D.C. Council Passes Eviction Bill After Making Landlord-Backed Changes

A bill that would make substantial changes to the way eviction cases are handled in D.C. — the city with the highest level of unpaid rent in the country — is heading to the mayor's desk. 

The D.C. Council on Tuesday passed the Emergency Rental Assistance Reform Amendment Act of 2025 with its second and final vote. The bill is designed to speed up the eviction of nonpaying tenants while ensuring those who are eligible for rental assistance can obtain it. 

All but one member, Ward 4 Council Member Janeese Lewis George, voted in support of the bill. She said during Tuesday's meeting that the final version of the bill “leaves tenants without sufficient leverage and protections.”

A previous version of the bill that advanced out of committee had drawn opposition from real estate industry groups and from Mayor Muriel Bowser, each of whom warned it added exceptions that undermined the purpose of the legislation.

But after Council Members Matthew Frumin and Zachary Parker introduced additional amendments ahead of the final vote, real estate groups and the mayor said they supported the version of the bill the council passed. 

Bowser said in a letter to the council Tuesday morning that the updated bill “reflects a more balanced approach” and is in line with the version she introduced as part of her RENTAL Act proposal in February. 

Apartment and Office Building Association Director of Policy Communications Alex Rossello said in a statement that the amended bill would “mitigate the risk of unforeseen delays and uncertainty and prevent accumulated rent delinquencies.”

Small Multifamily Owners Association CEO Dean Hunter said the bill “represents a small but meaningful step on a long road toward the recovery of D.C.'s rental housing industry.”

One tenant advocacy group, Legal Aid DC, said in a statement to Bisnow that the bill “falls short” of adequately protecting the city's renters.

“With evictions at a 10-year high in DC, we need to make access to ERAP for those who qualify easier, not more difficult,” Supervising Attorney Molly Catchen said. “What’s also troubling is a larger trend of putting tenants’ rights on the chopping block as a quick fix to systemic policy issues.”

The rental assistance reform bill is a permanent version of the emergency measure the council passed Oct. 1. That temporary legislation came in response to rising levels of unpaid rent that have threatened to put housing providers out of business, put properties into foreclosure and strip affordable housing units of their covenants. 

D.C. apartments have an average of $2,207 in rental arrearages, by far the highest in the nation, and the total amount of unpaid rent in the city has risen from $11M in 2020 to $147M this year, according to a Committee on Human Services report accompanying the bill.

Real estate groups and city policymakers have said a pandemic-era change to the Emergency Rental Assistance Program that allowed tenants to automatically delay eviction cases simply by applying for assistance — even if they weren’t eligible or it wouldn’t cover what they owed — allowed unpaid rent to skyrocket and caused a massive backlog of cases.

Some evictions now take more than a year to process, the committee report found.

Assuming Bowser signs the bill, the ERAP program will be changed to remove tenants’ ability to automatically delay cases by filing applications to the program, and it will give judges more discretion to advance evictions for tenants who have racked up large amounts of unpaid rent.

The emergency legislation was effective in reducing delays in eviction cases and speeding up the process of administering ERAP funds, the Committee on Human Services said in its report. 

The committee then introduced changes to the bill ahead of the first vote in April that were supported by tenant advocates and drew the ire of landlord groups. 

That version would have allowed judges to hold landlords in contempt if they didn’t cooperate with the ERAP application process by producing requested payment information, but it didn’t specify what type of information they must provide. 

This week’s amendments clarified that landlords must provide information identifying the owner or manager of a unit and disclose the balance of rent owed by a tenant, and it gave a few examples of documents that can satisfy the requirement.

Frumin, who chairs the Committee on Human Services, said at an SMOA event on April 21 that he heard landlords' feedback that the proposed changes would have undermined the purpose of the bill and extended the eviction process. 

“There was a big pushback on the bill, and we’ve spent the last weeks talking to dozens of people and leaders in this room about how we can make this work so it achieves the goals everybody’s trying to achieve, and we can start to bend the curve on these rent delinquency issues,” Frumin said at the event last month. “I think we’re there.”

The amendments also addressed the remedy for tenants if a landlord doesn't provide the required information and the tenant's ERAP application is denied. 

In that instance, the previous version of the bill had said courts “shall” waive the total amount of unpaid rent that would have been covered by a successful application. But the amendments changed that to say they “may” waive the rent, giving judges more discretion over when to exercise this authority. 

Frumin, in response to Lewis George's opposition at Tuesday's council meeting, said the inclusion of this “rent waiver defense” in the bill increases the leverage that tenants have. 

“We made modifications to [the rent waiver defense], but it is there to try to drive landlord compliance with ERAP and, I think, as written will succeed in doing that and benefit all of our residents, our landlords and our tenants by encouraging folks to stay up to date,” Frumin said. 

Another change to the bill — allowing a one-time delay in eviction processing to allow a renter to apply for ERAP if they hadn't yet been able to — was designed to encourage tenants to make partial rent payments so that any ERAP funding has a higher chance of making the landlord whole.

Now that the bill is heading to Bowser's desk, real estate groups are turning their attention to other reforms the mayor proposed as part of her RENTAL Act, including reforming the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act that the industry has long opposed. The council's Committee on Housing is expected to hold a hearing on that in the coming weeks.