Homelessness advocates celebrate DC’s budget as a win

Advocates for ending homelessness in DC are celebrating the budget the DC Council passed this week, calling the investment in programs for the unhoused “historic” and “monumental.”

“This is going to be a game-changer for ending homelessness in the District,” said Jesse Rabinowitz, who works as advocacy manager for Miriam’s Kitchen and runs The Way Home, a campaign to end chronic homelessness.

The budget for Fiscal Year 2022, which passed its second vote in the DC Council Tuesday, includes thousands of housing subsidies and program slots, funded in part through federal coronavirus dollars and a tax increase on DC’s highest earners.

The Way Home estimates that the budget includes funding to help more than 3,500 households afford housing through a variety of programs. People who work in the housing space say the scale of that investment is unprecedented.

“I would say that this is the largest investment in affordable housing, and housing specifically for homeless individuals and families, possibly in history, or at least in anyone’s memory,” said Kate Coventry, a policy analyst for the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.

“Everyone who works in this space has said this is the most substantial investment they’ve seen in years,” said Brittany Ruffin, who works for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless as their affordable housing advocacy attorney.

Some of the biggest housing investments are in the Permanent Supportive Housing program. Those vouchers support people who have experienced homelessness regularly or consistently and have a disabling condition; they include both housing and case management.

Rabinowitz estimated that about 2,600 DC residents are chronically homeless. DC’s Department of Human Services put the number at 1,618 this year; Rabinowitz says that count “isn’t the most reliable,” and that his organization uses data on how many people have been assessed for Permanent Supportive Housing to estimate the full scale of chronic homelessness.

Earlier in the budget process, The Way Home Campaign asked for vouchers for 2,761 individuals and 432 families. Estimates vary a little, but all of them indicate that the FY22 budget will include more than 2,300 individual vouchers and more than 500 for families, coming very close to meeting that ask.

“These are folks who are very vulnerable, who are most likely to die without housing,” Coventry said. “So these are lifesaving interventions.”

The investment in these vouchers is vastly higher than previous years, Coventry said. In Fiscal Year 2020, for instance, DC funded 753 individual slots — Coventry said that was the highest number of slots in the past decade, but still less than half of what’s being funded this year.

Included in the overall numbers is funding for Local Rent Supplement Program vouchers, as well as vouchers set aside for specific groups like LGBTQ people, returning citizens, seniors, and domestic violence survivors.

The budget passed by the DC Council also includes a major investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund, which Mayor Muriel Bowser announced in May. That program is used to finance affordable housing construction and rehabilitation. Officials estimated in May that the total funding boost could lead to an extra 3,000 units of dedicated affordable housing.

The Council still has to pass one more piece of the budget next week before it can be sent to the mayor for signing.

Housing advocates caution that even though the FY22 budget is a major step toward ending homelessness, it’s not the end of the road.

“Even though we have substantially put a dent in the numbers, that doesn’t end homelessness,” Ruffin said. “There are still going to be people who are in need. It can’t be a one-time thing.”

Ruffin said her organization would have liked to see more funding put toward enforcement of tenant protections that allow people to get into and maintain housing, as well as enforcement of laws like the Cashless Retailers Prohibition Act that are commonly flouted (low-income people, including those experiencing homelessness, often don’t have access to cashless payment options).

Meanwhile, Rabinowitz emphasized that people who experience homelessness aren’t a static group — and preventing people from becoming unhoused also involves making sure people can benefit from programs like DC’s pandemic tenant assistance program, STAY DC, to help keep people in their homes.

Still, though there is work to be done, housing advocates are marking the FY22 budget as a rare win.

“The advocates are happy,” Coventry said. “And being an advocate, you’re rarely happy.”