D.C. renters face record eviction levels amid dwindling aid and rising housing costs

This story is a collaboration between Street Sense Media, The 51st, and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. It was reported with support from SpotlightDC: Capital City Fund for Investigative Journalism. This article is also part of the D.C. Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. The collective works will be published throughout the week here.

Melvine Perkins has spent years trying to pull herself out of poverty — working temp jobs, applying for rental aid, and doing everything possible to stay in housing. But in a city where rent costs outpace wages and assistance often runs dry, each step forward seems to push her two steps back. Now, after years of fighting to stay in her one-bedroom apartment, she’s again facing eviction.

“It's just by the grace of God that I have the mental bandwidth to not crash and burn. I'm telling you I have been through it,” she told Street Sense/The 51st. “I'm not in this situation because I want to be.”

Perkins spent nearly a decade cycling in and out of homelessness after losing her Maryland house and her nail salon business during the 2008 financial crisis. She lived for several years in a women’s shelter in Northwest D.C. It wasn't until 2020, when she got a job tracing COVID-19 cases for the city and received a housing subsidy from the city’s Rapid Rehousing Program that she was able to move into a Ward 6 apartment that cost $1,800 a month.

“I remember thanking God that living that nightmare was over,” she says. “I looked forward to a good night's sleep and taking a hot bath.”

But Perkins lost her housing subsidy in late 2021 when she hit the program’s one-year cutoff. A few months later, her contract job with D.C. Health ended, leaving her with no income and no safety net. She received emergency rental assistance from the city twice over the next two years, which covered a few months of her missed rent but not enough to catch up. Perkins eventually landed a new job at the U.S. Census Bureau, bringing in just over $1,000 a month, but it wasn’t enough to keep pace with her rising rent.

Perkins now owes more than $55,000 in back rent, and her landlord has filed for eviction. Climbing out of debt, she says, has felt nearly impossible without more assistance or a higher-paying job — both of which have been hard to secure while also navigating court hearings, legal filings, and the constant paperwork tied to her case. She has agreed to move out by the end of October as part of a negotiated resolution to her case.

“Every day I wake up, I feel like I am in a mental obstacle course,” she says. 

Perkins isn’t alone: Last year, completed evictions in the District rose to record levels, with 1,869 households removed from their homes under a court order. That rise marked the largest increase since the year before the pandemic, according to new data from the Office of the Tenant Advocate obtained and analyzed by Street Sense, The 51st, and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. And these trends show no signs of slowing down. By the end of June 2025, the city had already recorded at least 1,477 completed evictions, with three months left in the fiscal year, nearing totals seen in the entire year pre-pandemic.

While final numbers for this year won't be available until early next year, average monthly evictions in D.C. are the highest they’ve been in six years. Before the pandemic, the city averaged about 124 evictions a month. That number dropped sharply during COVID, but jumped to roughly 156 per month in fiscal year 2024 – and has climbed even higher in 2025, averaging 164 each month so far. 

Advocates say the District’s eviction surge is not the product of a single policy shift but the collision of several forces — dwindling rent assistance, the rollback of laws meant to protect tenants, and the end of the pandemic eviction moratorium — in a city with some of the steepest rents in the country. And now they worry a new law, the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants and Landlords (RENTAL) Act, which the council approved last month and is designed to move eviction cases through the courts more quickly, could intensify those pressures.

“At the end of the day, it is actually pretty simple. It's very unaffordable rent and a drawback of tenant protections and supports that are causing this kind of deluge of evictions,” Daniel Del Pielago, housing director with Empower DC, a grassroots tenant advocacy group, tells Street Sense/The 51st.

More evictions, advocates say, means more people trapped in a cycle of poverty that strains city services — from emergency shelters to hospitals — and makes it harder for the District to retain residents and curb its growing unhoused population, which fell by 9% in 2025 but remains among the highest per-capita in the region. And while completed evictions offer one measure of the crisis, they represent only a fraction of cases. Tens of thousands of eviction cases are filed in D.C. each year, most of which don’t result in a person being formally removed.

Research from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab shows that even just an eviction filing on your record — whether or not it results in a tenant being removed — can have lasting consequences. Tenants who face eviction often struggle to rent again, as many landlords treat any filing as a red flag. They also face a higher risk of job loss, as the stress and instability of eviction can interfere with work schedules, commuting, and overall performance.

For Perkins, just having a landlord file against her has made life harder — from renting an apartment to passing a credit check or landing a job.

“Displacement causes years of financial hardships,” Perkins says. “Rental ledgers do not reflect the truth of a person's character.” 

A tale of two cities

For some tenants, one layoff or missed paycheck can be enough to send their lives into free fall. When Carolyn Steptoe lost her job at a D.C. law firm in July 2024, she was optimistic her savings would be enough to cover the roughly $2,600 rent on the two-bedroom apartment she moved into after her home of 20 years faced foreclosure.

By fall, her savings (and her retirement) had run dry. Steptoe, who is in her mid-60s, applied for help through the city’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), which provides short-term aid to tenants behind on rent. The program covered about three months of unpaid rent, buying her some time. But by early 2025, still without a job, she fell behind again. Over the next six months she accrued more than $10,000 in arrears — debt her landlord is now using to try to evict her.

“You do the best you can because you're living in D.C., where economic disparity is rampant and housing is very expensive,” she says, calling the District “a tale of two cities.”

And she isn’t far off base. A 2022 Brookings Institution report found that white households in D.C. earned a median income more than three times higher than Black households. The study also found a $156,000 gap in median home values between white and Black residents, and that Black renters were nearly twice as likely to spend over 30% of their income on housing. 

In fiscal year 2024, half of all evictions occurred in majority-Black Wards 7 and 8, according to city data. Those wards account for about a quarter of the city’s renters. Tenants there are far more likely to spend more than half of their income on rent, according to a 2018 report on evictions in the District by Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. A separate Urban Institute analysis published in 2023 found that these inequities stem from decades of disinvestment and discriminatory housing policies that have left Black residents disproportionately vulnerable to eviction and displacement.

But it’s not just lower-income neighborhoods east of the Anacostia that are seeing a spike in evictions. Wealthier, majority-white wards have experienced some of the steepest increases in evictions — albeit from a much lower baseline.

In 2024, completed evictions surpassed pre-pandemic levels in every ward except Ward 4 — and the sharpest jumps came in neighborhoods that typically see the fewest cases, according to data obtained and analyzed by Street Sense, The 51st, and IRW. 

Compared to 2019, Ward 1 saw a 41% increase, Ward 2 was up 90%, Ward 3 rose 88%, and Ward 6 climbed 83%. By contrast, wards that already had the city’s highest eviction totals — 5, 7, and 8 — saw much smaller increases, ranging from 7% to 33%.

Through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, which runs from fall 2024 to fall 2025, that trend has continued. Wards 1 through 4 and 6 have already logged more completed evictions than before the pandemic, with Ward 3 seeing the sharpest rise — up 73% compared to 2019. Meanwhile, Wards 5, 7, and 8, which usually see the highest volume of evictions, have so far remained below pre-pandemic levels, though that could change once fourth-quarter data are released. Though the exact cause of the rise in filings in neighborhoods that previously saw few evictions are unclear, advocates say they could be linked to several factors, such as the end of pandemic-era assistance, rising rents, and landlords relying more on court filings to recover unpaid rent.

Fighting for scarce aid

The rise in evictions has unfolded against the backdrop of a defunding of rental relief aid programs and weakening tenant protections that once acted as a backstop to keep people from losing their homes.

During the pandemic, federal relief through the CARES Act and the American Rescue Plan allowed the District to expand the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. Before COVID, the program served only a few thousand households a year on a budget of less than $8 million. But between 2020 and 2022, federal aid pushed that number into the tens of millions, helping thousands of residents stay housed. Combined with the city’s eviction moratorium, it prevented a wave of removals.

When the moratorium lifted, landlords began filing cases that had been on hold during the pandemic. At first, ERAP and other federal relief programs helped blunt the impact, with more than $60 million available at the program’s peak in 2023. But as that federal money ran out, the city did not replace it. By fiscal year 2024, ERAP funding had fallen to $27 million. This fiscal year, just $8.6 million is budgeted. 

When the city reopened applications last November, residents requested more than $20 million in rent relief within six hours, exhausting the year’s funding almost immediately. ERAP has not opened for applications yet this year. “I am really bracing for this new fiscal year, because that $8.6 million is going to go like the speed of light,” says Amanda Korber, managing attorney for D.C. Legal Aid’s housing unit. “I think it's gonna get ugly, and I think it's gonna get ugly fast.” 

While the city shrank the emergency rent assistance, it also began rolling back pandemic-era tenant protections for applicants. Earlier versions of ERAP required judges to automatically pause eviction cases when tenants had a pending application. But under changes approved last year, it’s now up to judges to decide whether to delay a case. The law also added new documentation requirements for tenants and narrowed what qualifies as an “emergency situation,” making it harder for some applicants to be approved.

Supporters of the legislation say it is meant to help landlords recover unpaid rent faster by making the eviction process more efficient, citing concerns from property owners and lobbyists who argue that cases can sometimes take a year or longer to resolve.

"This is a big problem, because the housing provider isn't getting any money. They're basically renting the unit for free,” Alex Rossello, the director of policy communications for AOBA, a local real estate industry group, told Street Sense/The 51st. “If you have a number of these in a building that heavily hits the finances of the building.”

A rollback of tenant protections

The rollback of those protections culminated this year in the most significant overhaul of the city’s eviction process in years – the RENTAL Act. The law, passed Sept. 17, includes several provisions housing attorneys say will significantly impact tenants. These include shortening the notice landlords must give tenants before filing an eviction for nonpayment of rent from 30 days to 15, removing the requirement to include rent ledgers and payment histories with filings, and giving judges greater discretion over whether to pause cases when tenants have a pending rental assistance application.

“I don't think it's any secret that pretty much every single eviction procedure related provision of the [RENTAL] Act would tend to make it easier for a landlord to evict their tenant,” says Adam Marshall, housing managing attorney at Neighborhood Legal Services Program, which is funded by the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency.

When she proposed the legislation in February, Mayor Muriel Bowser pointed to applications for up to $144 million in housing preservation funding — requests from 69 affordable housing projects seeking bridge and gap financing to cover operating costs, repairs, and debt — as evidence that many property owners were struggling to keep nearly 8,000 affordable units from falling into distress.

“We basically created a system that in large part still persists that burdens housing providers and renters with outlandish levels of rental debt,” says Rossello.

Data from the D.C. Housing Finance Agency found that tenants owed more than $21.5 million in back rent in 2024 across 105 properties financed or monitored by the agency. Delinquency rates were highest in Wards 7 and 8, the wards with the highest eviction levels.

The data shows a steady rise in delinquencies since before the pandemic, climbing from $3.7 million in 2019 to $13.5 million in 2024.

“As you can see from the underwriting assumptions, this is unsustainable for normal operations,” a spokesperson for the housing finance agency told Street Sense/The 51st.

The RENTAL Act is supposed to stop that rise. But Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George says she worries it will only deepen the problem by pushing more residents into instability at a time when the city’s safety net is already fraying. She argued faster filings and shorter notice periods may help landlords recover unpaid rent more quickly, but at the cost of displacing families who are already struggling to stay afloat amid low wages, rising rents, and gaps in social support.

“I ultimately voted against the RENTAL Act because I reject the premise that evicting our residents is the only way to stabilize affordable housing providers,” she says. “We cannot displace our way to an equitable D.C.”

Beyond band-aid solutions

Lewis George’s concerns reflect what many housing advocates have been warning for months: without stronger protections and long-term solutions, the District’s eviction system will continue to punish residents who fall behind for reasons largely beyond their control.

But advocates stress that the current trajectory is not inevitable. They point to steps city leaders could take to blunt the crisis, including restoring ERAP funding, expanding subsidies, and strengthening right-to-counsel programs so tenants have free access to legal help in court.

The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute says the city would need to commit at least $100 million a year to ERAP alone to prevent mass displacement. But even that level of investment would only address part of the problem. The deeper issue, advocates say, is the lack of affordable housing.

“We need to be funding ERAP because… It's really the only tool for people facing eviction, but we also need to be investing in affordable housing so people aren't in a position of needing ERAP to begin with,” says Kate Coventry, the deputy director of Legislative Strategy for the policy institute.

Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, who also voted against the RENTAL Act, says ERAP was never designed to be a long-term fix for D.C.’s housing crisis.

“ERAP is meant to be an eviction prevention tool in the simplest sense,” Nadeau told Street Sense/The 51st. “It’s not supposed to be something you go back to every year. It’s supposed to be for when something goes wrong.”

Leah Hendey, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, says the District’s housing market lacks both “deep subsidies,” which cap rent at 30% of a household’s income, and “shallow subsidies,” which provide smaller, time-limited offsets to help households just above the poverty line manage rent. Without both layers, families are left paying rents that far exceed what they can afford, with no buffer for emergencies.

Her team’s 2024 analysis estimated D.C. would need an additional $380 million annually for deep subsidies, $153 million for shallow subsidies, and $76 to $108 million for ERAP to meet the scale of need. Even if ERAP were fully funded, she noted, it cannot substitute for long-term affordability. “We don’t have enough money in the system for housing assistance, and the rent is too high for many households in the District to afford,” she says.

Nadeau says the city needs to address deeper structural problems, including stagnant wages and the shortage of affordable housing. She pointed to D.C.’s Housing Production Trust Fund — the city’s main tool for financing new affordable housing — as an example of how local investments have fallen short. While the fund helps developers build or preserve income-restricted units, Nadeau says it hasn’t produced enough deeply affordable housing for the residents most at risk of eviction.

“None of it’s enough,” she says.

Advocates argue that failing to act will cost more in the long run. They warn that shortfalls in housing assistance will mean more families pushed into homelessness, a heavier strain on shelters and emergency rooms, and deeper inequities in who gets to remain in the city.

“A person's home or housing forms the base of any type of success that person will experience,” says Natasha Bennett, managing attorney at Bread for the City. 

Street Sense and IRW created and published an interactive tool to empower anyone to explore the D.C.'s eviction data cited in this article.

See for yourself

Fighting to stay housed

Without these interventions, tenant attorneys argue, more families will be displaced, not because they choose not to pay rent but because the systems meant to keep them housed are underfunded and riddled with barriers. The result is more residents living on the edge — one paycheck, one medical bill, or one missed paperwork deadline away from losing their homes.

Zoila, a single mother of three living in Ward 4, earns about $2,000 a month cleaning homes — less than rent for her two-bedroom apartment, which costs $2,375. She says her problems began soon after moving in, when she discovered severe mold that damaged her furniture and clothes. Despite repeated complaints, she says the landlord painted over the problem rather than fixing it.

“They knew about these bad conditions,” Zoila, who asked to use only her first name for fear of retaliation, says through a translator. “I never thought they would take me to court because they knew about the bad conditions.”

She says she had to stop paying rent temporarily after spending much of her limited income replacing her family’s furniture, which had been ruined by mold. In D.C., landlords must follow housing code standards, and if they don’t, a tenant may be legally entitled to a rent reduction.

But when the landlord later sued her for nonpayment, the judge ordered her to pay rent into the court while repairs continued. Zoila was ultimately able to avoid eviction. But housing advocates worry that when the eviction process is sped up and less assistance is available to insulate tenants on the edge, renters like Zoila and Steptoe will have fewer avenues to protect themselves.

Steptoe landed a new job in July as a paralegal at a Reston law firm that pays six figures, but she’s still trying to catch up. She now pays about $1,500 a month into the court under what’s known as a protective order while her case moves through D.C. Superior Court. She’s hopeful it will be dismissed, saying she’s gathered evidence that her building’s management has violated D.C. housing codes, which would give her justification for withholding some rent. More than that, she says, she’s fighting to show her neighbors — many of whom are on fixed incomes or have lost work themselves — that they don’t have to give in and leave their home if they fall behind.

“No one wants to be homeless,” she says.

Zoila told Street Sense/The 51st that she no longer owes rent but lives with constant uncertainty as winter approaches, when mold problems worsen. She says she’s afraid to apply for ERAP again, worried it could trigger another court case.

 “I’m thinking of finding a second job, but my life is very hard with my kids,” she says.“I want to pay my rent. I know it’s my responsibility,” she added. “But I’ve suffered with these conditions, and it feels like there’s no help. Every year the rent goes up, and people here barely make enough to eat.”