D.C. residents have complained for years that the city doesn’t do enough to crack down on dangerous residential construction projects that damage their properties, leave them on the hook for damage and can even lead to building collapses that, in one case, killed a construction worker.
On the back of those concerns, the Office of the D.C. Auditor launched a probe into the city’s Department of Buildings last year. The audit reviewed eight properties — one from each ward — drawn from a pool of 57 that advisory neighborhood commissioners had flagged as being possible examples of dangerous construction.
The resulting report, released last month, found the DOB has failed to adequately audit the third-party inspectors it contracts with, doesn’t always notify neighbors of adjoining construction projects and doesn’t always collect the required paperwork before issuing permits.
“That is a clear issue,” D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson told The Washington Sun, particularly as D.C. looks to ramp up its housing production.
Trending
The DOB issued 63,675 permits in fiscal year 2025, up 23% since fiscal year 2023. That figure will only grow, as Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George has ambitious plans to build 72,000 new homes here in the next five years.
“The District’s robust construction activity has resulted in a heavy and growing workload at DOB and increased reliance on private third-party agency inspections,” the audit reads. “As a result, DOB management of its responsibility for plan review and permit issuance, inspections, and third-party oversight to safeguard residents, workers, and visitors has become more difficult.”
About 3 in 5 construction inspections in the 2025 fiscal year were done by third-party inspectors, and among the eight properties reviewed, the DOB performed required annual audits of third-party inspectors only 14% of the time, the audit found.
That has allowed bad actors to “run rampant” in D.C., said Andy Steele, president of construction firm Steele Foundation.
“It’s too easy to game the system, and everybody knows it. It’s a running joke,” said Steele, a Virginia resident who added that he wouldn’t feel safe buying property in D.C.
Homeowners say the lack of enforcement means that in dense D.C. neighborhoods, particularly those with rowhomes, adjacent buildings are being affected by unpermitted or dangerous construction work without prior notice or sufficient review.
“DOB allows people with zero construction expertise to apply to undertake inherently dangerous structural work, trusts their ‘professional judgment,’ and limits its review to code alignment,” said Meg Roggensack, a former ANC in Dupont Circle. “That approach has encouraged corner cutting and risk taking and is failing the ultimate homebuyers, the adjacent property owners and the workers putting their lives at risk on these projects.”
In its response to the audit, the DOB took issue with its non-random sample.
“Even before the audit began in earnest, it seems that a pre-ordained judgment was being baked into the ‘judgmental sample’ selection process,” DOB Director Brian Hanlon wrote.
Nevertheless, the agency agreed to take most of the audit’s recommendations on board, including ensuring that property owners requesting a general contractor exemption are doing so for their primary residence, and that pre-construction meetings are held and approved by the DOB before any work begins.
It did push back on the audit’s recommendation that it should create permit review checklists that include all building code requirements, arguing that’s not feasible.
“The entirety of the Construction Codes comprises hundreds of pages and thousands of provisions. Stacked up, the code books measure over a foot and a half tall,” the agency wrote in response. It did say it would increase consistency across plan reviews.
Now that the audit is in, homeowners want to see action.
“It starts with DOB requiring that licensed general contractors submit any permit request for proposed structural work, and that the application include a site-specific assessment, and a design appropriate to those site-specific conditions,” Roggensack said.
A 2024 bill to establish licensing requirements for residential and commercial contractors was passed by the D.C. Council but remains unimplemented due to a lack of funding.
Steele said he thinks the council should intervene on the back of the audit, clear house at the DOB and bring in experts from neighboring Montgomery and Fairfax counties — where he thinks the process works better — to consult on how to rebuild D.C.’s permitting process.
“It’s up to them to protect the neighbors, because the current system doesn’t do that,” he said.
Author
