Dana Pleasant is one of thousands of D.C. residents who have faced eviction in recent years, as diminished rental assistance and policy changes make it harder for low-income tenants to stay in their homes. (James Jarvis)
When Dana Pleasant got the call that his daughter had been shot to death by her ex-boyfriend in 2022, he immediately rushed to be with her three youngest children, then ages 4 to 14. He found them waiting for their mother to return home from the grocery store.
“The hardest thing I've ever had to do was sit them all down and let them know that their mother was no longer with us,” Pleasant, now 64, told The 51st.
Determined to keep them safe and housed, Pleasant took legal custody of the children and moved them into a four-bedroom house in Bloomingdale with the help of a housing voucher. Without it, he would have been unable to cover the roughly $4,800 rent with his U.S. Department of Energy salary of $56,000.
But after Pleasant’s home failed multiple inspections last year, the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) stopped paying its share of the rent, in accordance with federal housing rules. The agency gave him a transfer voucher and six months to find another home, but despite working with a real estate agent and applying for several properties, the voucher expired before he could move.
By then, the property manager had filed an eviction case seeking possession of the home and $12,000 in unpaid rent.
“I can’t afford to live here in D.C. and be able to continue taking care of my family,” Pleasant said in August. “It’s scary right now … having to let the children know that we may be evicted.”
Pleasant’s story is one of thousands playing out across the District as evictions hit a twelve-year high. Data from the D.C. Office of the Tenant Advocate (OTA) analyzed by The 51st, Street Sense, and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop show 2,420 households were evicted in fiscal year 2025 — up nearly 30% from the previous year, and well above the pre-pandemic average of about 1,600 evictions per year.
And fiscal year 2026 (October 2025 through September 2026) is expected to come close, with OTA reporting 2,313 completed evictions. Data is still being finalized, however, and the number could rise.
More than 80% of D.C. eviction cases filed between July 2025 and July 2026 were for nonpayment of rent, according to an analysis of D.C. Superior Court data collected by the data science consulting firm January Advisors. Housing attorneys and tenant advocates say the rising cost of living and high unemployment are leaving many District residents with a razor-thin margin of error — one missed paycheck or unexpected expense can push renters into debt and, eventually, out of their homes.
At the same time, two major policy changes have left renters with fewer options when they experience a financial setback: steep cuts to the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) and the passage of the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords Amendment Act (RENTAL Act), which was intended to speed up the eviction process, among other aims.
“Once you take away those protections … you get where we're at now, which is record-high evictions,” Jen Jenkins, a senior policy attorney for Legal Aid DC, told The 51st. “It was just inevitable.”
An affordability crisis
The rise in completed evictions is happening as many D.C. renters are already struggling to afford basic necessities.
At the same time, the District’s unemployment rate rose to 5.9% in August, almost two percentage points higher than the national average, per the city’s latest economic and revenue trend report.
For renters especially, those pressures come at a time when housing already consumes a large share of household budgets. According to an analysis by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, nearly 45% of renters in the District — a third of whom work more than 40 hours a week — spend more than 30% of their income on rent, a burden that falls disproportionately on Black and Hispanic renters.
Even for renters with a steady income, it’s harder than ever to make ends meet: According to the Economic Policy Institute’s family budget calculator, Pleasant would need about $203,000 a year to cover the basic expenses of raising three children in D.C.
The combination of these forces can make paying back rental debt close to impossible.
"People don't have enough money to keep up with the cost of living in the District — that's a fact," said Natasha Bennett, managing attorney with Bread for the City, a nonprofit providing low-income residents with social services, including legal aid. “One illness, you miss one month of work, and that's it — you're never catching up with these rents because people were already living paycheck to paycheck.”
The resulting evictions are not felt equally. The Civil Legal Counsel Projects Program (CLCPP), a D.C.-funded program run by the DC Bar Foundation that supports legal aid organizations representing low-income tenants facing eviction, found that those seeking help were overwhelmingly low-income, with 82% identifying as Black and nearly two-thirds as women. Evictions are also heavily concentrated in the city's Southeast, particularly in Ward 8.
Perhaps counterintuitively, the rise in completed evictions (when tenants are actually removed from their home) has not been accompanied by an increase in filings — the paperwork that kicks off the process but doesn’t always end in a removal. This pattern suggests that renters who do face eviction are having a harder time staying in their homes, in part because recent changes in D.C. have left them with fewer ways to catch up on rent or to work out a solution before they are forced to leave.
According to D.C. Superior Court data, landlords filed 13,051 new eviction cases in calendar year 2025, less than half the number of cases filed in 2019. (The vast majority of eviction cases each year are residential).
Adam Marshall, managing attorney of Neighborhood Legal Services Program’s housing law unit, said the decrease in filings was likely due to a 2022 law that required landlords to give tenants more notice and barred filings over small debts.
Still, while that change may have kept some tenants from eviction court, it has not translated into fewer completed evictions.
Among tenants represented by a CLCPP attorney for their entire case, the percentage who stayed in their homes decreased from 77% in 2022 through 2024 to 63% in the first half of 2026 — a trend the report attributed to changes to ERAP.
“Scraps” of assistance
At its core, ERAP was created to help low-income residents avoid losing their housing when they fall behind on rent because of a financial emergency. Pleasant said he would have applied for assistance after his voucher was revoked. But by then, the fund had been exhausted, leaving him to fall further behind while he fought his eviction in court. Ultimately, emergency rental assistance wouldn’t have solved Pleasant’s core problem — he needed new housing before his voucher expired — but experts say the stopgap can be crucial in buying tenants like Pleasant a little more time to move or rectify legal or bureaucratic problems.
“This is the heart of what ERAP envisions: you had this sort of bump in the road that set you off [course], and now you can't get back on track,” Brian Rohal, a senior staff attorney with Legal Aid DC’s Housing Law Unit, told The 51st. He says the changes to ERAP are the “most significant” factor leading to increased evictions.
Since 2022, CLCPP data show that 73% of the cases that were dismissed because a tenant paid their back rent used ERAP to help do so. In the first half of 2026, it was 32%.
Funding for ERAP swelled during the pandemic, reaching more than $60 million in 2024 before falling sharply to roughly $7 million in the most recent budget. But while funding for the program has fallen, demand has not.
In 2025, hundreds of residents who showed up to apply in person were turned away after the city ran out of appointment slots. “We're basically making people fight over scraps,” Sunny Desai, a managing attorney with Legal Counsel for the Elderly (LCE), told The 51st.
And the shrinking pool of money is only part of what attorneys say has changed.
In 2025, the D.C. Council also tightened the rules around who qualifies for the program, and ended the practice of automatically pausing a nonpayment eviction case while a tenant’s ERAP application was pending.
Councilmembers argued the changes had to be made because a growing number of landlords were left with large amounts of unpaid rent. Ward 3 Councilmember Matthew Frumin said the automatic eviction pause contributed to a “period of historic delinquency” that created “perverse incentives for tenants to fall deeper and deeper behind.”
According to data provided by the D.C. Housing Finance Agency, unpaid rent across more than 100 affordable housing properties ballooned from $21.5 million in 2024 to roughly $26.8 million in 2025 — a trend developers have warned is “a serious red flag” for potential housing investors.
“When the eviction system does not work properly, it is bad for everyone, starving maintenance budgets and, in some cases, leading to foreclosures where affordability covenants are lost,” Frumin, who chairs the council’s human services committee, told The 51st.
Meanwhile, Dean Hunter, CEO of the Small Multifamily Owners Association (SMOA), disputes the idea that reduced ERAP funding is primarily responsible for the increase in completed evictions. Instead, he argues many of the evictions being completed now are cases that remained unresolved for too long during the pandemic-era eviction moratorium, including because of pending ERAP applications.
“Additional ERAP funding alone does not solve this crisis,” Hunter said. “When court delays allow arrears to grow to $25,000 or $50,000, emergency assistance is no longer a realistic substitute for resolving the case.”
While protections narrow, evictions drag
Landlords and lawmakers had hoped the RENTAL Act would help speed up eviction cases and ease court backlogs. But landlords say case delays remain, even as tenant attorneys say renters have fewer opportunities to avoid eviction court.
Mayor Muriel Bowser initially proposed the RENTAL Act as she faced growing pressure from landlords, especially affordable housing providers concerned about mounting unpaid rent.
Among other things, the law shortened the minimum period before an initial eviction hearing and gave judges more discretion to allow landlords to revise errors in eviction paperwork to move a case along, rather than dismiss it outright.
Supporters, including SMOA, argued those changes were necessary to keep cases from dragging on. But tenant attorneys argue it leaves renters with less time in the crucial window between when they receive an eviction filing and when their case goes to court, when they might be able to apply for rental assistance, work out a deal with their landlord, find legal representation, or move out on their own. Once a case goes to court, a tenant’s chance of staying in their home drops considerably — in part because so few have legal representation.
In the first half of 2026, landlords were represented by attorneys in 93% of 1,487 active eviction cases involving CLCPP clients who had been served with a complaint. Of the eviction cases CLCPP closed during that period, only 12% of tenants had an attorney representing them throughout their case. (Another 17% received legal representation for part of their case). While D.C. has relatively strong eviction protections, tenants are less likely to benefit from them without help.
“We see this regularly: if you don't have a lawyer, you often end up with an outcome that is much worse than if you had a chance to at least speak with a lawyer, even if you could not be represented by someone,” Rohal said.
Pleasant has been able to make significant headway in his case because he has an attorney who helped him challenge the unpaid rent and raised concerns about the home’s poor conditions, putting pressure on the housing authority to help resolve the issue.
But even as the RENTAL Act speeds a tenant’s path to housing court, judicial vacancies and court backlogs continue to slow cases down.
Data provided to The 51st and Street Sense by Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP) show that for evictions scheduled during the first six months of 2026, the median case took about 250 days — more than eight months — from filing to the scheduled eviction date.
“The RENTAL Act did little to resolve this crisis for housing providers, large or small,” Hunter told The 51st. “It established no deadline for an initial hearing and did virtually nothing to shorten the time required to resolve a nonpayment case.”
Those continued delays are among the reasons Bowser has asked the council to look at the Housing Investment Protection Act — which some are calling “RENTAL Act 2.0” — that would require the court to hold an eviction hearing within 60 days of a filing, though judges are skeptical the courts could keep to that timeline.
Frumin agreed more changes are needed to address lengthy eviction cases.
“It may seem counterintuitive, but to bring evictions down and support tenants, we need an eviction system that works,” he said.
System breakdown
But rising costs and policy changes are only part of what is driving this crisis. Experts say that D.C. has also failed to address long-standing systemic issues, from poor housing conditions and unaccountable landlords to dysfunctional government agencies and a lack of affordable housing stock.
Former D.C. resident Shay Pasha, for instance, faced eviction twice after she stopped paying rent because of poor conditions in two separate apartments. She said the problems included severe water damage and mold and that withholding rent felt like her only option after making repeated complaints with no results. At one property, she said that despite city inspections and multiple fines against the landlord for housing violations, she still failed to get sufficient repairs.
“[Landlords] are not being held accountable and they're still allowed to get their money, and like [if] they're not going to do [their] job — that's not fair,” Pasha said.
Meanwhile, voucher holders like Pleasant have to navigate local and federal bureaucracy to keep their housing subsidy, including regularly verifying their income and household information to confirm they still qualify. But housing attorneys say tenants often see their assistance disrupted because of things outside of their control, such as leasing staff mishandling paperwork or landlords not making repairs.
LCE attorney Desai, who primarily represents elderly tenants living on fixed incomes, estimated that roughly a quarter of the eviction cases he handles stem from these types of disruptions that cause a tenant to lose their subsidy.
“If it's someone with no subsidy, very low income, and very high arrears, it's just a matter of time before they get evicted, especially because there is no ERAP right now,” Desai said.
DCHA said it does not have data directly linking recertification problems to evictions and noted that, according to federal rules, landlords participating in the voucher program cannot evict a tenant solely because the agency did not pay its share of the rent. The agency also said it has taken steps to improve how quickly it processes recertifications and other paperwork, including changing customer service hours and dedicating staff time to work through backlogs.
Will the rise continue?
Advocates say the city doesn’t have to operate like this.
Bennett has called for reviving a version of the Housing Stabilization Grant model the District used coming out of the pandemic, which allowed landlords to apply for city funding to cover unpaid rent. In the past, the program paid participating landlords 80% of debt if they agreed to forgive the rest, allowing the tenants to stay housed.
Desai suggested the city also consider an eviction-diversion system that brings landlords and tenants together before a case is filed to work out a repayment plan, repairs, or other solutions. A bill now before the council would set up an early mediation program to do just that.
“There's a lot of momentum behind those sorts of ideas right now,” he said. “The court is trying — to their credit — very hard with the [diversion] program that they have set up, but there's no money associated with it.”
But tenant advocates worry the city is moving in the opposite direction, and fear Bowser’s proposed “RENTAL Act 2.0” will leave tenants with even less time to find legal help or resolve the problems that caused them to fall behind in the first place.
But while all that plays out, people like Pleasant are still struggling to keep a roof over their heads.
Considering the headwinds facing many D.C. tenants, Pleasant is comparatively lucky — he’s part of a tiny percentage of low-income D.C. residents who have a housing voucher and, once he received an eviction filing, he was able to obtain legal representation to help him navigate the process.
On Sept. 17 — days after The 51st and Street Sense contacted DCHA for comment about eviction cases involving voucher holders like Pleasant — the agency issued him a new transfer voucher. Pleasant is now working with a real estate agent to find another home for himself and his three grandchildren.
“Thank God for allowing us a restart,” Pleasant said. “Now I have an additional six months to look for housing. It’s a blessing.”
Pleasant has since reached a settlement with his landlord that will waive the entire disputed rent balance. He can continue paying only his usual share of the rent until he moves out at the end of January. He has not yet found another home, and moving will still come with costs the voucher does not cover, including a security deposit and first month’s rent.
Pleasant chafes at what tenant advocates say is a frequent misconception about those facing eviction: that they could have avoided losing their home if only they had tried harder.
“God knows the last thing I would want to do is deliberately or intentionally put my family at risk of homelessness,” he said.
Daranee Balachandar provided data analysis and graphics for this story. Aarushi Sahejpal, from American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop, provided data editing.
James Jarvis is a freelance journalist in D.C. and an adjunct professor at Georgetown. He’s a former assistant editor at ARLnow/FFXnow and has reported for InsideNoVa and Washington City Paper.
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