More than 900 families that receive temporary rental assistance through a DC program will soon lose that help—putting them at risk of ending up back in shelters or on the streets.
Intended to help families with children that are transitioning from homelessness to stable housing, the District’s Family Rehousing Stabilization Program requires participants to pay a percentage of their monthly income toward rent while DC subsidizes the rest. After 12-18 months, participants are expected to pay the full amount.
According to the DC Department of Human Services, 954 families in the program are expected to have their subsidies end in the coming weeks after their time in the program comes to a close. At that point, families can permanently take over their leases or look for other programs that may accommodate them.
The problem, says Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless executive director Amber Harding, is that very few families that leave the program are able to afford their leases, making them likely to face eviction and a return to homelessness.
DHS Director Laura Zeilinger and Councilmember At-Large Robert White both say that the area’s lack of affordable housing contributes to the issue. “Some of these families have multiple jobs but because of the extreme cost of housing in DC, a lot of them cannot take over their leases resulting in terminations,” White says. “That will send them back to the streets, to shelters, to couchsurfing.”
Exhausted funds
Created in 2008, the program was intended to be a stopgap solution for families exiting homelessness. Participants are expected to pay 30-60 percent of their monthly gross income toward housing, and exit after 12-18 months once they can sustain themselves.
During the pandemic, however, DHS stopped exiting families from the program—instead offering extensions to families that still needed help.
As a result, Zeilinger says, the number of families in the program at any given time expanded from around 1,000 to as many as 3,500.
“The program continued to grow as we were not exiting people, but the budget did not grow in a corresponding way,” she says.
To fund the extensions, DC reallocated funds from within DHS’s budget as well as from other agencies. According to Zeilinger, that money is now exhausted. Moreover, DHS estimates that 1,581 new families will enter the program later this year.
“We can only adhere to the 12-month limit going forward,” she says. “We won’t be able to extend families as we had during the pandemic.”
Voucher shortfall
In late August, DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson asked Mayor Muriel Bowser to halt the pending exits of the 954 families from the program until DHS and the DC Housing Authority could match those families with existing federal housing vouchers or with 451 new housing vouchers the Council planned to fund with money from the DC Housing Authority’s budget in fiscal year 2025.
“Exiting these families from rapid rehousing before they have been matched with a voucher will only harm the families and the housing providers, as families will undoubtedly fall behind on rent and housing providers may commence eviction proceedings,” Mendelson wrote in a letter.
In September, however, Zeilinger informed Mendelson that more than $7 million of the money that the Council planned to spend on the 451 vouchers already had been allocated to help other families in separate programs—leaving DCHA only able to provide 38 vouchers.
“While the intention of the council was to fund more vouchers for rapid rehousing participants, that didn’t happen because the resources that were meant to be used were already obligated,” Zeilinger told Washingtonian.
Council members say they should have been warned sooner about the funding shortfall.
“I’m angry that a real solution is being thwarted,” White says, referring to the plan to create 451 new vouchers. “The bigger feeling is one of sadness because to get into rapid re-housing, you have to be a family which means there are kids involved.”
DHS says it continues to work with the families to complete housing voucher applications and plan their exits with their assigned case managers.
The bigger picture
Is the rapid rehousing program working as intended? It depends who you ask. According to DHS, the program has a success rate of 85 percent, because less than 15 percent of families exiting the program enter the shelter system.
However, DC does not track what happens to families that exit the program but don’t enter shelters. A 2017 report from Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless said that DHS’s success rate was “illusory” because less than 1 percent of exiting families can afford market rent.
In May and June of this year, 1044 families whose assistance already had been extended beyond the 18-month mark received that their subsidies would end within 60 days. What has happened to them since is unclear.
White says that in order to exit the program successfully, families have to be able to earn enough money to pay rent. That can be challenging in Washington, where rent is higher than in many parts of the US.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, someone who earns minimum wage needs to work 79 hours a week to rent a modest one-bedroom home at DC market prices; a two-bedroom home would require 90 work hours a week.
“There is a narrow field of people that the program would be perfect for,” White says. “This is not a program suitable for the vast majority of the families.”
