D.C.’s beleaguered housing authority — which has faced leadership turnover, a cyberattack and a scathing audit this year — is the city’s worst offender when it comes to unresolved housing violations.
The District’s housing authority (DCHA) owes D.C.’s Department of Buildings (DOB) more than $2.2 million for over 2,500 unresolved violations across its properties, per a public DOB dashboard. Some violations date back to 2019.
The issue stems in part from the fact that the agency, which owns more than 8,500 public housing units, polices itself. Unlike private landlords who answer to DOB, by law, DOB cannot do more than issue fines to the housing authority.
“If someone calls us up, we’ll go out, we’ll inspect, we will see what’s broken, we’ll create a [notice of infraction], and we will provide it to DCHA. They are supposed to then fix it and tell us,” Keith Parsons, DOB’s director of strategic enforcement, told NOTUS. “There is really no ‘stick,’ by law.”
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That the housing authority is the District’s worst offender doesn’t surprise Megan Browder, Legal Aid DC’s director for systemic advocacy and law reform.
“I think it is partially the size of the portfolio and also a systematic disregard for their mission,” Browder told NOTUS.
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In 2022, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that DCHA was out of compliance with its annual inspection requirements, inspection outcomes weren’t monitored, and emergency work orders went uncompleted at night due to safety concerns. In 2020, D.C.’s attorney general sued the DCHA for endangering thousands of tenants across 10 of its properties.
D.C. has the country’s highest rates of rent nonpayment for low-income tax credit buildings, a fact landlords often point to as an explanation for their inability to make repairs. But DCHA doesn’t have that excuse, Browder said, as their properties are subsidized by the government.
“DCHA takes steps to fully abate any infraction within the abatement timeframe listed on the notice and provide proof of abatement to the DOB,” Alison Burdo, a DCHA spokesperson, told NOTUS in a statement. “There may be a delay in updates to DOB’s public database if further clarification between DCHA and DOB is needed.”
Some of the violations on the public dashboard are “associated with vacant units currently undergoing modernization or awaiting modernization pending sufficient funding,” Burdo said, and others are for properties DCHA doesn’t own or control but where the agency may have a long-term ground lease for redevelopment.
The housing authority is in the middle of a three-year “recovery plan” meant to improve the quality of its housing stock and improve work order systems, among other goals. The agency meets monthly with DOB to review any notices of infraction, Burdo said.
DHCA is far from the only landlord with an extensive list of outstanding violations. Per DOB’s dashboard, more than 84,500 housing violations, dating back to 2018, are currently unresolved, with more than $83 million in associated fines. More than 100 landlords owe at least $100,000 each.
Some of the violations — particularly those dating back years — are in active litigation, Parsons said. Others may have already been fixed, but either DOB is waiting for evidence of that abatement or associated fines are tied up in the department’s adjudication process.
That adjudication process is why it’s so hard to collect. It starts when DOB issues a notice of infraction after a property inspection, which may also carry a fine. There, the department runs into its first problem: the D.C. Council found in 2024 that over half of those infraction notices were sent to the incorrect address.
Once a landlord receives a notice, the department must take them through a monthslong appeal and adjudication process administered by the city’s Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) in order to collect any money.
“A landlord is entitled to due process,” Browder said. “That does take time, largely because there’s a big backlog at OAH.”
Because of that system, each year DOB receives just a fraction of the fines it assessed and abates less than half of violations. In the 2024 fiscal year, the department collected $2.6 million in fines, but referred $25 million more to the city’s collections unit.
Even as D.C. navigates a tight fiscal era, the DOB argues that the best outcome for the city is not necessarily collecting that $83 million.
“Success is making sure the problems are fixed, and the fines are a way to motivate the landlord to do it,” Parsons told NOTUS. “So, if we can get things fixed, that is our goal.”
In that spirit, and in line with the council’s recommendations from 2024, the department is shifting its approach. Instead of chasing down every penny owed, the department is trying to settle with landlords for less or no money in order to fix violations sooner. It has set a “very ambitious” goal of resolving 80% of emergency violations within 30 days, and 90 days for non-emergencies, Parsons said.
“There’s work to do here, but because we’re timing ourselves now, we are actually orienting operations around trying to move those things more quickly,” he said.
The strategy seems to be paying off: DOB’s collection rate for fines increased by 10% from fiscal years 2024 to 2025. Last year, fines collected before final order exceeded $1 million for the first time.
“We’re doing more outreach. We’re doing more talking to people. These options have usually been here, but we’re emphasizing them more,” Parsons said. “If you fix [violations] soon enough, we will just resolve it without fines at all.”
Not everyone thinks that’s a win. Browder worries that landlords, some of whom already don’t take the abatement process seriously, won’t be incentivized to make fixes.
“For me it’s really concerning,” she told NOTUS. “I think it just lessens the accountability for landlords to say ‘Hey, you can kind of just limp along and settle with DOB without any meaningful corrective action.’”
Browder thinks informal settlements could be beneficial for smaller landlords, but that bigger housing providers — especially corporate landlords who own multiple properties under LLCs — should be forced to go through the fine collection process. She is hoping for a more transparent violations dashboard, and a public list of the owners of properties held under LLCs.
“DOB enforcement should be the last step before litigation. The landlord should just fix the issue; it shouldn’t get to the point where you have to request DOB,” she said. “If we could figure out who the repeat violators [are], DOB could focus on those folks.”
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