Aparna Raj Demands Housing Justice in DC

Washington, DC, has long been a laboratory for federal overreach. Despite being the nation's capital, with over seven hundred thousand residents, DC is governed without full democratic rights. In recent years, the Trump administration has treated the district as a staging ground for immigration raids and militarized policing.

Into that landscape steps Aparna Raj, a tenant organizer and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member running for the Ward 1 council seat on an unapologetic housing-justice platform. With the primary approaching on Tuesday, June 16, Raj is making the case that a socialist on the council can help transform not just policy but political possibility, building an inside-outside strategy that links tenant power, labor power, and electoral power in a city where all three have been systematically constrained.

This conversation between Daniel Denvir and Aparna Raj was recorded for the Jacobin Radio podcast The Dig.

Daniel Denvir

DSA has an endorsed a candidate for DC mayor, Councilmember Janeese Lewis George. But you are, I believe, the first DSA cadre candidate to run for office in the city. How did you get involved in the Left and specifically with DSA, and how do you think about the role of a socialist elected official as an individual relating to the chapter as an organization?

Aparna Raj

Like for a lot of other people, the 2016 election was a big wake-up call for me, and I tried to figure out where to start organizing, how to get involved locally, and I really found my political home in DSA around 2018–19, when I was struggling with my own housing issues with a really neglectful landlord. I looked around, and the only organization that I really saw organizing tenants, and doing so militantly around rent strikes, was Stomp Out Slumlords, which was the tenant organizing campaign of DSA. I started getting involved with them doing anti-eviction canvases in a building in Ward 8, which is a predominantly black, predominantly working-class ward in DC. And I started organizing a building there around a rent strike to protest inhumane living conditions. From there, I got way more involved with the chapter in general.

I supported our endorsed candidates in 2022 in DC and Maryland and helped lead the fight to raise the tipped minimum wage in DC at the time and then supported Councilmember Janeese Lewis George's reelection campaign in 2024. I became part of the steering committee in Metro DC DSA from 2022 to 2024 and, through my tenant organizing, this electoral organizing, and also being a union member and seeing DSA's solidarity with workers, I really dove into DSA, because I saw it as the biggest shot we have as democratic socialists to really fight for a better world, both at the local level and at the national level, with a lot of elected officials across the country — whether they're in city council, whether they're in Congress, whether it's Bernie Sanders.

I see this campaign as a movement. I was really inspired seeing, in New York City, the way the organization grew and built itself out during Zohran Mamdani's campaign, and how that energy and that growth is being used as part of an inside-outside strategy. That's what I am trying to build here too. We have a lot of labor unions that are supporting our campaign. DSA has obviously been incredibly supportive. If elected, I'll see myself as an organizer in office and make sure I'm still engaged with the chapter, that I'm still accountable to it, and that we're able to bring the momentum that we've been building up during this election to organize other councilmembers and fight for a bold policy to expand rent stabilization, to fund free childcare, to raise wages, to expand our social safety net, and to make it possible for people to be able to live here for the long term.

Daniel Denvir

You're running to represent Ward 1, an area that I spent a lot of time in as a 1990s DC teenager going to punk rock shows, a cultural legacy in the U Street Corridor in terms of black music and culture. It's also a neighborhood that, like much of DC, has undergone dramatic gentrification over the last few decades. What's your vision for a housing agenda, for things like rent stabilization and programs like social housing, that might allow black and Latino working-class DC to remain in the city rather than continuously be pushed out into the suburbs?

Aparna Raj

I'm proud that Ward 1 is the densest ward in DC. It's still also the most diverse ward in DC, but we are at risk of losing that. To your point, we've seen a ton of displacement already. A lot of Latino families, a lot of black families have been forced to leave Ward 1 or leave DC entirely. And as a tenant organizer, I've seen the way that many private landlords have tried to hike rents up to 20 percent or have neglected buildings to really inhumane levels — air conditioning not working in the summer, heat not working in the winter — so people have to use their ovens to stay warm, which is completely unsafe.

Social housing is my North Star for housing, moving to mixed-income housing that is publicly owned and tenant-controlled, so we take profit out of housing and make sure that our housing meets people's needs and that it reflects what people want to see, whether they want to have a pharmacy or a childcare center or something else in their buildings — making sure that we're designing housing around people's full lives.

I've seen this balance start to emerge around a lot of other leftist candidates. We do need more housing in DC. We need to end exclusionary zoning in a lot of our neighborhoods. We need more family-size housing instead of just studios and one-bedrooms. And if we're building that housing, we have to make sure that people can afford to live there. Right now our rent-stabilization laws only apply to buildings built before 1975, so as we build more housing, there are fewer who are protected, and landlords can hike their rent up as much as they want. So we have to bring rent stabilization to apply to modern multifamily buildings as well.

DC has really paved the way with a lot of tenant protections. I believe that we were the first city to have the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which allows tenants, when the landlord puts their building or house up for sale, to try to buy it and potentially form a co-op or have negotiating power to be able to demand rent concessions or fixes to their building. That right has been chipped away at in recent years, but it's something that takes property and puts it in the hands of people. I want to fight to restore that and make sure that we're providing — whether it's social housing, whether it is limited-equity co-ops — as many avenues as possible for people to have ownership over where they live, have a say, and preserve long-term affordability.

Daniel Denvir

DC is essentially a colony of the federal government. I grew up in DC and was active in the statehood movement in the late 1990s as a teenager, a time when there was a federal control board that shut down DC's public hospital. I interned for the DC Statehood Green Party. There's a whole long, complicated history of struggle. How would you use your seat on city council to fight for a free DC?

Aparna Raj

That's a great question. I really hope we see DC statehood in my lifetime, and I will fight for it.

Since the occupation started last August, we've seen a ton of volunteer efforts to protect immigrants, to make sure students get to school safely, to walk neighborhoods to see if ICE was active. But it took so long for our local elected officials to even be willing to say that we're a sanctuary city and that immigrants belong here, let alone try to work to protect immigrants or strengthen the Sanctuary Values Act. On the immediate level, my focus will be on ending our local police department's collaboration with ICE and making sure we're not undermining our own local autonomy, that we're protecting immigrants and LGBTQ folks, and that we're supporting federal workers who've been laid off and getting people through this period. And making the fight for DC statehood a national fight.

We have seen over the past two years that DC has been a testing ground for the Trump administration, and that what he starts in DC does not end with DC. If we want every community to be safe, and if we want to have a true democracy in the United States, DC cannot continue to exist, as you said, as this colony under the federal government. We have over seven hundred thousand people, predominantly black people, who are being denied voting representation and even basic funding for services because we are not a state. We have no control over our own budget. If we're going to fight for the working class across the United States, it has to happen for the residents of DC as well.