Harry Gural, president of the Van Ness South Tenants Association, filed his 41-page closing arguments along with 81 pages of exhibits in his eight-year legal battle against Equity Residential for overcharging him using its “rent concession” scam. Gural is requesting that the court force Equity Residential to pay him more than $150,000 penalties — three times the amount that Equity has overcharged him over this period — as required by law when the landlord overcharges a tenant in bad faith.
In response, Equity Residential filed its final arguments, restating its claim that before recent related court decisions it did not know the meaning of the word “rent.”
DC law states that in older buildings that are subject to rent stabilization, property owners may raise the rent annually by a maximum of 2% plus inflation. In order to circumvent the law, Equity Residential wrote leases with “rent” amounts that far exceeded the actual rent paid, claiming that the “rent charged” could be $1,000 or more per month higher than the rent that is actually charged.
Equity Residential had invented a new definition of the word “rent” — one that was neither in a standard English dictionary in in DC law.
Using its own definition of the word “rent” and the words “rent charged,” Equity Residential in 2016 demanded that Gural pay a rent increase of 20% ($297 per month) instead of the 3.5% ($65) allowed by law.
As president of the tenant association, Gural contacted the office of DC Attorney General Karl Racine in 2016, requesting help for other tenants who complained that Equity Residential had demanded that they pay rent increases of $1,000 or more per month. In 2022, a judge in DC Superior Court handed down a $2 million judgment against Equity Residential for deceiving and overcharging its customers at 3003 Van Ness.
However, the judgment affected only residents of 3003 Van Ness, despite the fact that Equity Residential appears to have used the same rent scam in its other six rent-stabilized properties.
Gural’s case against Equity Residential is distinct from the Attorney General’s case — he had filed the complaint before the Attorney General decided to sue Equity Residential on behalf of the residents of 3003 Van Ness.
In 2020, Gural won the main part of his case on appeal to the Rental Housing Commission (RHC), which issued a strong decision in his favor confirming that the word “rent” in DC law has its plain English meaning, i.e., the amount a person pays for the right to occupy a rental unit. The RHC sent the case back down to the Office of Administrative Hearings for a final decision on related issues, including Gural’s claim that Equity had retaliated against him for his work assisting other tenants.
Nevertheless, eight years after Gural filed his initial complaint, Equity Residential continues to claim that it could not possibly have known the meaning of the word “rent” before the 2020 RHC decision and a related case, Gabriel Fineman v. Smith Property Holdings, or before it lost the Attorney General’s case against it, District of Columbia v. Equity Residential.
While Gural’s tenant petition in the Office of Administrative Hearings against Equity Residential has been litigated over eight years, Equity Residential’s lawsuit against Gural in DC Superior Court over the same issues has been on hold. However, Equity convinced the court in 2016 to force Gural to pay $297 per month into escrow to protect the company’s interests — Gural has now paid $29,474 to date. Moreover, Equity claims that Gural owes the company more than $50,000.
The law calls for restitution to the tenant of three times the amount of the overcharge in the case of bad faith. Gural has asked the court for triple the overcharges — more than $150,000 — because Equity has continued to overcharge Gural despite several court decisions finding that it’s novel definition of the word “rent” is wrong.
In response to Equity Residential’s closing arguments, Gural submitted his final rebuttal — a short overview of the case that points out that Equity continues to object to the simple definition of the English word “rent” and the phrase “rent charged,” despite the fact that the Rental Housing Commission has ruled against Equity’s claim that a radically different definition could apply. In response to Gural’s final rebuttal, Equity filed its own rebuttal — again claiming a novel definition of the word “rent.”
Both parties await a final decision by the Chief Justice of the Office of Administrative Hearings.