On Monday, July 14, the D.C. Council will take its first vote on our local budget and many legal changes that will impact the lives of D.C. residents. As we discussed here, the mayor’s budget proposal was regressive and harmful, hardly befitting a city where the vast majority of residents support progressive and humane economic and social policies. The Council has already reversed some of these harmful proposals, but when it comes to responding to the ever-growing gap between household income and the cost of rent, both branches of government are failing D.C. residents, particularly those who are homeless or at imminent risk of homelessness.

For individuals experiencing homelessness, there is not one dime in this budget to end homelessness. Not one permanent supportive housing voucher, proven time and time again to be the most effective intervention to permanently end one’s chronic homelessness. Not one local housing voucher for the thousands who have been waiting on the housing waitlist for decades. To compound the harm, despite there being very few shelter spaces available and no housing funded, the mayor is devoting $900,000 to fund encampment evictions.

For families experiencing homelessness, while there are some housing vouchers in the current version of the budget, the budget proposes terminating more families from housing than it does supporting them with housing—resulting in a deliberate, government-caused net increase in family homelessness. Here is a loose timeline leading up to today of the failures of the mayor and the Council in the past few years to solve family homelessness in a humane, nontraumatic way:

  • Mayor Bowser announced, post public health emergency, that too many families were in rapid re-housing. She proposed solving this problem by terminating thousands of families from their housing.
  • The Council agreed with families and advocates that that is not the right approach. Chairman Mendelson proposed fixing the program via the Rapid Re-housing Reform Amendment Act. (Some more information here, and yes, we were wrong to be so optimistic about the chance for reform.)
  • The Council never moved the bill forward, despite near-unanimous support at the public hearing.
  • The Council did, unanimously and repeatedly, pass emergency and temporary legislation ensuring that families be offered an opportunity for extensions in the program.
  • The mayor claimed there are still too many families in the program. She proposed legislation to “fix” that problem—not by helping people secure more stable long-term housing, or by helping people increase their income so they can afford rent. Instead, the mayor proposed terminating even more families, but faster, by no longer providing extensions and by taking away most of the legal rights people have in the program, including fair hearings.
  • The vast majority of the Council strongly opposed this legislation. The agency claimed there were tremendous cost savings to be had when gutting the legal rights of the people it serves. The legislation passed when the Council failed, despite their stated opposition, to secure enough money to pay for the removal from the Budget Support Act. More info here.
  • Over three thousand families received termination notices over the next year. Only about half were able to transition into a permanent housing program. The rest will lose or have already lost all of their housing support and face rising rental debt and eviction.
  • The Council passed legislation that makes families in rapid re-housing ineligible for emergency rental assistance when they lose their rental support, removing the very last safety net for avoiding eviction.

That brings us to present time. The mayor has decided that the Department of Human Services should be able to terminate people in rapid re-housing even more quickly, and that participants still have too many rights. She proposed yet another Budget Support Act subtitle eliminating more rights, making the program even more draconian. (Note: proposing such changes in the Budget Support Act ensures there will be no public hearing and that there will be no Racial Equity Impact Statement performed by the Council.) This time she proposed stopping the rent payments before someone even has their appeal heard. She stripped away the right to an extension, giving the agency director “sole and absolute discretion” on extensions.

Most likely recognizing that the impact of these mass housing terminations will surely soon be felt in increased family homelessness, the mayor chose once again not to solve that problem in a humane or even logical way–by keeping families housed. No, her solution is to remove health and safety protections in the law for family shelter—so she can place families with minor children in the same sleeping quarters as strangers.

As a reminder, Mayor Bowser ran on a platform of not placing families in congregate settings, stating that: “I will not treat our homeless families like emergency flood victims, housing them in city recreation centers.” The Council, including then Councilmember Bowser, has twice—in 2010 and 2014—unanimously rejected proposals to force families to share sleeping quarters.  When families filed a class action in 2014 after Mayor Gray placed homeless families in recreation centers, a judge concluded that: “As to those named Plaintiffs who have not been placed in apartments or private rooms the court finds that they, particularly the children, incur increased risk of communicable disease, are denied adequate privacy and physical security, are likely to experience emotional trauma and stress, hence are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of a restraining order.”

In other words, so far, the mayor has proposed “solving” housing unaffordability for individuals by failing to fund any housing that would end their homelessness and instead increasing encampment evictions. For families, her solution is kicking families out of housing, eviscerating their legal rights, and then forcing children to sleep next to strangers. The Council so far, while sometimes opposing this approach in their words, has failed to effectively put a stop to this pervasive harm against unhoused D.C. residents. The Council must reject any language that puts children at risk in shelter and either fix rapid re-housing or fund enough housing vouchers so that families can exit the program without cycling back into homelessness.

Raise your voice. Tell the mayor and the Council that they must stop failing unhoused D.C. residents. Ask them to remove harmful Budget Support Act language (“Subtitle K”) that will increase rapid re-housing terminations and force families into shared sleeping quarters with strangers. Tell them to fund housing vouchers to end homelessness permanently.

Take action here!

Update: from our friends at Fair Budget Coalition, please come to the Wilson building (1350 PEnnsylvania Ave NW) on Monday, July 14 at 9AM for a rally and at 11AM to pack the vote. RSVP here.