Homelessness and DC’s housing shortage are part of the same conversation

Homelessness has a wide range of causes — from health issues like mental illness and drug addiction, to unemployment, reentry after incarceration, and domestic violence. But national advocates and groups convened to end homelessness all point to one key cause of homelessness: a lack of affordable housing.

A robust affordable housing stock can prevent households from falling into homelessness in the first place. Families who aren’t paying more than they can afford are less likely to get evicted, and plentiful affordable housing means if they lose their current home they can easily find another.

Housing affordability and homelessness have a direct link. Nan Roman, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, told CityLab in 2020 that while mental illness and substance disorders existed before, the major societal change that coincided with widespread modern homelessness was a rise in the cost of housing.

Research bears out that link. A 2018 Zillow study found that areas where people spend more than a third of their income on rent experience more rapid increases in homelessness.

One of those increasingly unaffordable regions is our own. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) finds that DC falls more than 20,000 units short of the housing it needs for low-income renters. That means low-income people in particular are struggling — more than half of DC’s lowest-income renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on rent, NLIHC says.

Why is housing so expensive?

The simplified answer to why housing prices are rising is a matter of supply and demand. The Washington region’s population is growing; housing construction isn’t keeping up.

A 2019 Urban Institute study found that artificially constraining housing — in other words, zoning and other regulations — has pushed up rent and housing prices across the region. That study found that by 2030 the region needs to add more than 300,000 units to keep up with population growth.

The District set its own goal in 2019 to build 36,000 units by 2025. So far, it’s hit about 45% of that total. The District’s recent Comprehensive Plan amendment was another measure intended to address the problem, by allowing for more dense construction.

Homelessness actually declined during the pandemic in Greater Washington, most likely due in part to eviction moratoriums and other tenant assistance measures.

But the pandemic also increased financial precarity. And while some housing costs took a dip during the pandemic, that dip didn’t last long. DC is currently following a national trend of spiking rents — probably a side effect of some of the disruption of the pandemic, CityLab reports. The average one bedroom apartment in DC now costs a whopping $2,210 per month, a more than 11% spike over a year ago, according to a report from Zumper.

At the end of August, more than 100,000 households across the region were behind on rent — about 14% of renters. The success of emergency rental assistance has varied, and with eviction moratoriums winding down, the future is uncertain. What is clear, however, is that if the goal is to prevent families from experiencing homelessness, our region’s housing prices are still moving in the wrong direction.