If there’s one thing that D.C. can expect from its next mayor, it’s much more housing – or at least promises of it.
The candidates running for the city’s highest office have unveiled ambitious plans to build more housing in more places, aiming to outdo the 40,000 units that were built in a recent five-year stretch under Mayor Muriel Bowser. They’re also pledging to preserve and expand D.C.’s stock of affordable housing, all with an eye toward bringing down the city’s historically high cost of living.
But they also face a harsh market reality: Investors are less interested in building in the District now than they were in years past.
About 1,900 housing units started construction in 2025 – down significantly from almost 10,000 in 2022, according to a new report from the Washington, D.C. Economic Partnership. And it is particularly expensive to construct affordable housing. Building a single affordable unit in D.C. can cost upwards of $905,000, in contrast to $659,000 in Arlington County, according to a study by the Urban Land Institute.
“The candidates are going for supply-heavy responses. I think that's a good thing because research has shown time and time again that cities have built more housing saw lower rent growth,” says Emilia Calma, the director of the Wilkes Initiative for Housing Policy at the D.C. Policy Center, a local think tank. “But I don’t think the candidates’ goals are necessarily reachable, just because [construction] permits have basically plummeted in the last two years.”
Despite broad agreement on the need for more housing, there are also some significant differences between the mayoral candidates, notably former councilmember Kenyan McDuffie and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, over the role that tenant protections play.
While national economic conditions like high interest rates and supply costs are clearly making it more difficult to build, developers and some analysts pin part of the blame on local regulations that can make it expensive to build affordable housing and laws that have made it difficult to evict tenants who don’t pay rent.
“Investors and lenders that do affordable projects are very skittish about the District right now,” says Patrick McAnaney, the development director for Somerset Development Company, a D.C.-based developer focused largely on affordable housing in D.C.
Still, others counter that tenant protections alone haven’t led developers to slow down their investments in D.C.; they point out that those same protections existed during the boom years. And they say that if private capital is shying away from D.C., the city could use public funding for alternatives like social housing.
Build more – lots more
One area where most of the eight mayoral candidates seem to agree is on the need to build more housing.
Lewis George said she would aim to build 72,000 new housing units in five years in a plan outlined in an op-ed published in Greater Greater Washington last month. “I’ve embraced the fact that cities that build temper costs for renters and homeowners,” she wrote. “Increasing supply, paired with policies to protect residents, really is critical to stopping further displacement and making housing more affordable for all.”
McDuffie, who unveiled his housing plan this week, says he’s aiming to build 12,000 new units and preserve 20,000 existing units by 2030. He also emphasized the need for more large units, pledging to construct 1,500 family-sized units by 2035. “It's not just simply building more housing. It’s building more housing everywhere, and it's more housing types citywide,” he tells The 51st.
Vincent Orange, a former councilmember and onetime president of the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, has even revived an idea he had more than a decade ago: building up to 1,000 tiny homes for low-income residents, seniors, and recent graduates. Gary Goodweather, whose professional background is in real estate and development, is pledging 50,000 units over the next five years.
Calma, the housing policy expert, says some of the housing construction goals are indeed ambitious, given what Bowser managed under far more favorable economic conditions. “A lot of those factors that we saw that were making building possible aren't here anymore,” she says. “Interest rates are higher. Construction rates have really gone up. And there's a lot of construction workforce issues.”
In response to questions about feasibility from The 51st, Lewis George doesn’t shy away from her proposal. “Our target should be aggressive enough to inspire real change,” she says. “If we don’t start ambitious, we’ll never be ambitious.”
Most of the candidates have also said they would make the construction of apartment buildings legal in all D.C. neighborhoods, in contrast to current zoning rules that reserve large portions of the city for single-family homes. Some have also said they support amending the federal law that limits building heights in D.C., albeit in different ways: Lewis George would scrap the Height Act only for affordable housing, while McDuffie would get rid of it for housing around Metro stations.
Additionally, virtually every mayoral candidate has spoken out against a draft map proposing new zoning regulations, largely arguing that the changes wouldn’t move the needle far enough on housing affordability. Lewis George said the proposed Future Land Use Map put out by the D.C. Office of Planning was “codifying exclusion,” while McDuffie argued that it “simply does not allow dense development in the places where the city needs it most.” Goodweather and Rini Sampath, another mayoral candidate, both spoke out against the proposed map at a protest last month hosted by advocates of building more housing.
There’s also broad consensus that there is a need to speed up the permitting and approvals process, which has been criticized by developers and individual homeowners alike as too cumbersome and slow.
McDuffie wants to cut approval times by 50 percent and appoint a housing ombudsman that would coordinate housing construction projects; Goodweather similarly wants a single point of contact for developers to work with. Lewis George says she would create a “shot clock” – a maximum timeframe for development reviews – and make it easier for homeowners and affordable housing developers to start projects. (Fixing the agencies that issue permits and approvals has bedeviled lawmakers for at least two decades, though.)
The role of regulations
Calma cautions that promises of upzoning and easier permitting alone might not lead to a housing construction boom, citing “pretty high regulatory constraints” that developers say they face in D.C.
“When the market is weak, the importance of signaling is very important: How do you get investors and lenders comfortable again?” adds McAnaney.
In response partly to those types of concerns, Bowser introduced the RENTAL Act last year, a bill that restored eviction timelines that had been paused or slowed during the pandemic and exempted new and small buildings from the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, the decades-old law that gives tenants the first chance to buy their buildings. The council passed the bill last fall; Lewis George voted against it, while McDuffie supported it.
"I do not believe that tenant protections are a major barrier to investment in D.C.,” Lewis George tells The 51st, pointing out that TOPA and rent control have been in effect for nearly 50 years, which included periods during which the city saw a massive construction boom. “If we want to make it easier to build, we need to tackle the outdated regulations that make it illegal to build across so much of the city, not attack tenants.”
McDuffie tells The 51st that he’s pushed to protect tenants, authoring the law that gives them access to free legal assistance in landlord-tenant court. But he also argues that D.C. needs to pull back on rules and restrictions like TOPA that might make building housing slower and potentially more expensive.
“We're not gonna put in place regulations that slow down the pace of building housing,” he says. “It's one of the things that makes building housing in the District of Columbia cost more, and it’s one of the things that continues to drive the city to a place where it’s unaffordable for most people to live.”
Goodweather has his own take on what he says are well-intentioned laws that aren’t working effectively anymore: He says he wants to fully revamp the city’s inclusionary zoning program, which requires a certain number of affordable units to be built into many new developments.
The next mayor may also face a proposed ballot initiative that could impose a two-year rent freeze across D.C. Proponents say it would immediately offer tenants relief, while critics say it would further drive housing providers out of the city. The initiative could appear on the ballot in 2027, but McDuffie, Lewis George, Goodweather, and Sampath all say they have concerns with it.
“A rent freeze would discourage investment in existing housing stock, accelerate deferred maintenance, and push small landlords out of the market entirely,” wrote Goodweather about the proposed initiative in response to questions from the D.C. YIMBYs, a pro-housing construction group.
Alternative solutions
When Lewis George first joined the council in 2021, she proposed what’s known as social housing: publicly owned mixed-income housing where tenants’ rent is reinvested in the property itself. She’s now proposing to move the idea forward if elected mayor.
Will Merrifield, the director of the Center for Social Housing and Public Investment, says social housing is a concept worth exploring because relying on private capital to build housing skews it towards luxury offerings.
“The private sector is incentivized by very short-term thinking. It’s a means for wealth creation for investors and private equity. When you’re relying on private equity, they’re going to build things that maximize their asset value,” he says. “Social housing offers a different dynamic.”
McDuffie, though, says it’s the wrong time to test new concepts, especially since the city’s usual tool for paying for affordable housing projects – the Housing Production Trust Fund – has seen declines in funding as the economy and budget have soured.
“Social housing requires massive public investment, well beyond what we've already invested in housing. And it requires new government capacity that D.C. doesn't currently have,” he tells us. “We need housing today. Families need results now. So my focus is using the tools we already have to actually deliver more housing, faster and more affordably.”
Still, McDuffie has floated his own costly housing proposals. He wants to double the reach of the existing Housing Purchase Assistance Program, which offers qualifying first-time buyers interest-free loans and closing-cost assistance. The program has seen significantly higher demand than there is funding, leading to wait lists and rejections. He has also floated the possibility of freezing property taxes.
Sampath tells The 51st that her focus is on fixing what D.C. is doing poorly, not necessarily creating new programs. To that end, she wants to ensure that affordable housing units that D.C. does finance are leased up more quickly.
Martin is a longtime reporter and editor in D.C. He formerly worked for WAMU 88.5 and DCist.com, and has contributed to the Washington City Paper and other publications. He's been in D.C. for 25 years, and tries to ride his bike everywhere he can.
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