Amber Harding: Will Bowser administration really terminate 913 families from housing assistance, despite a billion dollars in unexpected money?

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration appears to be ready to follow through on plans to terminate 913 formerly homeless families this year from a time-limited housing program called rapid rehousing. The Department of Human Services (DHS), which runs rapid rehousing, says it has to terminate these families because the program does not have enough money to continue providing them rental assistance. DHS has stated that it expects 90% of these families to be unable to pay their rent the next month — likely leading to eviction, displacement or homelessness. Meanwhile, the chief financial officer recently announced that DC underspent $570 million in fiscal year 2021 and has $506 million more in FY 2022 than anticipated — in other words, more than enough to keep these families stably housed.

In the face of a crisis of this magnitude, DC must both bail out the program and reform it. DC must bail out the program because 913 families will otherwise lose their housing. DC must reform the program because otherwise next year will bring another 1,000 families in crisis. 

Terminations from rapid rehousing were put on pause during the public health emergency. Despite the continuing economic and health impacts of the pandemic, the Bowser administration restarted the process of time limit terminations last July after the initial public health emergency expired. In August, the DC Council approved a budget with over 1,700 federal and local housing vouchers specifically for homeless families, in part to prevent families in rapid rehousing from falling off a benefits cliff. But legislators, and perhaps the executive branch as well, underestimated the scope of the problem.

Inadequate funding to support families in rapid rehousing until they can afford market rent is a problem entirely of the Bowser administration’s own making. Mayor Bowser requested an FY 2022 rapid rehousing budget of nearly $32.2 million, which would have served only 1,005 families — less than half the number of families in the program at the time the budget dropped. The mayor subsequently submitted a revised budget of $51.65 million, which is enough to support only 1,614 families in the program. Meanwhile, there are now 3,400 families in the program. Even with historic levels of funding for permanent housing this year, Mayor Bowser must have known that rapid rehousing was significantly underfunded. When faced with a clear choice — devote more money to fill the gap, or terminate a large number of families — Mayor Bowser has so far chosen the latter. 

It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first year the mayor has underfunded rapid rehousing. In fact, she has proposed a lower budget than the actual cost for many years. Sometimes DHS balances the budget by cutting families off of assistance before they can handle the rent on their own. Sometimes DHS balances the budget by taking money from other programs to fill the hole. Neither approach is good policy, and both approaches evade real accountability and oversight.

Beyond funding, rapid rehousing is failing to meet its own goals — at a substantial cost to taxpayers. The stated goals of the rapid rehousing program are to 1) move families quickly into housing from shelter; 2) increase family income; and 3) achieve stability in permanent housing, including past the time of assistance. 

First, we can concede that average shelter stays have gone down as the rapid rehousing program has grown — a clear improvement over the prior situation. However, landlords are extremely reluctant to rent to applicants in rapid rehousing. It may be that this goal could be reached more effectively with permanent housing subsidies.

Second, rapid rehousing is not a program that substantially increases incomes, as demonstrated by DHS in its answers to the questions posed by the DC Council’s Committee on Human Services in advance of this year’s performance oversight hearing (the section on rapid rehousing begins on Page 85 of the document). In FY 2021, the average income at entry was $867 per month. At exit, the average income was $906 — an increase of only $39 a month, or 4.5%. Only 26% of families had any increase in income. Contrast that with the amount of money DC is paying case managers to increase family income — $863 per month per family. By any standard, DC residents are getting a terrible return on their tax dollars. If DC diverted the money it pays for case management into a direct payment to families, the average incomes of families would double. 

Finally, and most critically, the overwhelming majority of families cannot maintain housing stability after the time-limited assistance ends. The average income at exit for families is $906 per month, but the average rent for a one-bedroom unit — the least expensive apartment a family is likely to live in — is $1,400. The average rent burden at exit is 289%, which means the rent is nearly three times the family’s total income. As mentioned above, DHS has stated that 90% of the families slated to exit this year cannot afford rent without additional assistance. There is no credible argument that rapid rehousing leads to long-term housing stability.

For years, DHS has tried to claim that the way to measure success in rapid rehousing is not by assessing how well the program meets the aforementioned goals, but by looking at how many families reenter shelter after being in rapid rehousing. We at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless have always said that cannot be the only goal the program sets out to achieve — because there is tremendous harm that can happen to families beyond resuming shelter stays. 

We are relieved to finally be on the same page as DHS on this core issue. As part of its performance oversight, the Committee on Human Services asked the agency (in Question 104) to identify which unstable housing outcomes, besides reentry into shelter, would be considered successful outcomes of rapid rehousing. DHS responded: “At the core of DHS’s values and mission is the well-being of families. This line of questions implies that DHS would consider any non-return to shelter a success without regard for harms that families may experience. DHS is not myopic and does not ever consider evictions, overcrowding, being subject to violence and abuse, or further instability as measures of success.”

Rapid rehousing for families is a program that manages to be both underfunded and wasteful, while harming families and failing to meet its goals. It is so broken that even historic levels of funding for permanent housing did not resolve its core, inescapable flaw: Participants cannot afford market rent at the end of an arbitrary time limit. The mayor — or DC Council — must bail out the program with some of the city’s billion-dollar surplus to prevent trauma to over 900 families, as 38 organizations have called on her to do. At the same time, the council must amend the law to prevent this from happening again, by only allowing terminations for time limits when participants are able to afford rent without further assistance. 

Amber W. Harding is a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, where she leads policy and budget advocacy. She is on the steering committee of the Fair Budget Coalition and The Way Home Campaign.

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