Preservation through Tenant Rights in Washington, DC (Working Paper)
By Kathryn Howell, Executive Director of the National Center for Smart Growth and Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, Casey Dawkins, Faculty Affiliate with the National Center for Smart Growth and Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and Sophie McManus, Urban and Regional Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland PhD Candidate.
Over the last two decades, there has been a shift in how we understand the geography of affordable housing. As the demand for walkable neighborhoods accessible to amenities increased for higher-income households, affordable housing units – both subsidized and unsubsidized – were lost, and their supply shrank. As a result, states and localities are looking for new tools for production and preservation of affordable housing. This may include a right of first refusal for a jurisdiction (Montgomery County, MD, Prince George’s County, MD) or a tenant association (Washington, DC, Takoma Park, MD) to have the first chance to purchase a residential building going up for sale. In Washington, DC, the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), passed in 1980, gives tenants the right of first refusal when their building is for sale. All multifamily tenants in DC have the right to collectively buy and convert it into a cooperative or condominium, assign their rights to a developer of their choice, or do nothing and allow the sale to go through without intervention.
In this working paper, we use a multinomial logit regression model and find that TOPA was highly effective at preserving affordable housing, particularly in areas where rents were rising. Further, in areas where there was limited affordable housing due to exclusionary zoning or earlier waves of gentrification, TOPA could do little to preserve affordability because little affordable housing existed. Similarly, TOPA was less effective close to transit where buildings were newer and typically not affordable. In short, while TOPA was effective in preserving affordability where it exists, it also points to the ongoing need to enable the production of new subsidized and unsubsidized housing across the city. These findings help to better understand on a large scale the ways that tenant rights of first refusal, and perhaps other rights can be used to provide critical access to the market to intervene and prevent the loss of affordable housing.