The District’s Rental Housing Commission has set the 2026 rent increase caps for the roughly 80,000 units still under rent control: 2.1 percent for elderly and disabled tenants, 4.1 percent for everyone else. Separately, the RENTAL Act now requires landlords to disclose ownership and any open housing-code violations in tenant notices — a small transparency win, and a sign of how much information tenants previously had to fight for.
The bigger fight is on the 2026 ballot: an initiative that would freeze rent-controlled units at their current rate for two years, proposed at exactly the moment landlord groups are warning that caps this low discourage new construction. That argument is decades old, and it was made against the very first rent control laws in the 1970s too. Whether it’s true this time is an empirical question. Whether tenants can afford to wait for the answer is not.