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Washington, D.C. · guides

For anyone deciding how far to trust this

What a Washington report does not tell you

The gaps, named. What the District does not publish, what we choose not to read, and where a number here stops being the whole answer.

Everything here is a public filing. Nothing in a report is inferred, scored or predicted, and where a register did not answer the report says so rather than printing a zero.

Rent control is not read

The District does regulate rents: they are controlled under the Rental Housing Act and buildings are registered with the Rental Accommodations Division. That register is not published as data we can read, so this report does not tell you whether a unit is covered, and never implies it. Do not read the absence of a rent-control line as evidence a building is exempt. The Rental Accommodations Division is the authority on that question.

The offence location is a block, not an address

The Metropolitan Police publish the hundred-block rather than the address. That is the District's own choice about how precisely to locate a crime, and it means an area count is accurate to a block rather than to a building. The feed carries no demographic column at all, which is unusual and welcome.

A 311 request is not a finding

A service request is what somebody reported. The District records it before anyone has been to look, so a count of vacant-property reports is a count of reports, not of vacant properties.

What we choose not to read

The permit feed publishes the owner's name and the applicant's. The certificate-of-occupancy feed publishes the property owner, the owner's address and who permission was granted to. None of those columns are read here, in any section, and none will be. This product describes a place, never a person.

A year that did not answer

Because each feed is split by year, a slow portal can lose one year of a ten-year window. Where that happens the report names the years it could not read, so a low count is explicable rather than mysterious.

The city line

Coverage stops at the District boundary. Arlington, Alexandria, Prince George's County and Montgomery County are different jurisdictions with their own records, and nothing here covers them.

Counts run 15 September 2026.

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