Washington, D.C.
The city hit its housing target the year the pipeline ran dry.
Supply Scorecard
How Washington, D.C. measures up
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| M1 Housing units permitted per 1,000 residents | 2.3 | 2025 |
| M2 Multifamily units permitted | 1,372 | 2025 |
| M3 Decline in total units permitted since 2022 | -79% | 2022-2025 |
| M4 Share of residential land where multifamily is allowed | 26% | 2026 |
| M5 Average days added by a zoning appeal | 450 | 2015-2025 |
| M6 Year-over-year change in average asking rent | -3.8% | Aug 2026 |
| M7 Multifamily rental units that are true market rate | 21% | 2024 |
In July 2024, Mayor Bowser announced that Washington had built 36,216 new homes since 2019. The goal had been 36,000. The city had cleared it.
The achievement was real and already over. Housing takes two to three years to get from permit to keys. The homes she celebrated were approved in 2019, 2020 and 2021, when the District was permitting five to eight thousand units a year. That had already stopped.
In 2022 the District permitted 7,705 homes. In 2025 it permitted 1,591. Apartments fared worse: 1,372 for the whole year. In January 2026, one apartment building in Washington pulled a permit. Thirty units.
Homes permitted in the District, by year. Source: U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey.
The city celebrated a pipeline that had already emptied. What opens in 2027 and 2028 is whatever cleared in 2025.
Permitting is not the problem
Ask anyone in Washington real estate what went wrong and you hear one word: permitting. The record does not support it.
The Department of Buildings assigns a reviewer within two days 93 percent of the time and finishes first review within thirty days 97 percent of the time. For a major American city that is fast.
The delay sits one floor up, in zoning.
Three quarters of the District’s residential land is zoned for single-family houses only. Apartments are allowed on 26 percent of it. Any project wanting more than the map permits has to ask permission, and asking means the Zoning Commission, the Board of Zoning Adjustment, a neighborhood commission, and across much of the city a historic review.
That process has no clock. Since 2015, opponents have filed 89 appeals against zoning decisions. Nine won. The other eighty lost and it barely mattered, because an appeal adds an average of 450 days regardless of outcome. Those appeals covered 17,219 homes.
A developer in Washington is not buying land and lumber. They are buying a lottery ticket on an approval, and they have to price the ticket.
That diagnosis is correct. It is also no longer what decides whether anything gets built.
A forty-unit building loses $4.8 million
Consider an ordinary one. Ten studios, twenty-two one-bedrooms, eight two-bedrooms, sized and priced to Washington’s own averages. The kind of building the city says it wants.
Land, construction, permits and interest come to $16.3 million.
Rented and running, it earns $607,000 a year. At the price Washington apartment buildings actually trade for, that income is worth $11.6 million.
It costs $16.3 million. It is worth $11.6 million the day it opens.
Pro Forma Calculator
40-Unit Apartment Building, Washington, D.C.
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The building
What it costs
Return on cost
3.72%
Earns3.72%
Needs6.50%
- Total development cost
- $16,328,290
- Of which, entitlement carry (land only)
- $224,000
- Of which, construction carry (avg. draw)
- $775,715
- Effective gross income
- $1,085,109
- Property tax (solved iteratively)
- $98,253
- Stabilized annual NOI
- $606,856
- Implied stabilized value
- $11,559,166
- Value minus cost to build
- -$4,769,124
Measured against what it cost, the building returns 3.7 percent a year. Developers need 6.5 percent, or the money goes somewhere safer.
That is what one permit in January looks like from the inside.
Deregulation closes a quarter of the gap
Grant the entire reform agenda at once. By-right approval. Review capped at four months. No parking minimums. Stairwell and accessibility rules fixed. The affordable set-aside dropped.
The same building goes from 3.7 percent to 4.4 percent. It needs 6.5.
Grant every reform at once and the building still does not work.
Three quarters of the shortfall sits somewhere zoning cannot reach.
The permit timeline is the smallest piece of it. Cutting review from fourteen months to four moves the return from 3.72 to 3.75 percent, because during approval a developer pays interest on land rather than on a building. Ten fewer months on a $2.4 million lot saves $160,000 against a $16 million project.
The delay still does real harm. That harm runs through risk. Lenders charge more, or refuse outright, when an approval might never come. Permitting reform is usually argued from the wrong number.
Rents fell, costs rose, and the jobs left
The average Washington apartment asks $2,446 a month, down 3.8 percent in a year. Building got roughly 4 percent more expensive over the same period. The Washington metro shed 122,300 jobs in the twelve months ending February 2026, 56,300 of them federal.
Washington spent forty years building a system to ration growth. It now has no growth to ration.
The land is worth less than nothing
Strip away every regulation and a builder still cannot pay for the lot. The price that would let this building hit its return is negative $1.5 million. A developer would have to be paid to take the site.
The market has already priced this. Through 2025 and 2026, Washington development sites came up for sale in volume as banks pushed owners to clear land loans off their books. One entitled site in the region went to foreclosure auction. Sites that do sell are being redrawn smaller and shorter.
What would actually work
Fix the zoning anyway. Not for next year’s production, but because when demand returns the District needs to be able to answer it, and because a process that adds 450 days regardless of merit is not a process. Just stop selling it as a near-term fix. It will be judged against a result it cannot deliver and abandoned when it fails to deliver it.
The strongest near-term lever is fiscal. A ten-year property tax break is worth more to this building than every zoning reform combined. Washington taxes apartments at 85 cents per $100 of value, about $98,000 a year here, taken straight out of income in a market where income is the scarce thing.
And some of this is not a housing problem. No zoning code brings back 122,300 jobs.