It takes a special kind of incompetence, or perhaps audacity, to manage to piss off the D.C. Council, the D.C. Housing Authority, and hundreds of struggling families all at the same time. And yet that is precisely what Mayor Muriel Bowser has managed this month.

Bowser’s deputies have pulled the rug out from under roughly 1,000 families receiving temporary subsidies via the rapid rehousing program, according to lawmakers and advocates following the issue. The program requires participants to pay a percentage of their income each month toward rent with the idea that they will be able to pay the full amount after 12 months.

In early September, the Department of Human Services announced plans to send notices to families saying they will be kicked out of the program soon and must pay rent without city assistance. It sent similar notices to another 1,000 of them over the summer. These moves could not only plunge those people back into homelessness, but it also amounts to an about-face from this past budget cycle, when Bowser struck a deal with both the Council and the housing authority to find longer-lasting resources to help these families. 

Bowser’s DHS spent the first half of the year warning that it didn’t have the money to keep participants in the program, which is designed as a temporary measure to get people off the streets by helping them pay rent until they can stabilize their lives. With 2,200 families at risk of being kicked out of rapid rehousing, the Council moved money around to fund about 450 new housing vouchers that some participants could use to pay rent on an ongoing basis. Lawmakers and Bowser were even able to convince the DCHA board to direct 1,300 of the vouchers it controls to families exiting rapid rehousing. The mayor’s end of the bargain was to keep these people in the program until the city matched them with all the new vouchers, and her team assured the Council that she would do so.

So tenant advocates were outraged to discover that Bowser was going back on her word, telling rapid rehousing participants in early September that they’d cease receiving rental assistance by the end of the month. The DCHA board only made its vouchers available in July, and the housing authority is still evaluating who is eligible for the subsidies—at least 70 percent are likely to qualify, according to preliminary data from DHS. Plus, the new housing vouchers funded by the Council become available on Oct. 1, when the new fiscal year starts, so DHS would only need to keep people in the program for a few more weeks until it could match them to this additional subsidy. Tossing families out early could funnel them back into the shelter system, where the city will pay to keep them housed again anyway, albeit in far worse conditions.

“It creates all this destabilization, particularly with kids being forced to move just as the new school year starts,” At-Large Councilmember Robert White, the chair of the Council’s housing committee, tells Loose Lips. “It costs twice as much for the city to have these families in shelter as to have them on vouchers. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot financially. It just doesn’t make sense.”

It’s not the first time that Bowser has played games with the rapid rehousing program, which many view as a way to essentially shuffle homeless families out of sight without giving them the time or the resources to meaningfully change their financial situations. But it is nonetheless a bit maddening for those working on this issue, who feel that Bowser is crippling a program that she once championed. If the mayor won’t support people in rapid rehousing, and she refuses to adequately fund rental assistance or housing vouchers, what exactly is the city’s strategy for ending homelessness?

“This was a bait and switch,” says Amber Harding, the executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. “They just moved all these families into this program without any plan for transitioning them to longer-term assistance … I regret saying in the past that this is the worst this program has ever been, because it somehow always manages to get worse.”

DHS Director Laura Zeilinger wrote in a statement to LL that the agency is “working with residents who have reached the [rapid rehousing] time limit to apply for other affordable housing resources and create viable transition plans.” After this article was published, Bowser’s spokespeople also wrote to LL to say that “subsidies for these households were supposed to end earlier in the spring, but the District invested local resources to extend to allow DHS additional time to match families with permanent affordable housing,” and that “DHS has been hosting housing fairs, providing transportation for viewings and encouraging families to lease up in place to minimize disruption to their households.”

But White and Harding both say the main message they’ve received from the department is that the agency doesn’t have enough money in the budget to keep people in the program. Notes from an Aug. 14 meeting of the Interagency Council on Homelessness confirm as much.

“Ultimately, DHS does not have a budget for continuation,” an agency official identified only by their initials told the group of housing nonprofits, government officials, and advocates, according to a copy of the notes provided to LL. “We utilize [rapid rehousing] as a short term program for 12 months. During the pandemic, we extended the time period, but there is a need to operate the program under its time limitation. This is why we need to implement the time limits and exit those who have been in for more than 12 months.”

Harding says this explanation is misleading, however, because many of her clients have received exit notices despite participating in the program for just a year, rather than being holdovers from the pandemic. She’s also seen the administration enroll more people in rapid rehousing while it’s busy kicking current participants out: not exactly a prudent move for a program that’s hard up for cash. DHS’ own projections expect a 25 percent surge in shelter admissions this winter due in part to the rapid rehousing exits, according to notes from the ICH meeting, and that will strain the agency’s budget, too.

“They will exit them, they’ll get behind on rent, they’ll get evicted, they’ll come back into shelter, and then if there’s still a gap between that and getting their voucher, because both DCHA and DHS are slower than they should be, they’ll just put them back into rapid rehousing,” Harding says. “Only now they’ll have a harder time finding an apartment because they have an eviction on their record. So why wouldn’t you just keep them in rapid rehousing? It’s like Whac-a-Mole.”

White and some of his Council colleagues, including Council Chair Phil Mendelson, have been trying to persuade Bowser of this point. But White says she has not given any commitment that she’d consider moving money around to keep people in the program, even though there is inevitably money available at the end of each budget year to close unexpected gaps. “The mayor holds most of the cards on this,” White says. (As ever, the subtext here is that if D.C. voters had elected White as mayor two years ago, or if they vote him in two years from now, none of this would be happening.)

Bowser’s actions here will undoubtedly be noticed over at DCHA, too. The housing authority’s board only reluctantly voted to reserve a chunk of its vouchers. Otherwise the housing dollars would be dedicated to the roughly 18,000 people still on the famously crowded voucher waiting list. There’s some overlap between people in rapid rehousing and people on the waiting list, but the board’s approval meant privileging one group in need over another. Board member Chris Murphy, formerly a top aide to Vince Gray when he was mayor, argued ahead of the July vote that re-allocating these vouchers could amount to “bailing out a failed policy,” considering rapid rehousing’s well-documented problems.

“I don’t like agreeing to this resolution, but I am going to agree in support of this resolution because the alternative just feels unacceptable,” Murphy said ahead of the 6-2 vote on the matter. The housing authority’s board is stacked with Bowser-friendly appointees after the mayor, Mendelson, and White engineered its reorganization two years ago. But LL imagines future requests for vouchers will be met with a bit more skepticism if DHS doesn’t use them for their intended purpose. 

“The logic would suggest that, if we’re jumping these folks to the front of the line, we’d make every effort to ensure they don’t lose their housing,” White says. “It’s just really frustrating.”

Harding cautions that she doesn’t want people at risk of losing their rapid rehousing subsidy to panic just yet. “Our office will represent any family that has any legal claim, and will pursue every possible legal relief for any of these families, individually or as a class,” she says. She continues to believe that the Council and mayor made unconstitutional changes to the program in the budget by limiting the right of people being kicked out to appeal the decision to a judge, opening up an avenue for a lawsuit on those grounds. (Lawmakers said at the time that they made the change because the mayor forced their hands, building her budget on steep cuts to rapid rehousing that necessitated the speedy exits of a large number of participants.)

But a legal case can only do so much. Harding fears that Bowser’s actions will fundamentally undermine rapid rehousing’s move forward. Potential participants won’t want to enroll if they know they’ll be cut off from assistance in a few months, and landlords won’t want to rent to them anyway if they know DHS could cut off their subsidies so quickly. (Harding notes, with amusement, that some of the advocacy groups representing landlords signed an open letter urging Bowser to halt the exits.)

Advocates may not especially like rapid rehousing, so its death wouldn’t be overly mourned. But considering it’s the only option available for many homeless families right now, they still fear what will happen if it disappears.

“I 100 percent guarantee you: Landlords are going to look for every excuse they can to not rent to people in rapid rehousing from now on, which means the program will die,” Harding says. “You just can’t have a program that tenants don’t want to be in, and landlords don’t want to be in. They’re killing their own program by doing this.”

This story has been updated.