Unreleased HUD Letter Shows D.C. Housing Authority Failing Disabled Tenants

 

The D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) is negotiating a resolution with the federal government after being ordered this past summer to fix extensive violations of federal laws regarding the treatment of people with disabilities, including sometimes taking years to handle requests for elevator access or adequate doorway space for wheelchairs. This is after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) condemned the authority for remaining “woefully out of compliance” with federal law and, in a letter on August 23rd, specified a series of steps it must take to remedy the failures. Among the city’s largest landlords, the authority serves about 30,000 households through housing vouchers and mixed-finance and traditional public housing properties.

The letter came after a HUD report in 2022 lambasted the authority for dozens of findings of faulty governance and poor performance. In addition to noncompliance with HUD fair housing regulations, that report also covered issues such as the agency’s extremely high public housing vacancy rate, dangerous and unsanitary conditions, and problems with how it calculated rents for low-income housing voucher holders. In 2022, then-D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) filed a lawsuit against the authority, alleging widespread discrimination against people with disabilities, some of whom the attorney general’s office said had waited as long as a decade for housing that met their needs. The suit remains ongoing.

The letter from HUD says that in 2023 it conducted on-site surveys of 33 public housing units out of over 700 that DCHA had said conformed to Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards. None of the inspected units were fully compliant, HUD said. The violations included wheelchair ramps that exceeded maximum slopes, playgrounds that had no ramps at all, handrails that were nonexistent or at improper heights, and doorways narrow enough to make it difficult or impossible for wheelchair users or others with mobility issues to get through. In one case, a woman spent years in a public housing unit where the bathroom doorway was too narrow for her motorized wheelchair. The deficiency required the woman “to undergo a painful routine of propping herself up using upper body strength to get into and out of the bathroom multiple times each day.” In 2022, after the woman filed a complaint with HUD, the authority moved her to a unit with accessible features that had been vacant for nearly three years. In another case, a 74-year-old woman who had a full knee replacement lived in a third-floor apartment and requested to move to a building with an elevator. DCHA did not approve her request until more than two years later. The letter described maddening paperwork delays and demands for verification from doctors about disabilities that were evident, such as an 81-year-old woman’s difficulty maneuvering in her bathroom, creating a need for grab-bars at her toilet and shower. DCHA failed to maintain adequate paperwork to document compliance with federal law, the letter said, and at times did not cooperate with HUD’s investigation. In another case detailed in the letter, a woman began at-home dialysis, and DCHA approved a larger apartment for her to accommodate the necessary equipment. It then took the authority almost four months to issue the new voucher, despite repeated emails from her lawyer and a caseworker at Miriam’s Kitchen.

DCHA has a long history of failing to comply with federal laws designed to ensure that people with disabilities are not shut out of access to housing. In 2001, The Post wrote about children who lived in inaccessible D.C. public housing and were forced to drag themselves up steps. That year, HUD required the housing authority to make over 500 units accessible to people with disabilities after finding the authority never complied with federal accessibility legislation.

HUD’s letter in August specified corrective actions DCHA must take, including conducting a needs assessment of all tenants and applicants to its public housing and voucher programs. DCHA was required to revamp policies and training, retain an architect to survey properties, and install a full-time coordinator “with sufficient expertise and staff” to handle requests for reasonable accommodations from those with disabilities. HUD spokespeople did not respond to a message requesting comment about DCHA’s compliance. The federal agency’s efforts to follow up on the demands of its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which focuses on eliminating housing discrimination, will be more complicated with the wave of recently-announced worker firings and spending cuts.

Burdo, the DCHA spokeswoman, said the housing authority’s steps so far have included moving its ADA compliance office to under the agency’s legal office, addressing requests from residents, examining its policies and trying to improve its data integrity. DCHA also has begun trying to hire an architect to confirm compliance of units with accessibility standards, Burdo said.

Sunny Desai, managing attorney at Legal Counsel for the Elderly, has advocated for DCHA clients for several years and spoken about the agency’s problems at D.C. Council housing committee meetings. He said intransigence, lack of transparency, and stonewalling were major problems under its past leadership. “They’re far more receptive” under Pettigrew, but change is not coming fast enough, Desai said.

Read the March 6, 2025 Washington Post article.

D.C. Sues Landlord Alleging Housing Discrimination Against Non-Voucher Holders

In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, the D.C. attorney general’s office has accused the major developer Petra Management Group of skirting rent control by renting only to voucher holders. In a lawsuit filed January 30th in D.C. Superior Court, the office of Attorney General Brian Schwalb contends that Petra is guilty of source-of-income discrimination at three D.C. buildings with over 100 apartments. This is the first time the city has sued a landlord for discrimination against non-voucher holders. At the three buildings cited in the lawsuit - just a portion of Petra’s portfolio - Petra rents exclusively to tenants with vouchers, the suit alleges. Rashid Salem, Petra’s founder and a named defendant in the suit, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Petra’s alleged scheme follows a shift in D.C.’s incentives for housing vouchers, under which low-income residents pay 30% of their income toward rent and the government covers the balance. A decade ago, in an effort to deconcentrate poverty, the D.C. Housing Authority began raising the rent limits for homes subsidized with vouchers - allowing many voucher holders to move to neighborhoods with better schools and less crime. But not only was the Housing Authority frequently overpaying for apartments, D.C.’s rent-control law granted an exemption for units rented to voucher holders, so landlords could get out from strict rent caps and collect far more money.

Petra began buying up residential buildings and filling them with as many voucher holders as possible, a Washington Post investigation found. As some of the buildings filled with people struggling with addiction or mental illness, neighbors complained of a lack of case workers and security and drug dealers operated out of the properties. Upscale apartment buildings along Connecticut Avenue NW managed by one property company began filling up with formerly homeless voucher holders, leading some residents (both longtime tenants and new voucher holders) to complain that there was not adequate support or security services.

Rent control in D.C. typically applies to all apartment buildings constructed before 1976. In 2020, the median rent was $1,442 per month in rent-controlled units, compared with $2,554 for units not subject to rent control. That makes these apartments substantially more affordable to residents of moderate means, but it also makes them less profitable for landlords.

A landlord can get an exemption from rent-control caps for voucher holders only after getting city approval, according to the attorney general’s office. But at the three Petra buildings, the suit alleges, Petra advertised the higher, non-rent-controlled rate both to lenders and to prospective tenants, violating the law and making the apartments unaffordable to many people without vouchers. At one of the buildings, the Adams on North Capitol Street NE, one three-bedroom unit would be capped at $1,000.25 under rent control, but Petra advertised and rented it at $3,131 per month, according to the attorney general’s office.

Read the January 30, 2025 Washington Post article.

Book Review: "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap"

Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza. University of California Press, 2023. 311 pages. Paperback. $27.95.

Amazon.com's description: 

"Before Gentrification shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and policing work to displace and decimate the Black middle class.

Through the stories of those who have lost their homes and livelihoods, she explores how DC's "troubling history makes clear that the choice to use prisons and policing to solve problems faced by Black communities in the twentieth century—instead of investing in schools, community centers, social services, health care, and violence prevention—is what made gentrification possible in the twenty-first. Before Gentrification unveils a pattern of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism in DC that has implications for all US cities."

This book is a personal project: as Golash-Boza states, “I have a personal investment in understanding how and why my neighborhood became plagued by violence, why so many of my childhood friends were murdered, why a generation of Black boys and men was put behind bars, and why so few of my childhood friends can afford to live in the neighborhood where we were raised” (p. 24). 

Regarding the book's reception, Golash-Boza posted in her Twitter (X) account: "I just read the first published review of Before Gentrification and it's a good reminder my book is not for everyone. The book clearly generates a different response in different readers - and that's fine. So far, the audience I most wanted to reach has responded positively."

Read the abstract of the book review in the December 2024 Social Forces. 

Read the December 2023 Twitter (X) post.