Rental Housing Commission reverses key rulings in case against Equity Residential

The D.C. Rental Housing Commission has issued a major new decision in Harry Gural v. Equity Residential Management / Smith Property Holdings Van Ness LP, reversing key portions of a lower-court ruling involving illegal rent increases and alleged retaliation against the president of the Van Ness South Tenants Association.

The Commission ruled that the Office of Administrative Hearings improperly limited its consideration of whether Equity Residential acted in bad faith when it continued to demand illegal rent increases from Gural for years after the Rental Housing Commission had rejected the company’s interpretation of D.C. rent-control law.

The Commission noted that its 2018 Fineman decision involved another tenant at the same building with essentially the same lease provisions. It also ruled against Equity on the same rent issue in Gural’s case in 2020. The Commission found that after those decisions, Equity could no longer claim that it did not know that rent increases could not be calculated using the higher, pre-concession “rent.”

Gural challenged the OAH ruling in his May 9, 2025, Tenant Appeal to the Rental Housing Commission, arguing that Equity’s continued rent demands after adverse RHC decisions demonstrated bad faith and that Equity had failed to rebut the statutory presumption of retaliation. In his June 24, 2025 Tenant’s Reply to Equity Residential’s Responsive Brief, Gural emphasized that the strongest evidence of bad faith was Equity’s continued overcharging after its interpretation of the law had been rejected, and that Equity had produced no evidence that it routinely filed eviction cases over amounts as small as the approximately $300 at issue here.

The case has been sent back to the Office of Administrative Hearings to determine whether Equity’s continued demands for the illegal rent constituted bad faith and therefore require treble damages. OAH previously awarded Gural $46,798 in rent refunds plus $13,090 in interest, but declined to treble the award.

The Commission also reversed OAH on Gural’s retaliation claim. Gural alleged that Equity sued to evict him in 2016 over approximately $300 in disputed rent after he had spent months challenging the company’s rent practices on behalf of himself and other residents.

D.C. law created a presumption that Equity’s action was retaliatory because of Gural’s protected tenant advocacy. The Commission found that OAH improperly placed an evidentiary burden on Gural instead of requiring Equity to rebut that presumption with “clear and convincing evidence.”

The Commission also found that there was no substantial evidence that Equity had a consistently applied policy of filing eviction cases over such small amounts. The Equity property manager who testified could not recall another case in which the company had sought to evict a tenant for $300 or less. The Commission observed that the evidence was “suggestive that Tenant was in fact singled out for eviction over a low amount of back rent.”

The Commission therefore reversed OAH’s ruling on the eviction claim and sent the case back to determine whether the retaliation was willful and should result in a civil penalty.

For the second time in this case, the Rental Housing Commission has reversed key rulings by OAH Chief Administrative Law Judge M. Colleen Currie. The Commission first reversed and remanded major portions of Judge Currie’s decision in 2020. In its September 25, 2026 decision, it again found legal and evidentiary errors in her rulings, this time involving bad-faith rent overcharges and Equity Residential’s eviction case against Gural.