DC’s housing crisis is about more than just how much housing to build—but where it goes as well

In order to reach Mayor Muriel Bowser’s goal of 36,000 new units of housing built by 2025, the District relies on several different agencies to work in tandem to achieve that number. One of those agencies, the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) is charged with “producing and preserving opportunities for affordable housing and economic development” in DC. This can be done with the creation and/or preservation of affordable housing, bolstering homeownership opportunities, and revitalizing neighborhoods.

The DC Council holds performance oversight hearings yearly on agencies including DHCD. Organizations and members of the public have the opportunity to testify in front of the council committees responsible for overseeing the work of the city’s administrative departments. Oversight season is the opportunity to comment on what agencies are doing well, doing poorly, or should be doing instead.

The Committee on Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization, which is chaired by at-large Councilmember Anita Bonds, held the oversight hearing for the DHCD on January 28. Here’s what I had to say.

GGWash applauds DHCD’s commitment to Mayor Bowser’s goal of 36,000 new units of housing built in DC by 2025. We are highly supportive of “#36Kx2025,” and agree with the Mayor that 12,000 of those units, at least, should be affordable; advocacy that furthers this is a major goal of GGWash’s housing program, which I run. We believe DHCD is the agency most critical to ensuring that a third of these new units are affordable, and we’ve been glad to see DHCD and Director Donaldson embrace this initiative. Still, there’s a lot to do to ensure that it actually happens.

We would like to see the Housing Production Trust Fund fully oriented toward meeting, or exceeding, the goal of 12,000 new affordable units. DC has the most robust housing trust fund in the country, and we are proud to work in a city that has demonstrated such a thorough commitment to affordable housing in its budget. But, given the scale of the crisis, the council should increase the HPTF’s allowance in the 2021 budget. The mayor has suggested that “we could be doing at least $250 [million]” with HPTF. We agree that seems like a fine minimum at which the HPTF should be funded.

As you know, the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Planning and Economic Development, the DC Housing Authority, and DHCD each touch housing production in the District. Given DMPED’s wide scope on citywide economic development, and DCHA’s essentiality to vulnerable residents and transformation plan for its aging properties, DHCD’s role in creating affordable housing, particularly through the HPTF, is more important now than ever. DHCD should be funding and managing production of housing for those who earn 30 to 50 percent of the area median income.

Further, HPTF funding should be more efficiently allocated. We should heed the findings of the May 2019 auditor’s report, which showed that DHCD awarded HPTF dollars to lower-scoring projects that proposed to provide fewer units of affordable housing. There may be good reasons, from time to time, to go against an agency’s ranking system for funding allocation. Maybe the ranking system itself is flawed, and needs to better account for the realities of developing affordable housing. But the lack of available affordable housing—which DHCD has direct control over—is dire, and there is no justification for flaunting scoring when the result is fewer affordable units built, if affordable-housing production is the goal. We hope that the Council will continue to carefully scrutinize how DHCD is spending HPTF dollars.

Lastly, we would like to see a stated commitment to affirmatively furthering fair housing principles from DHCD. AFFH is a federal rule that advances the goals of the Fair Housing Act by requiring that the US and its municipalities take “meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics.”

In 2019, GGWash submitted comments during the agency’s outreach process for its analysis of impediments to fair housing. We said then:

The current presidential administration isactively rolling back civil-rights regulations generally andrefusing to investigate housing discrimination specifically. It is more important than ever that DHCD, alongside the mayor’s office and Office of Planning, dedicate their efforts and staff time to funding, preserving, and creating better, stronger policy around affordable housing, special-needs housing, homelessness, homeownership, and community development and public service activities, whether those policies and programs are locally or federally funded. And it is critical that this work is conducted fairly and in a fashion that accounts, and redresses, systemic discrimination and denial of access particular to D.C.Without a federal commitment to affirmatively furthering fair housing, only DHCD can ensure housing is in D.C. assessed to address patterns of integration and segregation, racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty; disparities in access to opportunity; and disproportionate housing needs.

…But an issue larger than the city’s budget, and thus an issue that budgets cannot address alone, is where housing is built, or where people can afford to live. Regardless of the rate at which housing and homelessness programs are funded, and regardless of whether that funding is local or federal, the city will be complicit in furthering the place-based inequities—longer commute times, worse access to amenities and services—that its poorer residents, and residents of color, already face if programs and developments are confined to only certain parts of the District. DHCD should ensure, by complying with the Fair Housing Act and the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, that any production of housing, or the distribution of resources devoted to bringing housing within greater reach of people, is not constrained by particular geographies.

We stand by this comment, and have asked for a similar commitment from Office of Planning in its amendments to the Comprehensive Plan. Increasing the density of the city’s affluent neighborhoods, where affordable-housing production has historically been scant, is achievable through changes to the Future Land Use Map, which we have supported, and is essential to keeping the District’s distribution of affordable housing in line with AFFH principles.

GGWash believes that the District should produce more housing, preserve existing housing, and protect residents, whether they’ve spent their lives here or just arrived. A well-functioning Department of Housing and Community Development and a Housing Production Trust Fund that contains enough money to develop the new affordable housing that we need is essential to each one of these actions. We would like to see DHCD execute the mayor’s vision for more housing, and more affordable housing, in a transparent, honest, efficient, thoughtful, and fair manner.