At the end of the day, the D.C. Council is probably going to do something to ensure that people living in rent-controlled apartments avoid the highest rent increases to hit their bank accounts in the past 50 years. That outcome would be a good one, as far as it goes, but Loose Lips can’t help but take issue with the process of getting there.
Lawmakers were gearing up to vote Tuesday on a proposal from housing committee chair At-Large Councilmember Robert White to set a lower cap on rent increases at these units than the 8.9 percent hikes currently permitted under D.C. law. But after more than an hour’s worth of debate and wrangling that made House Speaker Kevin McCarthy look like a master legislator, the Council narrowly voted to postpone consideration of the matter until next week.
That’s because Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto backed a last-minute amendment to the bill that essentially sought to preempt a similar, more aggressive proposal from some of her more progressive colleagues: Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, and Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker. Much to their dismay, Council Chair Phil Mendelson opted to consider Pinto’s amendment first, setting off a confusing back-and-forth in the Council chambers as he worked with staff to haphazardly hammer out details that would affect roughly 90,000 tenants’ lives. The fracas included multiple parliamentary challenges, repeated calls for a recess, and more than a bit of snark traded among councilmembers; a key part of the debate turned, incredibly enough, on Mendelson’s assertion that he hadn’t heard one of Lewis George’s earlier protests, so he didn’t consider it “timely.”
“This feels like an attack not only on Black and brown councilmembers, but Black and brown residents if this is allowed to move forward in this way,” Lewis George said during one of the tenser moments of the debate Tuesday.
It all culminated in a 7-6 vote to delay debate for a week to ensure that things are a bit more orderly; Nadeau, Parker, Lewis George, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, and At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson provided the dissenting votes. It remains to be seen whether the same slim majority that voted to take a pause will ultimately support Pinto’s plan, but tenant activists are hopeful that all this scrambling is a sign that Mendelson knew he didn’t have the votes to beat back the progressives’ plan.
Things got so frenzied that it’s hard to keep track of the exact contours of the legislative debate, but LL will do his best to interpret it.
To start, Robert White’s original bill would have lowered allowable rent increases to 6.9 percent for each of the the next two years, a bid to meet the concerns of both renters and landlords after the Rental Housing Commission allowed an 8.9 percent cap to go into effect on May 1. He claimed this represented a compromise position with landlords and their lobbyists, who claimed they needed to be able to collect more money in rent in order to keep up with rising costs and avoid selling to big corporate interests. But advocates for renters began pushing him to drop things down to a 5 percent cap instead.
That prompted Nadeau, Lewis George, and Parker to back a different plan. They prepared an amendment and began circulating it early on Tuesday that would set a 6 percent limit for the rest of this year and stipulated that rents can’t go up by more than 10 percent over the next two years.
Pinto’s proposal is a bit of a middle ground between those two positions. Her amendment would set a 6 percent cap for the rest of the year, but allow up to 12 percent in increases through June 20, 2025; higher than the 10 percent proposed by progressives, but lower than the 13.8 percent allowed under White’s bill.
The backers of the 10 percent plan felt that their amendment should have been considered first because they had circulated it to their colleagues long before Pinto. But Mendelson opted to take up her measure first, probably no great surprise considering that his sympathies have long aligned with the same real estate lobbyists fighting the rent caps. Despite several objections from the progressives, Mendelson pushed ahead, claiming he saw Pinto ask to be recognized first.
“I saw her first and recognized her first, it’s that simple,” Mendelson said, though LL might note that the chair has long admonished his colleagues to submit potential amendments as early as possible to avoid exactly this sort of confusion. “I think you want in the presiding officer the ability to vary from the strict order of the agenda.”
Former At-Large Councilmember and frequent Mendo critic Elissa Silverman, apparently torturing herself by watching the debate despite her election loss last year, begged to differ: “Speakers are given time depending on whether [Mendelson] agrees with them. Hence, [Pinto] gets to go first on a controversial amendment involving landlords, because Mendo agrees with her amendment and not the one moved by [Nadeau] and [Lewis George],” she tweeted.
Things got truly shambolic when Ward 3 Councilmember Matt Frumin, seen as a key swing vote by advocates, proposed an amendment to Pinto’s amendment. He was concerned that the original version of her proposal didn’t set any parameters on how landlords could raise rents over the next two years beyond setting the 12 percent cap; in theory, that could allow a building owner to demand an 11.99 percent increase this year to get more money right away, even if such a big hike would have detrimental effects on tenants. Pinto clarified that her bill would maintain White’s original, 6.9 percent cap for this year, so Frumin suggested dropping it down to 6 percent to match the progressives’ proposal.
As Mendelson, Pinto, and the Council’s lawyers started trying to hash out these changes, the meeting descended into chaos. Several councilmembers got up and started roaming around as Mendelson and Pinto huddled, essentially writing the amendment on the fly amid lots of barely audible grumbling from their opponents. “Are we still in session?” Parker wondered at one point, asking a very pertinent question.
Pinto eventually accepted Frumin’s changes, but not before Lewis George and her colleagues repeatedly attempted to derail the debate by getting the measure declared out of order. (That’s when Mendelson claimed he simply couldn’t hear Lewis George’s objections in time to consider them: “I’m not trying anything deceitful or deceptive or whatever, but I just didn’t hear it,” he said.)
Progressive frustration with Mendelson is certainly nothing new, but it was still notable to see so much strife when the normally contentious budget debate was so chummy. And it stands as a great example of why progressives will always face an uphill battle if they can’t bring the chair on board with a particular policy matter.
The weeklong delay gives both sides time to regroup, and it’s unclear how each side may sharpen their proposals, if at all; one activist notes to LL with amusement that Pinto’s proposal started to strongly resemble the progressives’ pitch the more she agreed to alter it. If they can flip just one vote (perhaps Frumin?) then their original amendment could succeed.
The final product will be a consequential one for renters, who will still almost certainly see the largest rent hikes in a decade no matter what the Council passes. But the sausage-making could be just as revealing for what it portends about the future of the push-and-pull between Mendelson and the growing bloc of lefties on the Council.
This story has been updated.