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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It is amazing several years into this debacle, that has been decades in the making, how few people understand what is happening with these older buildings.

The underlying issue is that DC has permanent rent controlled buildings in affluent areas where landlords are forced to accept rents well below what the market would otherwise yield.

The landlords came up with a very creative solution a few years ago that lets them have their cake and eat it too and unfortunately the city abetted this by changing the law.

There were two changes that enabled this.

The first is the city adjusted what section 8 vouchers pay and indexed the payments to the neighborhood so that vouchers that only pay $1300 for a 1 BR in Ward 8 pay $2700 for a 1 BR in Ward 3 - in fact the city decided to index the payments above what the units even rent for in affluent areas, assuming that to get landlords to accept Section 8 vouchers they would need to pay more than market rates.

This probably would not really have netted that many units going to voucher holders because landlords discriminate and the rental market in Ward 3 has always been very strong so while some voucher holders would have likely found units it would not have been very many and would not have been concentrated.

But the landlords devised a very clever work around that the city signed off on which is the city decided that landlords could rent their rent controlled units to voucher holders at the Section 8 rents but still count them as affordable housing.

So overnight landlords were in essence able to double their rents in rent controlled units to above market rate for the entire Ward while not actually improving the units which they would have had to do at great cost to get the same rents on the open market.

So this has cost the city (though a lot of the money comes from the Feds) a great deal of money in the form of over payments for subpar rental units and eviscerated what used to be naturally occurring affordable housing (well not really as it was dictated by regulations) in otherwise expensive Ward 3.

The city can and should fix this by getting rid of two big loopholes in the process here - voucher holders should not be enabled to overpay for units which benefits no one but landlords and rent control units should have some type of income requirements on them which they don't today so the people who benefit from rent control are the ones who need lower rent and probably there should be no back door ways to transfer rent control units to make sure they go to deserving tenants.

If you did this over time you'd in fact get some section 8 tenants into rent controlled buildings  but they'd be paying the same rents as the other tenants so the city would benefit directly by paying less in rent and you'd only have a low percentage of rent control units and would likely avoid the concentrated poverty that abets a lot of the out of control behavior.

But you now have two powerful constituencies benefiting from this system - landlords and low income residents and both groups will furiously oppose any fixes that undo this even though it is a really stupid system.[/quote]

I still don't understand why people think it is OK to subsidize poor folks living in very expensive areas, when many working taxpayers could not afford these areas.  For the price of one unit in Ward 3, you could afford two elsewhere.  Yes, there are problems with concentrating poverty and dysfunction, but there are also problems with spreading poverty and dysfunction to different areas at twice the cost.[/quote]

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