As the D.C. Council is set to vote on the Rebalancing Expectations for Neighbors, Tenants, and Landlords (RENTAL) Act, a sweeping housing law reform bill with far-reaching implications for District tenants, recent studies and reports illustrate the sharp divide between reliable data and the narrative promoted by industry-backed advocacy groups.

The bill, praised by developer groups and introduced by Mayor Muriel Bowser, has raised concerns among tenants, housing advocates, and some affordable housing providers, who argue it would eliminate tenant protections based on little reliable data. 

Of particular concern are changes to eviction due process safeguards and the proposed exemptions to the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, a 40-year-old law that gives tenants the right of first refusal when their building is put up for sale.

Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau says she’s aware of “a cadre of developers who have wanted to take down TOPA for more than a decade. They’re using this opportunity to do it by blaming TOPA for everything. And it’s just not logical.” 

Nadeau’s staff says she has been working with Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George and Council Chair Phil Mendelson on an amendment to the RENTAL Act that would eliminate the exemption for buildings with affordability covenants that require rents to remain at certain levels. It would also reinstate a cooling-off period to prevent tenants from prematurely assigning their TOPA rights and would remove the provision on tenant buyouts.

Nadeau expects to introduce the amendment during the D.C. Council’s meeting Wednesday, when lawmakers will take the second and final vote on the bill. 

In the week or so leading up to the meeting, reports from both sides of the debate have started circulating; one touts the benefits of TOPA while the other pushes for harsher eviction reforms claiming landlords have $1 billion in rental arrearages.

A working paper from researchers at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education, housed at the University of Maryland, College Park, describes TOPA as an instrumental law preserving affordability while identifying the potential harm of the RENTAL Act, especially for low-income Black tenants.

The UMD researchers created a comprehensive database by compiling D.C.’s TOPA reports of filings, citywide building data, census information, with qualitative details from local tenant groups. (Landlords must file TOPA documents with D.C. and the government publishes weekly reports of those filings.)

The study found that TOPA “was highly effective at preserving affordable housing, particularly in areas where rents were rising,” but the law has been less effective in areas with limited affordability or near public transit stations where market-rate buildings are more common.

TOPA is a crucial tool for market access and affordable housing preservation, serving as an “early warning system” for anti-displacement efforts, according to the UMD study.

Kathryn Howell, director of UMD’s Center for Smart Growth, Research, and Education and one of the study’s authors, said in a previous interview that while some high-profile individuals may have had negative experiences with TOPA, making policy decisions based on a few anecdotal experiences is problematic. 

Peter Tatian, a research director and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, questions the sudden focus on TOPA as the cause of potential disinvestment in D.C. “What has changed to make it a perceived problem today when it wasn’t previously?” he asks. “What are all the possible explanations?”

The UMD study stands in sharp contrast to a “Rent Loss Study” from the Small Multifamily Owners Association, a landlord advocacy group. SMOA’s three-page report, which was released last week, claims landlords have lost an astonishing $1 billion in unpaid rent since the end of the pandemic and pushes for the restoration of harsher eviction provisions that were removed from the initial version of the RENTAL Act.

SMOA’s study uses data from a specific, distressed subset of the rental market—the DC Housing Finance Agency’s struggling affordable housing portfolio—and extrapolates it to come to a conclusion about the entire rental market. The report uses similarly questionable methodology for rent delinquency rates, drawing from unnamed affordable housing providers and applying their rental arrearages to the entire rental market. 

“The ‘study,’ which feels like a very loose term, doesn’t cite any of its data (beyond the number of apartment units in D.C., which isn’t the most recent number from the 2024 [American Community Survey],” says Mychal Cohen, a senior policy analyst for the left-leaning DC Fiscal Policy Institute, of the SMOA report. “That is a big red flag.”

Cohen says there are several methodological flaws, including a lack of transparency around the report’s underlying data, and erroneously using one unique subset of the rental housing market to make conclusions about every rental unit in D.C.

Hunter defends his methodology, saying in an interview that his data comes from DCHFA and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Economic Development. 

“I didn’t make those numbers up,” he says. “That subset is a very small subset of the entire rental population. If you take that small amount of money, which is not even looking at the entire rent, and stretch it out, it’s actually over a billion dollars,” he says, adding that the figure is “a conservative estimate.” 

The identity of the “small landlords” SMOA purports to represent remains ambiguous. An attendee list from a SMOA event in 2023 primarily featured representatives from trade groups, banks, property managers, and large landlords, including Nigel Crayton, director at Greysteel, Katalin Peter, vice president of government affairs for the Apartment and Office Building Association of Metropolitan Washington, and Dan Crosby, a property manager whose tenants have complained about squalid conditions for years. 

The answers don’t get clearer on SMOA’s website. In a glowing testimonial, a landlord identified as Adam Shaw raved that SMOA’s “advocacy against unfair housing policies and their relentless fight for our rights have given me a voice in a system that often overlooks small property owners.” Three other five-star reviews, purportedly from landlords who worked with SMOA, also appear at the bottom of its website.

But the same four reviewers, using different names but the same photos, appear on the site for a Slovakian clothing store, where the photo for Shaw appears next to the name Peter Novak. 

“The dress is gorgeous and created an unforgettable experience for my wife!” Novak proclaimed.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule in 2024 banning the use of fake online reviews, which, according to former Chair Lina Khan, “not only waste people’s time and money, but also pollute the marketplace and divert business away from honest competitors.” 

Dean Hunter, SMOA’s founder, has praised the RENTAL Act, stating the law “correctly exempts many providers, especially small apartment building owners, from burdensome TOPA requirements [that] have caused harm.” Hunter, a former attorney, pleaded guilty in 2013 to stealing settlement money from disability and personal injury clients in a scheme that cost victims more than $100,000.

As recently as 2018, Hunter held a different view on TOPA as executive director of the Civil Rights Center. He actively campaigned against eliminating TOPA rights for renters in single-family homes and circulated a flyer that warned the proposed bill would “cause thousands of families and seniors to be displaced from their homes” and called it a “major gentrification land grab.”

Adding to the landscape of questionable data, the dark money group Opportunity DC has cited its own poll results that say 62 percent of D.C. voters support the RENTAL Act. The poll’s methodology reveals that the questions themselves could introduce bias in the responses. 

The poll asks, for example, whether respondents support or oppose “Streamlin[ing] the permitting process for new housing construction, in order to speed up the building of new housing?” and “mak[ing] it easier to sell buildings, in order to help attract more investment in new housing.”

The survey also asks if respondents believe D.C. should “Modernize regulations from 1980, like the Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), which currently deter new housing production.” 

And the final question says: “DC’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) was created 45 years ago to give renters the chance to buy their apartment when their building was sold. But now it is being misused, causing long delays in property sales and slowing down construction of new and affordable housing. The RENTAL Act updates TOPA to exclude buildings with DC residents who make more money, while making sure that lower-income renters are not forced to move. Do you support updating TOPA so it works the way it was intended?”

Tatian, with the Urban Institute, says that “asking leading questions, those that intentionally or unintentionally prompt someone to give a particular response, is not best practice for data collection, as it can lead to biased results.”

Opportunity DC has recently launched anti-TOPA ads on social media to promote the RENTAL Act. Malcom Fox, the group’s executive director, tells City Paper that TOPA “commonly extends the transaction by multiple years.”

But when asked whether delays could be attributed to TOPA tolling—the almost two-year period in 2020 when the D.C. Council froze deadlines imposed during the TOPA process that caused significant delays in building sales—Fox was unaware. “By tolling period, you mean the process of forming the tenant association, going back and forth in negotiations?” he asked.

Evidence of developers’ behind-the-scenes influence on Opportunity DC’s messaging can be seen in a 2023 email from board member and developer Jair Lynch, who has advocated for the sort of TOPA exemptions in the bill.

Lynch’s email sent to the “Developer Roundtable” requested $4,000 from each member to support Opportunity DC’s “vital work,” including polling, coordinated messaging, and a  “public safety advocacy campaign.”

Lynch noted in the email that “ODC is a 501c4, which means that contributions are not publicly disclosed.” A new public finance law “prohibits donations to Councilmembers and candidates from any entity that has or is seeking a contract or grant (including TIFs & abatements) with a cumulative value of $250,000 or greater,” Lynch wrote. That means “ODC represents the sole vehicle for employers to use their voice and financially impact local elections.” 

City Paper sent an email to an address associated with the Developer Roundtable asking to interview members about their experience with TOPA. Chris Bruch, president and CEO of the Donohoe Companies Inc., and Taylor Lawch, executive vice president and co-head of development at JBG Smith, were the only ones to respond. Bruch says he has not done a TOPA deal recently. Lawsch responded by cc’ing Evan Regan-Levine, who according to Lawsch, “has spent a lot of time studying this topic and discussing with the various stakeholders.” But Regan-Levine never responded. 

The environment where data can be shaped for a particular agenda highlights the concerns of experts like Gary Langer, former director of polling at ABC News. 

“There are all sorts of data that’s around us, and some of it is independently produced to honestly and neutrally assess public attitudes or behavior on a given issue,” Langer says. “But other data can be produced for other purposes, to try to promote somebody’s preferred policy or agenda.”

While industry-funded research can produce high-quality, unbiased data, Langer cautions that “if the funder of a given research project has a dog in a fight, then we should be on guard about the possibility of manipulated data produced to promote their agenda or point of view.

“We all swim in a sea of data, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of pollution in the water,” Langer says.