Presumptive D.C. mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George will come into office next year with a slate of policy priorities aimed at protecting tenants and stabilizing rent.

But she hasn’t yet offered specifics on how exactly she would accomplish those goals or what her preferred end result would look like.

Lewis George’s senior advisers told Bisnow that all options are on the table while cautioning that linking her to any specific policies — like a proposed rent freeze, for instance — would be inaccurate.

“All the tools will be in the toolbox,” said Tommy Wells, a housing policy adviser for Lewis George. “We’re not leaving anything out to look at.”

Her transition to mayor comes amid a national housing crisis that has put rent control policies and ballot initiatives in the spotlight. A proposed ballot initiative in D.C. that would freeze rent for two years is tied up in an ongoing legal challenge.

Investors are already wary of investing in the nation’s capital, which lost 24,000 federal jobs alone between January 2025 and 2026 after the Trump administration made massive cuts to the workforce. Expanding rent control would dissuade investment further, real estate developers say.

“I would tell anyone that expanding rent control, as we’ve done in the past, is a death knell to production,” said Richard Lake, founding principal of Roadside Development. “You can’t have expansion of rent control or a rent freeze or any of these other policies, and you still want to grow. It will not happen.”

Lewis George is one of a small wave of politicians aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America platform to win elections. At least one of those victories has already resulted in a rent freeze.

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