On Tuesday, December 5, the DC Council passed the Homeless Services Reform Amendment Act of 2017, with a vote of 10-2. Only Councilmembers Trayon White and David Grosso voted no. (Brandon Todd was absent.) Because the bill is subject to appropriations and has to go through Congressional review, it probably won’t take effect until next fall. The Legal Clinic is among dozens of organizations and community leaders that opposed this bill  because it erodes the safety net for people experiencing homelessness and does nothing to improve services or end homelessness. We view what happened last week as a net loss for District residents…those residents who may need to turn to the shelter system for assistance, and all of us who believe in a more just community. In addition to failing to advance the fight against homelessness, this bill is not cost saving – in fact the Office of the Chief Financial Officer of the District says it will cost DC taxpayers money to implement this legislation.

The bill that Mayor Bowser proposed in May 2017 would have resulted in a catastrophic deprivation of basic constitutional rights and access to lifesaving services. Thanks to a lot of hard work from some Council staff and members, the bill that was passed on December 5^th is much improved from that version. However, it is not legislation that will improve the lives of those experiencing homelessness in the District. At the end of the day, the majority of DC Council chose to stand with the Mayor, and not people experiencing homelessness. In the midst of DC’s affordable housing crisis, the majority of the DC Council chose to limit access to emergency shelter. They bought into the Mayor’s harmful narrative perpetuating the myth that significant numbers of families fake homelessness and/or DC residency in order to get into DC General – the same facility the Mayor has been telling us for years is so decrepit and inhumane that it must be shut down. They claimed scarcity of resources required the hardening of their hearts toward displaced DC residents, while once again approving a $36 million gift of taxpayer money to an out-of-town developer – to build a parking lot.

The Final Vote: Details and Our Take

Last week we put out a list of ten fixes needed in the bill. Here’s how our top concerns were impacted by final amendments:

1. End the Rapid Re-housing cliff. No arbitrary time limits.

Brianne Nadeau introduced an amendment stating that a client cannot be exited from the rapid re-housing program for a time limit unless “the client was assigned to the provider for substantially all of the client’s time in the housing program.” This is fine—clients should not be terminated when they haven’t even been assigned to a service provider. But getting assigned to a service provider doesn’t mean that participants are getting the services they’ve been promised. If clients have been “assigned” to a provider but perhaps not an actual case manager, or have had poor or inadequate services from that provider, they can still be terminated from rapid re-housing based on a time limit. Advocates from multiple organizations reached out to Nadeau prior to the vote to suggest some language tweaks to make this a meaningful reform, but she rejected any changes. The amendment passed unanimously.

Trayon White introduced an amendment to allow a six month extension of rapid re-housing assistance for families who have not received quality services, have not been referred to other appropriate housing programs, or are likely to become homeless upon exit from the program. If you remember, this amendment almost passed at first vote, only failing when Anita Bonds changed her vote at the last minute. Then she issued a statement asserting that she had voted no just to give Councilmember Nadeau time to work on the fiscal impact, and that she looked forward to working with Trayon White on the amendment. By the second vote on Tuesday, the cost had been calculated, and it was a little over $2 million per year to extend families in those circumstances. Nevertheless, Anita Bonds, and five of her colleagues, including Brianne Nadeau, voted no and the amendment failed.

Where do we go from here on rapid re-housing? First, Brianne Nadeau and the Committee on Human Services will hold a public roundtable on Thursday, December 14, at 11AM in Room 500 of the Wilson building (1350 Pennsylvania Ave NW). You can sign up to testify by the end of next Tuesday by emailing humanservices@dccouncil.us or calling (202) 724-8170. Second, contact your Councilmembers. Tell them what you think of their votes. Tell them that they need to make this roundtable more than an empty political exercise: they need to do real oversight of the program and craft legislative fixes to protect families from being harmed by arbitrary time limits. If they don’t, then they must transition funding away from rapid re-housing and into more permanent solutions that are proven to be more effective and humane.

1. Allow DC residents to provide evidence of DC residency that isn’t on an exclusive list.

In response to community concerns that the “catch-all” for documentation of residency was too restrictive and would exclude many actual DC residents, Brianne Nadeau introduced an amendment that removed the requirement that each acceptable document be in regulations. That solved one problem, but potentially creates several more. The language of her proposed catch-all reads: “Any other document the Department identifies as acceptable proof of residency.” We asked her to modify her amendment to “Any other document the Department identifies as acceptable proof of residency or that is determined to be credible evidence of residency.” This would create a neutral, administrable standard that should allow people who are legitimately DC residents to prove that they are, but would not allow in non-DC residents. She rejected this suggestion. Her amendment passed unanimously.

1. Don’t leave families out in the cold because they can’t prove returning to housing is “impossible.”

Robert White introduced an amendment to change this language to “the individual or family cannot safely inhabit the housing associated with the lease or occupancy agreement.” The amendment passed unanimously. This was an important change. We had also recommended clarifying that credible evidence includes a credible oral statement, to be consistent with the federal HEARTH Act. That recommendation did not go through.

1. Don’t give the Mayor power to “re-determine eligibility” without adequate protections.

In response to community concerns that clients can be terminated from shelter or housing for an absence of more than 4 days, no matter the reason, Robert White introduced an amendment that limited such terminations to “an absence of more than 4 consecutive days without good cause, according to a standard established by the Mayor.” This amendment passed unanimously. No other changes were made to the “re-determining eligibility” sections.

1. Don’t allow the Mayor to emergency transfer people unless it is clear what the violation is so the client can prevent the violation from happening.

No changes.

1. Ensure that families with kids with disabilities can qualify for permanent supportive housing if they need intensive case management services to stay in housing.

No changes. These families will be ineligible for permanent supportive housing.

1. Ensure that people exiting hospitals, jails, or other institutions after more than 180 days are still eligible for shelter or permanent supportive housing if they’re homeless.

Mary Cheh and Charles Allen introduced an amendment to strike the “180 days” restriction in the chronically homeless definition. It passed unanimously. They did not remove the 180 day restriction in the definition of homelessness, which creates a strange inconsistency in the bill, but perhaps that can be fixed in a technical amendment.

1. Ensure that people getting in-patient treatment or going to jail retain their right to return to permanent supportive housing.

No changes.

1. Don’t expand the power to do emergency terminations when there is no immediate threat.

No changes.

1. Add real solutions to homelessness.

No changes.

In addition to our top priorities, there were two other amendments that fixed problems with the bill that we had identified. First, Brianne Nadeau introduced an amendment to clarify that, in medical respite beds, medical decisions are exempt from due process protections in the HSRA but non-medical adverse actions are not, and must be done in consultation with the medical provider. That amendment passed unanimously. Second, Mary Cheh and Charles Allen introduced an amendment to clarify that the time to appeal is not tolled until someone who is hospitalized gets actual notice of the adverse action. It also passed unanimously.

What Happens Next?

First, we thank Trayon White and David Grosso and their staff for working hard to fix the bill and for voting no when they couldn’t get it all the way there. We thank Robert White and his staff for working hard to improve this bill right up until the end and supporting the rapid re-housing amendment. We thank Kenyan McDuffie, Elissa Silverman, and Vince Gray for supporting Trayon White’s rapid re-housing amendment. We thank Mary Cheh and Charles Allen for moving two good amendments. Finally, we thank Brianne Nadeau for the improvements that she made in the bill. While we’re disappointed that she remained standing with the Bowser administration on some key issues and disagree with her conclusion that this bill “will ultimately protect the District’s right to shelter,” we are hopeful that Councilmember Nadeau will follow through on her acknowledgement that the Council’s work is not yet done…that further reform of DC’s homeless services is needed, even if not through the HSRA. Even more importantly, we hope that she will be a strong ally during budget season as we advocate for more funding for truly affordable housing, which is the only real solution to the crisis of homelessness here in the nation’s capital.

We tell all of the Council, other than Trayon White and David Grosso, that we expect more from them, that we need them to go beyond rhetoric and stand alongside people who are homeless—and that we’re paying close attention to their votes and their actions.

After processing and holding our elected officials accountable, we turn to the rapid re-housing roundtable and to advocating for the affordable housing that we all agree is necessary to end homelessness and to limit the impact of arbitrary time limits in rapid re-housing. We at the Legal Clinic, along with many of our partners, will also be advocating for regulations and policies that clarify some vague or concerning aspects of the new law as well as exploring litigation strategies to protect our clients’ rights.

Thank you to the hundreds who called, emailed, and visited your elected leaders. Thank you to all 46 organizations  and community leaders who signed the letter asking the Council to vote no. Thank you to our closest partners and co-strategists for all of your time and energy and work over the last year and a half, in particular: ACLU of DC, Bread for the City, Children’s Law Center, DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Fair Budget Coalition, Good Faith Communities, Legal Aid Society, and Neighborhood Legal Services Program. Without all of you we would be preparing for a much more catastrophic erosion of the rights and safety of people experiencing homelessness.

“Move into housing you can’t afford now and are unlikely to afford in 12 months. And then the inevitable happens, and you are homeless again. This is not moral and it is not humane.”

Rev. John Graham, Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Georgetown, President of the Board of Good Faith Communities Coalition

 

In May, the Legal Clinic released a report on the District’s rapid re-housing program for homeless families called “Set Up to Fail” (several publications wrote about the report, including The Economist, Washington Post, and Washington City Paper). In June, at least 17 families submitted testimony to the DC Council describing their experiences in rapid re-housing. The report and families’ testimonies highlight strikingly similar flaws with the family rapid re-housing program, including:

• Unsafe housing conditions – “My daughter was bit by a rodent inside my apartment, so we had to have an emergency transfer to another apartment. . . . My electricity doesn’t work properly and I don’t have a light in every room of [my current] apartment. I bathe my children in the dark because the lights don’t work.”  B.
• Paying too much for rent – “I only receive TANF and I need to pay utilities. I have no money to get on the bus to look for a job.  It’s like I am homeless but in an apartment.”  C.
• Unhelpful case managers – “[My case manager] would come monthly to check off the budget form and look at my rent receipts, but not much more than that.” R.
• Unable to afford the rent after the program ends – “Life is a daily struggle now. I don’t know where my housing is going to come from. . . . The only thing they have told me is that I can take my family back to the shelter.”  M.

At this point, the problems with the District’s family rapid re-housing program are well-established. Unfortunately, the Department of Human Services (DHS) has shown little interest in reforming the program, despite the Bowser Administration’s oft-stated goal of ending homelessness by helping families maintain safe, stable housing. Instead, the Administration has proposed a bill, now pending before the DC Council Committee on Human Services, that reinforces the features of the program that have left so many families at risk of cycling back into homelessness, including:

• Formalizing the current unlawful practice of terminating families’ rental subsidies based on arbitrary time limits;
• Degrading families’ current due process rights by making time limit terminations appealable only to the Director of DHS instead of an impartial body like the Office of Administrative Hearings; and
• Making the rules for the program even less available to the public by allowing those rules to be in contracts rather than regulations.

The DC Council now has an opportunity to reform rapid re-housing legislatively to ensure that the more than 1,300 families in program are not set up to fail. The changes to the law that are described below – which were jointly proposed by Bread for the City, DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Children’s Law Center, Fair Budget Coalition, Legal Aid Society of DC, Neighborhood Legal Services Program, and the Legal Clinic – would help to increase the housing stability of families in rapid re-housing.  

1. Ensure that families have safe housing

The Council should add legal protections for families to make sure that they are not trapped in apartments with terrible conditions or safety risks. We recommend requiring Housing Quality Inspections of units prior to families moving in, allowing families to withhold rent if the landlord does not fix housing code violations, and helping families to quickly relocate when the health or safety of a household member is at risk.

1. Increase stability during the program

The Council should help families maintain stable housing while they are participating in rapid re-housing. We recommend requiring that families pay no more than 30% of their income towards their housing costs – the standard, nation-wide measure of affordability. The current rules, which require families to pay as much as 60% of their income towards the rent, not including utilities, achieve no public policy, are unnecessarily burdensome and prevent families from achieving stability.

1. End the Rapid Re-housing Cliff

DHS and the Council have come to recognize that time limits don’t make sense for crucial public benefits such as TANF. Housing is no different. In the words of one of several DC faith leaders who submitted testimony opposing the Rapid Re-housing Cliff: “A safety net is not a safety net if its support is time limited.” Rather than terminating families’ rental subsidies and sending them over a cliff based on an arbitrary time limit, the Council should require DHS to consider families’ individual circumstances. We recommend only ending assistance after confirming that the family received appropriate and consistent case management, evaluating the family for other permanent housing programs, and ensuring that the family is able to maintain housing stability without further assistance from the program. A housing program that cannot meet such basic standards would not reflect our DC values. If the program cannot exist without causing trauma and instability to its participants, then it is not a program that DC residents should be funding with their tax dollars.

The hundreds of families in rapid re-housing deserve better than the status quo, and certainly better that what the Bowser Administration is proposing.  The bill is scheduled for mark-up by the Committee on Human Services on September 20.  Now is the time for the Council to act to improve this program and ensure that all families in DC have a safe, stable place to call home. 

“Ending homelessness just takes political will.” – Mayor Muriel Bowser

This simple, and in our view, correct, statement came from Mayor Bowser at the March 18th affordable housing rally organized by The Way Home Campaign and the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development (CNHED). Mayor Bowser uttered these words before hundreds of rally attendees, many of whom have faced or are facing homelessness and housing insecurity. Only a few weeks later, her words ring hollow. On April 4th Mayor Bowser unveiled her Fiscal Year 2018 (FY18) budget proposal (“DC values in action, a road to inclusive prosperity”) which leads us to conclude that she does not possess the political will to end homelessness in the District of Columbia.

DC coffers are flush with cash. DC expects to have an additional $600 million in FY18, as compared to FY17. Of that $600 million, the Mayor’s budget proposes adding only around $8.7 million to permanent affordable housing programs that end homelessness. That’s just 1.5% of DC’s extra money. As Fair Budget Coalition states: “Instead, the Mayor has prioritized $18.8 million in tax cuts for estates worth between $1-5 million, $23.8 million in tax breaks for businesses, and invests almost $400 million to support development projects like DC Streetcar, a new Wizards practice facility, and luxury condominiums at McMillan Park over the critical human needs of District residents.”

The Mayor knows how to end homelessness. The Bowser Administration finalized and adopted this plan to end homelessness by 2020: Homeward DC. Mayor Bowser said it best in her introduction to the plan in 2015:
“When I entered office on January 2, the District’s homeless crisis was at the top of my priority list. I knew this was a problem that could not be fixed overnight. I charged my team at the Interagency Council on Homelessness with accelerating the development of a strategic plan to guide our efforts in the coming years. And today, I am pleased to present Homeward DC, a comprehensive, data-driven plan that lays out a bold vision: Together, we will end long-term homelessness in the District of Columbia. By 2020, homelessness in the District will be a rare, brief, and non-recurring experience.”

Ending homelessness has been slipping down the Mayor’s priority list since this statement. While her first budget proposal did not fully fund what Homeward DC stated was necessary, it got us most of the way there, and the Council closed the gap. But last year’s budget was grim for people experiencing homelessness—and blame for that lies equally with the Mayor and the Council. Now the Mayor’s third shot at “putting our money where our mouth is” (her words in a National Alliance to End Homelessness speech about ending homelessness) is underwhelming, at best.

Without significant changes to this FY18 budget, and a much stronger budget next year, the Mayor will not fulfill her own political promises to end chronic homelessness by 2017, family homelessness by 2019, and all homelessness by 2020. We don’t care about her keeping promises for the sake of keeping promises. We care because these promises are people’s lives, people’s health, children’s education, a child’s childhood, a mother’s chance to take a breath and have dinner at a table… justice.

Now, we look ahead. We ask the DC Council to demonstrate the real political will to end homelessness, to demonstrate that they see ending homelessness as a political priority that deserves more than 1.5% of DC’s ever-increasing largesse. We ask that they take a long look at what this budget says about our priorities as a community. We ask that the Council consider what “inclusive prosperity” means for DC when so many of our neighbors have no homes, when so many will never be able to meet their family’s basic needs without help, much less even dream of prosperity.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to analyze what’s in the budget and what isn’t–what’s there to support people accessing shelters, what’s there to support preventing people from becoming homeless, and what’s there to preserve or increase safe affordable housing. We’ll be letting you know what opportunities there are to raise your voice and how you can lay a claim to what “DC values” really are.

 

Last Tuesday, the DC Council made changes to the Mayor’s proposed legislation to close the DC General family shelter and voted unanimously in favor of the bill. (It requires two votes to become law). We strongly support the changes to the bill and urge the Mayor and Council to work out any remaining kinks and expeditiously finalize and pass this important legislation.

The new version of the bill maintains the overall approach proposed by Mayor Bowser—that DC General be replaced with smaller shelters dispersed throughout the District. It also keeps more than half of the sites that the Mayor recommended (Wards 1, 4, 7 and 8). The major changes are to authorize DC to purchase or use eminent domain to acquire the Wards 1 and 4 properties, and to switch the Wards 3, 5, and 6 sites for specific DC-owned properties. The Council also included capital dollars in the FY17 budget to fund such acquisition and/or development of the properties into shelters. If none of the sites are leased, the District will save about $165 million.

In our view, the changes to the bill fairly reflect three months of community input into the specifics of the Mayor’s plan. The Mayor has held at least two community meetings in each ward to solicit input on the plan and the Council held a hearing at which we testified on March 17th. Overwhelmingly, community members supported the Mayor’s overall approach to closing DC General yet raised serious concernsabout high leasing costs, the short term of shelter leases when family homelessness looks to be a long term problem, the lack of private bathrooms and cooking space in the designs, and problems with the sites in Wards 3, 5 and 6. There were sign-on letters from advocacy organizations, letters from health professionals, and multiple stories in the press that echoed these concerns (such as the Ward 5 site’s asthma risks, the Ward 6 site’s proximity to the Blind Whino, and overall costs). For the sites in Wards 3, 5 and 6, there were also significant concerns about upcoming zoning battles and resulting delays. Of the three sites replacing the Mayor’s suggestions, at least two (Wards 3 and 5) were proposed as alternatives by Ward constituents and Councilmembers to the Mayor’s office and vetted openly.

It’s easy to become distracted by the political drama surrounding this issue, but step back for a moment, and we achieve a brighter perspective. First, this is how democracy should work. The Mayor can and should take leadership to propose a major initiative that the Administration will have to execute. And when that initiative is laid out in legislation, it is up to the Council to hold a hearing and mark up the legislation in a way that reflects input from the community. Second, the Mayor and Council clearly share a commitment and passion to close DC General the right way for homeless families. Any disagreement or conflict is around exactly the best way to accomplish that goal. It is rare to have both a Mayor and Council united in their desire and resolve to drastically improve the lives of homeless families. We are optimistic that they will find a way to move beyond any temper flares or past miscommunications to work out a plan that shows good stewardship of District resources, and more importantly, that best serves the needs of the DC’s homeless families. These families, and indeed all District residents, deserve no less.