ERC Comments: Are D.C. Agencies Meeting the Community’s Fair Housing Needs?
By Nick Adjami and Susie McClannahan
March 20, 2025
The D.C. Council holds annual Performance Oversight Hearings for all city agencies, allowing District residents and organizations to provide feedback on how well the agencies are meeting the needs of our communities. Each year, the ERC testifies at hearings for multiple agencies that are relevant to our work. By doing so, we hope our civil rights expertise can help the D.C. Council to better understand and address the urgent fair housing issues facing the city. Read our full comments at the links below.
Office of Human Rights Performance Oversight Hearing
The D.C. Office of Human Rights (OHR) enforces local human rights laws, including the D.C. Human Rights Act, and investigates individual complaints of discrimination, including housing discrimination. The ERC frequently assists clients who live in the District to file housing discrimination complaints through the agency. The ERC testified urging OHR to address the backlog of discrimination complaints and streamline the complaint process, including by making permanent the Attorney-Drafted Charges Pilot Program. The ERC also encouraged OHR to accept disparate impact claims to tackle more pernicious forms of discrimination, and to use director’s inquiries to confront systemic source of income discrimination.
D.C. Housing Authority Performance Oversight Hearing
The D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) is tasked with providing affordable housing to low-income families in the District and administers programs like public housing and the Housing Choice Voucher Program. The ERC testified urging DCHA to make its rent reasonableness determination process more transparent for program participants, overhaul the agency’s reasonable accommodations process to effectively serve people with disabilities, and improve communication with program participants. For more information about issues related to reasonable accommodations for tenants with disabilities, read this Washington Post article.
Office of the Attorney General Performance Oversight Hearing
The D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG) is the chief legal office for the District, tasked with enforcing the city’s laws, including the D.C. Human Rights Act, and protecting the interests of D.C. residents. The ERC has worked closely with the OAG, especially as part of our efforts to combat rampant source of income discrimination in the District, and we submitted testimony commending the agency’s strong enforcement of the D.C. Human Rights Act and commitment to fair housing.
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The Equal Rights Center (ERC) — a national non-profit organization — is a civil rights organization that identifies and seeks to eliminate unlawful and unfair discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations in its home community of Greater Washington DC and nationwide. The ERC’s core strategy for identifying unlawful and unfair discrimination is civil rights testing. When the ERC identifies discrimination, it seeks to eliminate it through the use of testing data to educate the public and business community, support policy advocacy, conduct compliance testing and training, and, if necessary, take enforcement action. For more information, please visit www.equalrightscenter.org.
The work that provided the basis for this publication was supported by funding under a grant with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The substance and findings of the work are dedicated to the public. The author and publisher are solely responsible for the accuracy of the statements and interpretations contained in this publication. Such interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Government.
