Loose Lips wrote a little over a year ago that the city’s budget amounted to a retreat on housing and homelessness issues. Perhaps he spoke a bit too soon.

If the District’s 2024 budget was a step back from the city’s commitments to keeping people housed, then the 2025 budget approved by the Council Wednesday amounts to a full reversal on these principles. Most lawmakers and advocates working on housing issues primarily point the finger at Mayor Muriel Bowser, who dealt the Council a terrible hand by slashing many of these programs to close budget gaps. Subsequent edits to the spending plan by Chair Phil Mendelson and his colleagues made improvements around the margins, but they were unable (or unwilling) to embrace bigger structural changes to reverse the worst of the mayor’s cuts.

“I don’t see any coherent strategy left in the mayor’s budget to address chronic homelessness: If anything, it seems like we’re running in the opposite direction,” lamented one Council source, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive subjects. “We’ve been working as hard as we can to try to move the ball forward. But it’s depressing that we have to work so hard when it seems like we’re working against a train moving in the other direction.”

Activists believe that Bowser has executed a frustrating two-step on housing: First, she has deprioritized funding for housing vouchers in favor of the city’s rapid rehousing program. (A voucher can help a struggling family afford rent for years as an ongoing subsidy; rapid rehousing, however, is meant to be temporary, giving families help paying rent for a few months while they try to improve their lives.) This policy shift has grown rapid rehousing to include a little more than 3,500 families over the past few years; eight years ago, there were just under 1,500 families in the program.

But as costs have ballooned and the city’s economic picture has grown worse, Bowser turned around and also included budget language directing her Department of Human Services to remove about 2,200 of those families from the program, whether they’re ready to pay rent on their own or not. She basically built her budget around this change, sweeping up the savings to pay for other priorities. Yet her spending plan barely included any new housing vouchers for families and not a single one for individuals, meaning that anyone losing their rapid rehousing subsidy was basically shit out of luck. 

LL hears from three different sources around the Wilson Building that DHS Director Laura Zeilinger has even been urging lawmakers in recent weeks not to fund any additional vouchers, as they don’t encourage people to pursue economic independence, while programs like rapid rehousing do. It’s deeply unclear to LL how, exactly, anyone can pursue this independence when they’re being booted from the program before they’re ready, of course. (A DHS spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

“The situation we’ve been handed is a mess,” Mendelson told reporters Monday. “And it’s not clear to me that the executive has figured out how to sort its way out of that.”

The Council was ultimately able to find money for a total of 619 new vouchers for families, single adults, and people who used to be homeless—a substantial increase from Bowser’s proposal. But the families in rapid rehousing will only be eligible for some of those vouchers, leaving hundreds of people in limbo. Many advocates fear they’ll end up in city shelters or out on the streets, further worsening the city’s homelessness crisis.

“This is the worst budget for housing since the mayor became the mayor,” says Kate Coventry, deputy director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and a longtime housing wonk. 

At-Large Councilmember Robert White, the chair of the housing committee, says he shares this frustration, but does see some hope for addressing the rapid rehousing situation. He says the D.C. Housing Authority’s governing board could soon redirect roughly 1,300 of its currently unallocated vouchers to people exiting the program, which “takes out a big chunk of the families who need help.”  

He initially hoped that the board would vote to do so at its June 12 meeting, but to make the maneuver work would require changing some DCHA rules to give preference to people exiting rapid rehousing—essentially helping them jump the line in the rather lengthy waiting list. The agency had to allow time for public comments on that change, so the earliest the board could take this up would be its July 10 meeting. (A DCHA spokesperson said she couldn’t comment on whether the measure will come up in July.)

But Coventry notes that it’s unclear how quickly these vouchers will be available for people, and time is of the essence. After all, DHS started notifying people on May 31 that they’d soon be phased out of the program, according to a notice to service providers forwarded to LL. White said Wednesday that he hopes only 100 families will still need assistance by the time all these vouchers are distributed, but it’s an open question how this process will work.

 “The timing for this doesn’t line up very well,” Coventry says. “Will these families be bridged in time?”

Mendelson, who has long taken a dim view of the rapid rehousing program, surely wishes he wasn’t in this particular pickle. Like many advocates, he feels it perpetuates a cycle of homelessness for these families, as study after study has shown that people wind up back on the streets after receiving rapid rehousing subsidies. He’s pushed broader reforms that have yet to pass amid resistance from Bowser, and it’s likely that these budget showdowns over rapid rehousing cliffs will continue unless something meaningful changes.

The big issue here is the amount of money involved. If the Council wanted to keep all of these people in rapid rehousing for the foreseeable future, Mendelson says the administration was estimating a cost well over $100 million. Funding vouchers for all of them instead would be even more expensive. 

“The Council was handed a choice of two very bad options,” Mendelson said Monday. 

So that has left lawmakers in a bind. The most they can do, Mendo said, is tinker with some legislative language advanced by Bowser: She wanted to allow DHS to kick people out of rapid rehousing without any sort of administrative hearing, in a bid to save more money. But most advocates believe that provision is unconstitutional, as due process rights generally give beneficiaries of these housing programs at least the chance to appeal such a decision before a judge. 

Mendelson has made some changes, allowing for an administrative review of these decisions, if not a full hearing, but the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless still believes that’s legally questionable. The Council could make additional changes before it votes on the Budget Support Act, which includes policies meant to implement the budget, later this month. But anything that costs DHS more money would be off the table. 

Despite all this, housing advocates are still glad to see the Council adding some vouchers, even if they still feel there’s a need for hundreds more to actually end homelessness in the city. White was able to pull away some funding from Bowser’s plan to send more resources to DHS to combat truancy to enable this change, among other tinkering. But there still aren’t nearly enough vouchers for people living on the street, and Bowser’s administration keeps sweeping encampments and destabilizing this population. “These are folks who’ve been homeless for a long time and struggle with disabling conditions, and some of them literally will die without these vouchers,” Coventry says. 

Rachel White, senior youth policy analyst at the advocacy group DC Action, adds that the budget does little to address youth homelessness, which she believes has increased by roughly 50 percent since 2017. (There are as many 5,500 children at risk of being evicted as part of the rapid rehousing cuts, the legal clinic estimates, so the problem could only get worse.) Yet she notes that there’s no additional funding to address youth homelessness in the budget, which amounts to a cut as costs rise.

“We need to keep growing our system to match the scale of the crisis,” says Lara Pukatch, chief advocacy officer for the homeless services organization Miriam’s Kitchen. “While that won’t happen overnight, it won’t happen at all if we don’t try and if we don’t really push ourselves to do everything we can to find every dollar we can to end homelessness.”

And that is where so many activists remain so frustrated with the Council. There is no doubt that Mendelson, facing pressure from the body’s progressive bloc, agreed to several tax hikes that he might’ve rejected as recently as five years ago. Much of that new money went toward housing.

But, with a few exceptions, the new revenue raisers aren’t tackling the structural problems plaguing D.C.’s post-pandemic economy and generating the cash needed to truly address the scale of the housing crisis. Mendelson’s decision to bump up the payroll tax even higher than Bowser initially proposed was viewed with particular skepticism by progressives—the tax was originally meant to fund the paid family leave program, but now it’s just getting used for whatever the Council wants. (Former At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman, one of the key architects of paid leave, called the move “reckless” in a recent letter to the Washington Post.) Some are grateful for the money, but the move strikes them as a Band-Aid instead of a serious long-term solution.

This approach has plagued the Council’s response to Bowser’s cuts, as a whole. Lawmakers have generally bought into Bowser’s framing that the city’s spending is outpacing its revenue—she called it “unsustainable spending growth” in a letter to the Council Wednesday—even as they’ve pushed back against some of her budget choices. White himself has made frequent arguments about the need to find as much as $100 million in savings moving forward, and the budget includes new resources for a Council staffer dedicated to finding places to make cuts.

That’s all well-intentioned enough—there are undoubtedly programs that aren’t working in the city that need to be revisited—but it seems foolhardy to believe that the District can slash its way out of its present circumstances. As Fiscal Policy Institute head Erica Williams has persuasively argued, the city’s budget has actually grown at a pretty steady rate relative to inflation and the growth of the local economy. It’s easy to raise fears of fiscal irresponsibility by comparing the size of this year’s budget to what it was 20 years ago, but that doesn’t reflect economic realities.

The way LL sees it, it’s hardly a bad thing to imagine a city that is growing and meeting the needs of residents along the way. Rather than retreating from these challenges with austerity, why shouldn’t city leaders put forth an optimistic vision of D.C.’s future that doesn’t leave anyone living on the street or going hungry to pay rent? 

That’s the sort of thinking that might prevent LL from writing the same story about housing a year from now. Sadly, it’s pretty absent from D.C. politics at the moment.

“We’re trying to send a message to Council that it’s not a question of, ‘either or’, it’s ‘both and,’” says Pukatch. “We need to be making sure we’re robustly and boldly investing in our system for all of the populations that are in need of housing and support services.”