The District’s multifamily housing ecosystem is fundamentally broken. New housing starts have plummeted, renters are living in increasingly disastrous conditions, and buildings are in death spirals—or at risk of entering them. Headline after headline after headline in the Washington Business Journal reports on canceled projects and scuttled plans.
Talk to almost any housing developer in this city—as I do through my ANC work—and they will tell you that interest in investing in the District is almost nonexistent. To be sure, broader economic forces like remote work and DOGE are major contributors to this crisis, but much of the current state of affairs is self-inflicted. After all, Northern Virginia has been affected by the same forces, yet housing construction there is booming.
At Capital Commonsense, we’re kicking off a long series of articles examining the many decisions by the DC Council, Mayor Muriel Bowser, and DC Superior Court that helped break our housing ecosystem.
Our hope is that the incoming mayor, Janeese Lewis George, learns from the string of often well-intentioned decisions that has produced major unintended consequences—and addresses the fallout. She has pledged to build 72,000 units of new housing. Not only is that goal a fantasy in the current environment, but thousands of existing affordable units are at risk of being lost after a decade of bad policymaking.
Mayor Lewis George has the opportunity to take office next January with a reset: Landlords will be held accountable. Tenants will pay rent. And the District will make it less burdensome to build, operate, and maintain housing, while respecting tenants’ rights.
We’re starting our series with a look at one building already in a death spiral—and what its collapse portends for the rest of the District’s affordable housing stock.
Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s complaint, filed last week, reveals deplorable conditions at the Delta Pearl, a 10-story affordable-housing building at 1400 Florida Avenue NE.
The building’s air conditioning system died on July 1 and was never fixed, leaving families and seniors to bake through the hottest weeks of the summer. Both elevators also broke in July, forcing parents to carry children up the stairs and residents with health issues to climb them—stairs covered with feces, urine, and debris. The exterior gate had been broken since August 2025 and the key-fob entry system since February, leaving the building to contend with a growing squatter problem.
Add exposed wiring, nonfunctioning fire-safety equipment, rodents, roaches, water damage, and unaddressed fire damage, and you get nearly 200 open housing-code violations that drove this lawsuit.
Schwalb’s office is asking the court for an emergency order compelling the most urgent repairs, a broader injunction, restitution for tenants, and civil penalties against owner-developer Buwa Binitie and his companies, Delta 2 Owner LLC and Faria Management.
Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, who helped cut the ribbon on the renovated building, said the decline was impossible to reconcile with what he had seen two years earlier. He also noted that his office had spent months escalating residents’ complaints to District agencies before the suit.
He is right to be angry—but his anger elides the role the Council itself has played in breaking our housing system and then failing to repair it—allowing buildings like the Delta Pearl to reach this point.
Binitie’s response to the lawsuit is not really a defense of the conditions—he concedes they are serious—so much as an explanation of the math behind them. His management group says roughly two-thirds of Delta Pearl’s tenants are behind on rent, that the property is carrying more than $1.8 million in unpaid rent and resident balances, and that it has lost more than $1 million this year alone. On July 30, according to the complaint, Binitie told the District he simply did not have the resources to fix the building and intended to begin relocating tenants.
To be clear, tenants who are not currently paying rent may be legally entitled to withhold it because of the current deplorable conditions and failure to make repairs—and we will learn more about the specifics through additional court filings. But it is easy to see how this situation could spiral out of control.
If 10, 20, or 30 percent of tenants stopped paying rent, at some point the Delta Pearl stopped generating enough revenue to be adequately maintained—margins are thin in affordable housing. The landlord could not or would not make repairs. Tenants who were paying rent—and had the ability to leave—moved out and were not replaced. The share of nonpaying tenants grew. The financial picture got worse and more problems went unaddressed. And on and on it went until the building reached the state it is in today.
That is a death spiral—and the Delta Pearl is not the only building caught in one.
Head over to Eckington and you find the Gale, a 603-unit complex where more than half the apartments are affordable. There, a blind tenant who uses a wheelchair went four months without the elevator nearest her apartment, forcing her to navigate three long corridors just to get outside.
The Gale has racked up more than 250 building violations since 2023 and more than $185,000 in fines, of which its owners had paid just 7 percent as of this spring. Residents describe mold, pests, break-ins, foul odors, billing errors, and management that either delays repairs or simply does not respond.
The “solution” now on the table is telling. Parker has proposed a $21 million, 10-year tax abatement—at a time of intense fiscal pressure for the District—to pull the Gale out of what even he acknowledges is a death spiral. The break would kick in only if the owners first fix the building’s problems. The Gale’s ownership blames the same forces Binitie does. In testimony before the Council, a representative said rising costs, tax burdens, and income lost to rent nonpayment had pushed the property into deficit.
The pandemic and the emergency tenant protections that followed stretched eviction cases to a year and a half or longer, while rent collections in the District fell to lows unmatched anywhere in the region. The city was projecting roughly $147 million in unpaid rent for a single year, and DC now posts the highest rent-nonpayment rates in the country for low-income housing tax-credit buildings, as GreaterGreaterWashington detailed in a highly informative June piece.
The RENTAL Act the Council passed last year—speeding up nonpayment cases—was an attempt to rebalance the system. But as we will discuss in future posts, we are still nowhere near the 2019 status quo.
All of this brings us back to the opportunity ahead. Janeese Lewis George inherits a housing system damaged by pandemic-era policy choices and years of failing to grapple with their consequences. She also inherits a genuine mandate for change and a rare opportunity for the reset desperately needed to preserve existing housing and get new housing built.
Doing so will require moving away from the positions she took on the Council and resisting pressure from many campaign supporters who want to go even further on the policies that have helped choke off housing development. But if she is serious about restarting investment and stabilizing the District’s housing system, she will have to push back.
Landlords maintaining their buildings and tenants paying their rent should be basic expectations in a functioning housing system. The Delta Pearl is a cautionary tale about what happens when those fundamentals break down and buildings are allowed to descend into chaos.
While it is easy to pin all the blame for this unfolding disaster on bad housing operators and greedy landlords, we see at the Delta Pearl and the Gale that those who are hurt the most by the status quo are the most vulnerable tenants who are unable to relocate and must endure increasingly deplorable conditions.
Our next mayor has a rare chance to build a system that prevents a dozen more Delta Pearls. She should take it.
I know how annoying it is that I always bang the drum of the shrinking tax base, but it really is the macro problem that parameterizes all the rest. The cases described herein could be ameliorated with money within the universe in which money is available. But we aren’t living in that universe. The obsession has to be with the kind of growth - including growth through development - that broadens the tax base and renders it more robust.
It strikes me as strange to urge a newly elected mayor to abandon the policy positions that she took on the Council and that fueled her election. But even if she wanted the kind of "reset" imagined here, the next mayor would quickly find that she cannot simply order the courts to stop having a backlog of nonpayment cases.
Achieving a functional rental housing market will require a long time and a lot of money. Even if all the nonpayment cases were immediately resolved in the landlord's favor, many rental properties would be burdened by the deferred maintenance--with high interest rates making it difficult to finance the repairs that will be needed to attract tenants who want to pay rent that is too damn high.
I hope future installments in this series will present a theory of getting out of the death spiral.