Image by Bekah Richards used with permission.

On Wednesday, the DC Council held a hearing on a bill to renew rent control, which is scheduled to expire in 2020. More than a hundred people signed up to testify, most in favor, of the legislation. I was among those who weighed in on the proposal. You can watch the hearing and read my testimony below:

My name is Alex Baca and I am the Housing Program Organizer for Greater Greater Washington. …

For what it’s worth, I live in a rent-stabilized apartment. This gives me the confidence that I will be able to, in the future, reside in DC, which means paying taxes, voting, and otherwise participating civically, both personally and professionally. Without rent stabilization, I would lack this certainty.

Opponents of rent control argue that it may mean that fewer apartment homes get built. And it is tempting to say that rent control not only suppresses supply, it suppresses mobility, by keeping people in housing situations that are not a good fit for them. And there is, of course, the canard that people who don’t really need rent stabilization, because they can, I guess, afford a landlord gouging their rent, are sucking up the limited number of protected units that exist. These are, indeed, possible outcomes of any given rent-control policy.

But some things aren’t just possibilities. There are many, many certainties about how housing works in DC currently. And what is certain is that today, right now, apartment construction is illegal in about 75% of the District. What is certain is that rents today, right now, are high enough that many developers would love to build (and many landlords would love to rent) new apartments in more places, were it allowed. What is certain is that the District’s current approach to housing and land use, which is characterized by zoning regulations that mandate the type of homes, the size of the lots they sit on, and how much parking they require, already limits housing supply. Segregationist land-use policies, not rent control, are housing supply’s foremost enemy.

We’re reasonably versed in the research that claims otherwise. The splashiest and most recent work on this, by Rebecca Diamond and Timothy McQuade, finds both tremendous benefits from rent control (such as that, in San Francisco, rent control increased renters’ probability of staying at their address by 20 %), and also costs: Namely, that fewer apartments got built because of rent control.

Diamond and McQuade’s empirical work is strong, and their data is fascinating. But their paper is unrealistic. It does not operate with a holistic understanding of the many policies that shape the wide and vast landscape of housing, and so it is unfortunate that it has become a foundation for anti-rent stabilization posturing.

Lashing out against rent stabilization takes valuable energy away from a much more constructive mission: adding supply, particularly in affluent, high-opportunity parts of the city like Rock Creek West, Near Northwest, and Capitol Hill. There, we have allowed a valorization of “community character”—and our 2006 Comprehensive Plan is largely responsible for this—to stop development, resulting in a warped and unfair distribution of the housing that does get built here.

In a climate where displacement of longtime residents due to rising rents is a chief concern, the 20% increase in probability that renters stay in their apartments found by Diamond and McQuade looks less like a population suffering from limited mobility, and more like one that is better able to enjoy the positives, like more amenities and reduced crime, that come with the upscaling of neighborhoods.

Additional researchl comes from Massachusetts, which eliminated its rent control in the 1990s. Three MIT economists studied this episode and, in part, found that rent control was effective in preventing gentrification in the communities it covered. Rent control helps stave off displacement for individual households, and a collection of more stable households in a particular neighborhood means that that place itself is stabilized by rent control.

Further, rent stabilization also functions as a consumer protection, which is a necessary feature in a market where supply is low; the District’s rental vacancy rate is currently at about 5%, which puts tenants in a precarious position, with fewer options than they would have were vacancy rates higher.

Right now, DC has a regime that doesn’t really protect tenants or produce housing: Rent control doesn’t cover as many renters as it could, and zoning and preservation policies halt the construction of more homes. So, as we work on getting more places to live built, because we build far less than we used to, we’re pleased to see a rising discussion of how the Rental Housing Extension Act might be not just passed, but expanded to protect more people. We are in favor of the loophole closures proposed by the Reclaim Rent Control coalition. Additionally, we feel strongly that current rent-stabilization requirements should apply to more buildings, and that tenants should only incur one rent increase per year.

GGWash advocates for the kind of high-level systems change that is hard to see; our futzing around with land-use documents leaves much to be desired from those looking for an immediate solution to housing that they can’t afford right at this moment. But rent stabilization—barring an influx of housing supply that we are currently not on track to receive—is, at this point in time, an essential component of DC’s suite of housing policies.

Rent stabilization is not at odds with Greater Greater Washington’s goals overall, or the goals of our housing program specifically. We support rent stabilization because we support increasing housing supply. We are under no illusion that there is one way to “solve” housing. So build more of it, preserve what we’ve got, put more money into our affordable-housing programs, give people more money, comply with the Fair Housing Act, get more data about all of it, and protect consumers—all consumers, not just the ones that qualify—from exploitation.

Any conflict between housing policies is a construct driven by a needless scarcity mindset. A more expansive Rental Housing Act is critical to protecting people, preserving homes, and producing housing for all. Thank you.

Alex Baca is the DC Policy Director at GGWash. Previously the engagement director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth and the general manager of Cuyahoga County's bikesharing system, she has also worked in journalism, bike advocacy, architecture, construction, and transportation in DC, San Francisco, and Cleveland. She has written about all of the above for CityLab, Slate, Vox, Washington City Paper, and other publications.