Amber W. Harding: Council must stop displacement of over 2,000 families from housing
Once again, DC residents are about to be terminated from housing support merely for hitting an arbitrary time limit, regardless of their individual circumstances or needs. But this time, the number of families affected is unprecedented. With little warning, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration has begun terminating over 2,000 families from rapid rehousing — about half the families in the program. This mass displacement will cause significant trauma to the families themselves, and the impact will reverberate throughout our community.
This might all seem disturbingly familiar. In 2022, the Bowser administration proposed terminating almost 1,000 families to “rightsize” the program. We at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, along with many partners and allies, advocated for families to exit the program only when they could afford market rent or had been transitioned to a more appropriate housing program. As a result, DC Council Chair Phil Mendelson introduced legislation to reform rapid rehousing, stating: “The goal with our homeless services is that we either get people placed into subsidized housing or we get them back on their feet. But not that we perpetuate a cycle of homelessness. And rapid rehousing, basically as it’s been used, is part of the cycle.” Pressure from the public and legislators, along with the council’s funding of more permanent housing subsidies that year, combined to persuade the Department of Human Services (DHS) to withdraw the remaining notices of termination. Unfortunately, the reprieve was temporary and the council has not yet passed and funded the bill that would permanently reform the program — which has continued to grow and is now at a historically high level.
The mayor had a choice when faced with the growing numbers of families in rapid rehousing. She could have admitted what we all know — that the gap between people’s income and market rent is just too high in DC to bridge with a time-limited program. She could have invested more in permanent housing subsidies and transitioned the majority of families out of rapid rehousing into long-term assistance. She could have been more strategic about which and how many families were placed in the program.
But she didn’t choose to manage the growth of rapid rehousing in a responsible or humane way. She continued to add hundreds of families a year into the program, ballooning its cost while failing to fund any real off-ramp. Then she chose the most harmful way to “rightsize” the program: a strict 12-month time limit with no possible extensions for any reason at all.
What’s the result? It’s 2,000 families thrown into chaos over three months. It’s 2,000 families unable to pay their rent. It’s 2,000 families unable to access the eviction prevention program that Mayor Bowser continues to underfund and undermine, even as she actively drives the need up to a historic level by terminating rental support for these families. It’s 2,000 families evicted, many of them forced to return to shelter, but also to abusers, to abandoned buildings, to tents — because DC doesn’t have even 200 open shelter beds for families, much less 2,000. It’s 2,000 families who will see their kids suffer, their grades and attendance in school decline, their mental and physical health worsen. For those relatively few families who make it into shelter, they will be placed back in rapid rehousing, and the cycle will repeat.
All of that is just this year’s round of exits. There is no end in sight for the cruelty of this program. Rapid rehousing is the most expensive, most harmful, and worst-performing housing program in the District. Next year will bring more exits because the only plan the mayor has to stay within the budget for rapid rehousing is to terminate participants.
The reality is that structurally created poverty and DC’s systemic lack of affordable housing make it impossible for most families placed in rapid rehousing to grow their income enough to afford market rent in only 12 months; DHS’s own recent data shows that less than 1% of families in the program can afford market rent at exit. Terminating families for reaching a time limit when the agency knows the program has done little if anything to help participants afford market rent is unfair and unjust, and it will lead to disproportionate harm to low-income Black families, who make up 97% of the participants in the program.
Instead of providing a systemic solution to a systemic problem, DC has put the burden of poor planning and poor program performance entirely on low-income, struggling families, causing repeated trauma and harm to DC residents who just want a safe, stable home. Stand with us to demand that the DC Council intervene to stop this unprecedented, inhumane mass displacement by funding the permanent housing programs that these families need and by passing the Rapid Re-housing Reform Amendment Act.
Amber W. Harding is executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.
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I work in a Rapid Rehousing program and have the hard job of going to my clients who have been in the program for over a year and tell them that the subsidy they rely on to assure they have a safe and secure home is going away. We notified our first round of clients on April 17 that they will be transitioned on May 31. My colleagues and I have been scrambling to see what it is that we can do to reduce the number of clients that will return to homelessness but all resources in the city are stretched thin and options are few. I did not sign up to throw people out in the street, and while I know we can’t house these clients forever there has to be a better way to serve our residents then to do this.