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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.

Gural appeals a second OAH decision -- calling for treble damages for overcharges in bad faith

Harry Gural has filed a second appeal with the DC Rental Housing Commission of an Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) decision in his long-running stabilization-control case against Equity Residential and Smith Property Holdings Van Ness LP.

The appeal challenges portions of an August 2024 decision by OAH. The court found that Equity had charged Gural rent increases greater than permitted under D.C. law and ordered the company to pay $46,798 in rent refunds plus $13,090 in interest, for a total of $59,888. The judge also rolled Gural’s rent back to $1,770 per month.

However, OAH declined to award treble damages and rejected Gural’s claim that Equity had retaliated against him, declining to allow the admission of extensive evidence that Equity had systematically overcharged tenants. A related case that had been brought by former DC Attorney General Karl Racine resulted in a $2 million judgment against Equity for these practices.

However, OAH declined to award treble damages and rejected Gural’s claim that Equity had retaliated against him. During the proceedings, the court also excluded several exhibits that Gural contended showed that Equity had systematically used similar rent-concession practices to overcharge other tenants.

A related enforcement case brought by the office of former D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine resulted in substantial penalties against Equity for its rent-concession practices, including $1 million in restitution for residents of 3003 Van Ness. Gural been the whistleblower for the Attorney General’s case regarding Equity’s rent practices and he assisted dozens of other residents in challenging their rent increases.

In his appeal, Gural asks the Commission to consider that continuing conduct in deciding whether the overcharges were made in bad faith. He argues that it is implausible that a $25 billion rental housing company would not know the most basic District laws regarding rental housing, and that furthermore, even a landlord that might initially have claimed uncertainty about the law could no longer make that claim after the Rental Housing Commission ruled against its interpretation. Therefore, when Equity continued to overcharge Gural after losing several legal decisions, it was doing so deliberately in bad faith.

Gural also appeals OAH’s rejection of his retaliation claim. As president of the Van Ness South Tenants Association, Gural had been helping other tenants challenge Equity’s rent increases when the company sued him for eviction over approximately $300 in disputed rent. Under D.C. law, Gural argues, his tenant advocacy triggered a presumption of retaliation that Equity was required to rebut with clear and convincing evidence.

The appeal also challenges OAH’s refusal to include thousands of dollars in late fees and related charges that Equity added to Gural’s account while the rent dispute remained unresolved.

This is Gural’s second appeal to the Rental Housing Commission in the case. In 2020, the Commission reversed important portions of an earlier OAH decision, also by Chief Administrative Law Judge M. Colleen Currie. Gural rejects Equity’s position that annual rent increases could be calculated using a higher, pre-concession rent rather than the rent actually charged to the tenant, and remanding additional issues for further proceedings.

By approximately 2019, Equity appears to have stopped using the same rent-concession method to calculate rent increases for other residents of 3003 Van Ness. That followed the Rental Housing Commission’s Fineman decision, enforcement litigation by the D.C. Attorney General, and enactment by the D.C. Council of the Rent Charged Definition Clarification Act.

Nevertheless, Equity continued to demand substantially higher rent from tenant association president Harry Gural. By the time of the OAH proceedings, the disputed rent demands had accumulated into tens of thousands of dollars.

Court rejects Equity Residential's motion against Gural

The Chief Administrative Justice of the Office of Administrative Hearings today issued a strong opinion denying Equity Residential’s Motion for Summary Judgment in the case of Harry Gural vs. Equity Residential / Smith Property Holdings Van Ness LP.

The court affirmed the decision of the Rental Housing Commission (RHC), the appellate body which decides rental housing issues. The RHC had ruled in favor of Gural is his case against Equity Residential, finding that maximum annual rent increases must be based on the rent actually paid by the tenant — not the extremely high, fictitious amounts that Equity Residential had routinely been inserting into leases.

Today’s hearing by OAH indicates that Equity Residential is unlikely to prevail in its case against Gural in the Landlord and Tenant Branch of DC Superior Court, in which Equity claimed that Gural had not paid his rent in full because he refused to pay a rent increase that was greater than what is allowed under DC law. Gural has been forced to pay approximately $297 per month since 2016 into court escrow because of Equity’s claim, now proven false, that he had failed to pay his rent in full — approximately $24,000 to date.