Chart of the week: Effect of the RENTAL Act on TOPA

On March 13^th, the D.C. Policy Center released a report titled TOPA’s Promise and Pitfalls: Balancing tenant rights, affordability, and housing investment in Washington, D.C. The report describes the landscape of multifamily rental housing in the District, provides data on transactions subject to the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) from 2012 to 2023 including where registered tenant associations formed, and offers qualitative insights on TOPA based on stakeholder interviews.

Around the same time, Mayor Bowser introduced the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords (RENTAL) Act of 2025. Among other provisions, the RENTAL Act exempts certain types of transactions from TOPA, including:

1. Buildings where at least 50 percent of the units are covenanted at or below 80 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) for at least 20 years, with 5 or more years remaining on the covenant at time of sale.
2. New construction or buildings that have been substantially improved within the last 25 years, where 51 percent or more of the rents are at 80 percent of AMI or higher.

In simple terms, these two provisions would exempt rental apartments from TOPA where affordable housing is already guaranteed through covenants, and market-rate buildings where TOPA is unlikely to effectively create or preserve affordability.

How many buildings would be affected by the RENTAL Act?

As of 2024, there are 3,006 apartment buildings in the District of Columbia, containing 138,392 rental units. These buildings are subject to various policies and affordability provisions based on existing covenants and the year they were built. Just over half of all rental units (73,136 units in 2,292 buildings) are subject to rent control, which limits annual rent increases for occupied units.

Over 22 percent of units (31,139 units in 467 buildings) are affordable through housing subsidies, including publicly owned buildings, HPTF, project-based Section 8 vouchers, and tenant-based vouchers. Most of these units (20,486) have been built in the last decade.¹ In addition, there are 4,491 affordable units created through Inclusionary Zoning (IZ),² which are included in market rate totals. This leaves only 21 percent of all rental units without any rent restrictions, government subsidies, or affordability requirements.

How many buildings and units would be exempted from TOPA under the RENTAL Act?

Based on provisions of the RENTAL Act, we estimate that 19 percent of buildings (572 buildings) and 35 percent of rental units (47,982 units) would be exempt from TOPA. The RENTAL Act would exempt the following properties:

1. 211 buildings with 30,804 units that have been built or substantially renovated in the last 25 years and have rents over 80 percent Median Family Income (MFI).³ This represents 7 percent of all buildings in the District. Over 93 percent of these buildings (197 buildings) are newer, market rate buildings that were built since 2000. These buildings contain, on average, 150 units and represent 56 percent of the total market rate buildings (351 buildings).
2. 107 buildings with 8,329 units that were financed by the Housing Production Trust Fund (HPTF) and have long-term housing covenants. While we do not have information on the length of affordability covenants on these properties, it is likely that almost all units have more than 5 years remaining on the covenant, based on typical 40-year covenants and when buildings were built. This estimate may include properties that are already exempt from TOPA, as many HPTF-funded properties have been individually exempted from TOPA through council legislation.⁴ These buildings represent 3.5 percent of all buildings in the District.
3. 254 buildings with 8,849 units⁵ that are publicly owned (and thus have permanent affordability). However, while these properties are technically subject to TOPA if they were to be sold to a private developer, these kinds of transactions have not been occurring in D.C. When District of Columbia Housing Authority (DCHA) repositions and disposes of properties, it typically converts them to another type of federal subsidy such as vouchers, or units are demolished.⁶

How many buildings and units will remain subject to TOPA under the RENTAL Act?

Over 80 percent of multifamily rental buildings (2,433 buildings) and 65 percent of multifamily rental units (91,215 units) would still be subject to TOPA under the RENTAL Act. Buildings that would still be subject to TOPA include:

1. Buildings that have not been built or substantially renovated in the last 25 years.
2. Newer buildings or renovations (under 25 years old) where 51 percent of the units are affordable at 80 percent MFI.
3. Affordable units where the housing covenants are less than 20 years in length or are expiring within 5 years. The housing covenants on IZ units, Section 8, and tenant-based vouchers do not meet the time requirement of this provision,⁷ and thus these units would still be subject to TOPA.⁸

Almost all buildings that would remain subject to TOPA (93 percent) are over 50 years old and rent-controlled. There are 2,291 total rent-controlled buildings with 73,448 units, a subset of which have been substantially renovated in the last 25 years (144 buildings with 8,489 units). Over 90 percent of these renovated rent-controlled buildings (130 buildings with 6,890 units) still have average rents under 80 percent MFI and would thus not meet the criteria for the TOPA exemption.⁹ This means that over 99 percent of rent-controlled buildings (2,277 buildings with 71,889 units) would remain subject to TOPA.

Over 43 percent of all market-rate buildings (351 buildings) would be subject to TOPA. Among the buildings built in the last 25 years, there are 99 buildings with 13,009 units that have average rents under 80 percent MFI and would thus be subject to TOPA under the RENTAL Act. More than half of these buildings and units are affordable through Section 8 housing vouchers or tenant-based vouchers. Additionally, there are 54 market rate buildings with 5,689 units that were built before 2000 and thus would not exempt.

How many sales and registered TAs would be affected by the exempted units?

There has been a surge in rental construction in the last 20 years, creating 48,114 units in 356 buildings. Despite the large amount of new rental construction, there have been few sales and even fewer tenant associations that formed in new buildings. Between 2012 and 2023, there were 419 transactions that were subject to TOPA. Only 23 of those transactions occurred in buildings that were less than 25 years old, and from those 23 transactions, there were only 6 registered tenant associations (TAs).¹⁰ That means that buildings less than 25 years old accounted for 5.4 percent of the applicable transactions, and 3.7 percent of total TAs.

1. Affordable housing data retrieved from opendata.dc.gov.
2. Inclusionary zoning is a program in which new construction must create a percentage of the units that are affordable. In some cases, this comes with a density bonus, allowing the developer to create more units overall. According to data from OCTO, D.C.’s Inclusionary Zoning program has created 4,491 affordable units. Of these, 3,317 are affordable at 60 to 80 percent of Family Median Income.
3. To meet the affordability requirement, more than 51 percent of the units in a building would need rents under 80 percent MFI to qualify. To estimate this, the D.C. Policy Center used the median rent in a building as the qualifier: if the median rent is under 80 percent MFI, that means that at least half the units in the building must have rents at that rate or lower.
4. Exempted projects include notable affordable developments Jubilee Maycroft, Anna Cooper House, Karin House, N Street Village, Paul Laurence Dunbar Apartments, and Jeremiah House and Shalom House. We were not able to remove all exempted properties from our analysis, and so these counts are included in our numbers.
5. This estimate is based on D.C. tax rolls where D.C. government is listed as the property owner. There are approximately 2,000 other units that are owned by private developers with D.C. government as a partial or secondary owner. These units were not captured in our analysis, but they are still considered publicly owned housing and D.C. government is ultimately responsible for the units.
6. District of Columbia Housing Authority Moving to Work Plan FY2025 https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/PIH/documents/DCHAFY25Plan.pdf
7. The length of these housing covenants is unknown, but most voucher and Section 8 covenants are for 1 year or 5 years. Some covenants could be more than 20 years (exempting them from TOPA), but these are relatively rare.
8. We included these counts in our market rate numbers, as this is how these rents are advertised.
9. The remaining 15 renovated rent-controlled buildings with 1,903 units would be exempted from TOPA proceedings.
10. Out of 158 total TA formations.