The RENTAL Act is full of tenant rights rollbacks. This one was supposed to be removed.

This story was reported with support from SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism.

The elevators in Harry Gural’s rent-controlled building on Connecticut Avenue haven’t been reliable for over a decade. It’s part of a string of maintenance problems that have plagued his older building. “They just haven’t fixed things for years and years and years,” he said.

But now, Gural wonders whether he should have a new concern: If his landlord significantly renovates the building to fix these outstanding issues, he and other tenants could be at risk of losing crucial rights.

Last year, the D.C. Council passed a bill overhauling the city’s housing law and significantly weakening major protections for tenants. Mayor Muriel Bowser first announced the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords (RENTAL) Act in February 2025 — aiming, she said, to address a rent-delinquency crisis and encourage more private investment in market-rate housing. Housing and tenant advocates immediately sounded the alarm about the bill, arguing that it stripped tenants of their most crucial rights, including eviction protections and renters’ rights to buy their building. But most of the city’s lawmakers eventually rallied behind it.

“We are building housing too slowly,” Councilmember Robert White, chairman of the housing committee, said at the time. “We are driving landlords and investors away. We cannot lose sight of the impact on real people.”

The law passed later that year with 10 councilmembers voting in favor. Following pushback from advocates, some older buildings — like Gural’s — were spared the loss of some rights in the final statute. Advocates believed it was a hard-won reprieve in a law they broadly disliked. But less than a year after passage, developers, tenant advocates, and real estate attorneys say there is confusion about that supposed concession. Older buildings are being subjected to RENTAL Act rules even though legislators and advocates say they shouldn't be —  and it’s threatening to dramatically expand the number of tenants losing their rights.

At the center of the issue is the way the RENTAL Act erodes the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), a landmark housing law passed in 1980 in response to the city’s affordable housing crisis. The law gives renters the first right of refusal to buy their building or to choose a buyer when it goes up for sale. For D.C.’s renters, TOPA isn’t just a way to purchase their building — it’s also a tool they can use to negotiate with a potential buyer, pushing for things like repairs or caps on rent increases. Over the past 40 years, the law has created or preserved more than 16,000 affordable housing units, according to the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development.

One of the RENTAL Act’s most consequential changes included exempting all buildings constructed in the last 15 years from TOPA. While the RENTAL Act included a series of changes to TOPA, this one affected approximately 81,000 existing units and untold more in the future, creating a "historic loss of tenants’ rights," according to Mychal Cohen, a senior policy analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

But today, ambiguous wording in the new law and confusing guidance from the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) is creating uncertainty about what counts as a new building under the law, tenant advocates, developers, and real estate professionals told The 51st. Some sellers are already taking advantage of the lack of clarity and are marketing older, rent-controlled buildings that have been renovated as “new construction,” and thus also TOPA- exempt.

This behavior has undermined one of the slim tenant protections advocates were able to preserve in the law, they say. (In a last-minute amendment, most 2-4 unit buildings also lost their TOPA rights under the act). Tenant organizers fought to retain TOPA rights for tenants in renovated buildings, and the D.C. Council’s Committee on Housing said they excised that particular exemption for fear that landlords would rush to renovate just to wiggle out of TOPA. 

“Improvements are just part of what you do as a landlord,” said Gural, who is a longtime advocate for tenants’ rights. “I'm not sure why that should give you a TOPA exemption.”

Like many tenant organizers and advocates, he sees the change as linked to a larger unraveling of the city’s protections for renters in favor of commercial interests.

“Tenants are just run over like a truck, and they're looking for some hand in the destiny of their building, and that's why they find it offensive if their TOPA rights are eroded,” Gural said.

When New Means Renovated

As the RENTAL Act is written, a property can be exempt from TOPA if it receives a permanent certificate of occupancy for a “new multifamily building” in the last 15 years. This is a document that confirms a building has met all regulatory requirements and is officially safe for habitation. But the D.C. Department of Buildings (DOB) grants new permanent certificates of occupancy for substantial renovations to existing buildings as well as for new ones. This has led to confusion, said Dennis Cravedi, Senior Vice President at commercial real estate law firm Horvath & Tremblay. The law could be interpreted to say that a landlord who renovates or redevelops their existing building could also qualify for the TOPA exemption, he said.

The law doesn’t clarify what “new construction” means when it comes to this TOPA exemption, said DHCD spokesperson Timothy Wilson. The agency "interprets the law to mean that properties that underwent substantial rehabilitation or gut renovation are not exempt from TOPA unless they qualify under the new construction exemption, which requires a permanent Certificate of Occupancy issued within the past 15 years.”

This, however, is exactly the problem, advocates say. Applying DHCD’s interpretation means that an older property that undergoes a major modernization may be considered a new building after securing a brand-new permanent certificate, allowing landlords of decades-old buildings to claim the "new construction" shield.

According to a Department of Buildings (DOB) spokesperson, a newly issued permanent certificate of occupancy alone cannot prove whether a building is “new construction or a substantial renovation or conversion.” Identifying whether a building is actually new construction, they said, would require looking beyond the permanent certificate of occupancy to review the building permits and construction plans.

With the law so unclearly defined, local attorneys are bracing for confusion. Attorneys in the Real Estate Practice Group at law firm Ballard Spahr alerted clients after a January meeting with DHCD that a full rollout of formal guidance on the changes to TOPA could take up to two years, noting that parts of the law “are unclear and subject to interpretation.”

The real-world consequences of this regulatory confusion are already playing out in the market. A recent listing by brokerage firm Marcus and Millichap advertises a 36-unit property at 5010 Southern Avenue SE as completely TOPA-exempt new construction, although it’s more than 60 years old.

Lorenzo Wooten, the listing broker, told The 51st that the property was fully renovated in 2015. Wooten said DHCD explicitly advised him that because more than half of the building was renovated and received a new permanent certificate of occupancy in 2015, it qualified as new construction. (DHCD denies this, saying they have “not provided any formal or informal guidance establishing a renovation threshold for an exemption.")

Wooten is not the only one using an interpretation of the law that would exempt renovated buildings from TOPA protections. The Small Multifamily Owners Association, a landlord lobbying group, hosted a webinar in March where Terrence Laney, the administrator of the Rental Conversion and Sale Division — the part of DHCD that manages TOPA — suggested that buildings undergoing substantial renovations could qualify for the law’s 15-year TOPA exemption. (Laney has since been placed on leave amid accusations of conflicts of interest).

This interpretation threatens to exempt thousands of older renovated buildings that received new permanent certificates in the last 15 years. Just in the last two-and-a-half years, DOB issued 5,798 permanent certificates of occupancy, according to the agency’s own data. Of those, nearly 80% were for modifications to existing structures. New construction accounted for only 986 certificates.

Laney was asked in the webinar, which was reviewed by The 51st, if gut renovations qualified as new construction. His response was: "If the permanent certificate of occupancy has been issued in the last 15 years, which designates that as new construction, it is exempt."

Similar reliance on a permanent certificate of occupancy to determine whether a building is new is used in a sample letter for landlords to send to tenants included in DHCD's Frequently Asked Questions on the RENTAL Act.

This kind of conflicting guidance is alarming legislators and tenant advocates alike.

“I worry that there is misleading information coming directly from the D.C. government that may be confusing tenants about their rights,” said Mel Zahnd, Supervising Attorney in the Housing Law Unit at Legal Aid DC.

Confusing paper trail

Tenant advocates and legislators said that Laney’s interpretation misses what was clearly the spirit of the law.

Robert White, who just won the race to become D.C.’s delegate to Congress and helped shape the final version of the law and pushed for its passage, strongly disputes it, saying that the law was meant to exempt newly constructed buildings or office-to-residential conversions from TOPA protections, not additions or renovations.

“We expect the Executive to directly address allegations that DHCD is promulgating guidance contrary to the law's intent,” White’s office told The 51st. 

"The clear and unambiguous legislative intent was to limit the “new construction” exemption to actual new construction,” said Joel Cohn, legislative director for the Office of the Tenant Advocate, the D.C. agency that offers legal support for renters. 

Wilson said DHCD’s job, however, is to “apply the statute as written.” The agency is currently reviewing 13 claims of new construction exemption and said the agency’s role is to “evaluate documentation showing whether a property meets the criteria for new construction,” rather than assessing whether a property has been renovated or the scope of that renovation.

Wilson also said that “future rulemaking could provide additional clarity.” The risk to tenants is further heightened because DHCD doesn’t appear to confirm the existence of a permanent certificate of occupancy when reviewing claims for TOPA exemption. According to Wilson, the agency may find a TOPA exemption claim deficient if “materials are missing, incomplete, or clearly inconsistent with statutory requirements.” But if an issue isn’t identified, “it does not independently verify Certificates of Occupancy beyond this.” 

A review of DOB records for Wooten’s listing at 5010 Southern Ave SE, for instance, does not show a permanent certificate of occupancy issued in the past 15 years, and Wooten did not explain the discrepancy or provide a copy of the certificate to The 51st. Mercedes Lemp, President and CEO of Housing Up, the nonprofit that owns the property through an LLC, did not answer questions about the claimed exemption, simply sending a copy of the 1996 permanent certificate of occupancy in response.

DHCD’s limited verification could mean that if individual tenants receive a notification that their building is not subject to TOPA as a result of the RENTAL Act’s new construction exemption, it is up to them to challenge this claim on their own (or with the help of a tenant advocate, if they’re able to get one). While renters have opportunities under the law to challenge a TOPA exemption, the confusing nature of the exemption makes the process almost impossible for most tenants to navigate. 

With little protection for tenants, advocates are already seeing a wave of questionable exemptions.

According to Cohn, his office is flagging “very problematic language,” including “wild characterizations of the actual law,” in the exemption notices that landlords are issuing to tenants.

Tenants lose out in a changing market 

For tenants, the threat posed by this new potential TOPA exemption for renovated buildings — as well as the broader erosion of TOPA under the RENTAL Act — extends beyond maintenance concerns to a fundamental erosion of their influence.

“It’s not about buying the building,” said Gural, who recently received a notification from his landlord that he won’t have TOPA rights as a result of a different provision in the RENTAL Act (which his tenant association is challenging). “It’s about having a seat at the table … having a hand in deciding what happens to the building.”

It’s why advocates were so worried about the passage of the RENTAL Act — it included so many carve-outs to TOPA that it threatens to swallow the law entirely. The weakening of TOPA is all the more concerning, Gural said, given the growing influence of private equity on D.C.'s housing market. These large companies often boost profits by hiking rents and slashing services before eventually offloading the building. 

Moreover, the law’s effects on the market may not be what many proponents of the RENTAL Act intended. While supporters said that removing TOPA protections would encourage investment in new housing, some real estate industry professionals told The 51st that confusion around the application of the law has created uncertainty, which isn’t good for business. “The RENTAL Act didn't really move the needle one way or the other,” Cravedi said. "If the goal was to really change the market or investor perception in D.C., then no, it has not had a big impact.”

As real estate and title attorney Kevin Bayly observes, the market values predictability above all. "You may have liked it or not liked it,” he said of traditional TOPA rules, “but you knew how it worked.” 

One D.C. developer, who requested anonymity, was more blunt in his assessment of the legislation: “They fucked up.”

This story was edited by Abigail Higgins, Natalie Delgadillo, and Benny Peterson.