Tenant Organizing in Washington D.C. and Beyond

This interview aired on the Current Affairs podcast in August 2019. You can listen to it here. As always, the following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

VANESSA A. BEE: 

Hello everyone. This is Vanessa A. Bee, and I am so excited to bring [you] a very special episode of this week’s Current Affairs podcast. We’re going to talk about tenant organizing in the District of Columbia, which is the place I have called home for seven years. I am so fond of Washington. I think it is a wonderful place to live. Unfortunately, I have also long accepted that it’s the kind of place where the rent is too damn high, and it has felt that way for a long time. But people are doing something about it. In fact, they have for decades. 

This week, we’re going to approach this episode a little differently. As you can tell, for starters, I’m flying solo today. We’re also going to have more guests than usual. I spoke to not one, not two, but three guests in order to get a more fulsome view of the housing crisis in D.C. My first guest is a lawyer. The second is a historian. And the third is a tenant organizer. Call it the perfect trifecta. On that note, let’s get to it. 

My first guest is Amanda Korber. She is a housing attorney here in the District of Columbia. Amanda, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

AMANDA KORBER: 

I am an attorney at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia. Generally, I represent tenants who live in poverty in the District of Columbia in eviction cases before the D.C. Superior Court. The majority of eviction cases that are filed in D.C. are non-payment of rent cases; tenants who have failed to pay some amount of rent. There are also cases based on alleged lease violations. You’re being loud, you’re annoying your neighbor, you have a dog, and you shouldn’t have a dog, things like that. I also work with tenant associations across the District. We work with groups of tenants that maybe aren’t as formal as tenant associations who are trying to enforce their rights to better conditions, their rights to purchase under the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) when their landlord is trying to sell their building.