(Photo by Rich Renomeron)

For a person experiencing homelessness, the process of going from the streets to getting housing involves navigating a complicated bureaucracy.

It can take months or years to acquire the necessary documentation to qualify for subsidy programs, which often then have long waiting lists. Historically, that has been the hard part. But the next step after a person or family has received a housing voucher—actually finding an affordable apartment and securing a lease—has become increasingly difficult, too.

“We have people are in the housing search process with a subsidy in hand and that stage of their process is getting longer and not shorter. We need that to change,” said Department of Human Services Director Laura Zeilinger before announcing a series of changes on Friday designed to make landlords more likely to rent to people who are exiting homelessness.

The centerpiece of the plan is a Landlord Partnership Fund, essentially a privately funded pool that landlords could draw from in the event of property damage or other potential costs—an incentive for property owners to rent to people with housing vouchers. In tandem, DHS has tweaked and added a series of programs to give landlords more confidence and assurances about a population often considered to be risky tenants.

“Our goal is really to promote access to housing that exists in our community for people who have subsidies and are working hard to exit homelessness, but are just being turned away from unit after unit,” Zeilinger said.

At the heart of the issue, like the homelessness crisis itself, is the city’s dwindling supply of affordable housing.

When an affordable unit comes on the market, there’s intense competition from both voucher holders and the general public. Case workers say such apartments often get snapped up in a matter of hours. And when faced with an array of applicants, landlords can afford to be picky.

Pathways to Housing, which pioneered the “housing first” model, has been working to get homeless clients in stable homes in D.C. since 2004. It has steadily gotten “tougher and tougher” to get a client with a subsidy into an apartment, according to Pathways to Housing DC director Christy Respress. The non-profit has had to devote increasingly more time and staff to help find units—and race to secure them. Pathways now even has a volunteer who scours Craigslist and other sites looking for opportunities.

“That is not something we had a number of years ago,” she said. “I wouldn’t have even thought of that as a volunteer opportunity.”

It is illegal to turn someone away from an apartment because of their source of income or for using a voucher, and under a new D.C. law, landlords cannot ask about prior convictions before extending a conditional housing offer.

Some mission-driven landlords actively welcome the formerly homeless population, D.C. officials note, but a number of companies that own or manage large, multifamily buildings use criteria that bar people with prior evictions, poor credit, or criminal records—each of which are often precursors or contributing factors to homelessness.

As the supply of affordable housing drops, officials say it has become increasingly important that those landlords open their doors.

“We have put a tremendous amount of investment in making housing affordable for people to be able to exit homelessness and investments in the services and supports to help them get there. But we can only do that in partnership with people who are building and managing housing for them to go to,” Zeilinger says.

Put another way, even as the city has made significant progress in terms of ending chronic homelessness, the supply side is a bottleneck and it has been narrowing.

That’s where the new risk mitigation fund comes in. Landlords would sign up ahead of time, knowing that if they incur damages or other costs, they’d be covered.

The Downtown BID is spearheading the effort to privately raise $500,000 by the end of the year to kick it off. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Non-Profit Housing and Economic Development will manage the program—signing landlords up, processing claims, and reimbursing them directly in the event of an issue. Landlords can receive up to $2,500 each for loss of a security deposit and/or damages.

“When landlords have choices, they are going to default to what they think is known and safe. So we’re trying to mitigate a lot of those risks,” said Neil Albert, the Downtown DC BID’s executive director.

District leaders looked to similar funds around the country, particularly in Seattle, as models.
Program managers also found something that surprised pretty much everyone involved: it appeared that the risk of renting to people exiting homelessness wasn’t as high as had been generally assumed.

“The fund is there as an incentive and, to some degree an insurance policy that if the risk is real, there’s help. But what we believe is that [landlords] will learn that these families are not the perceived risk that they have historically been seen as,” said Steve Glaude, CNHED’s executive director. “That was certainly true in the cities that we looked at,” where landlords lowered their screening criteria after the introduction of similar risk mitigation funds, but often didn’t need to utilize them.

DHS said it has not set a target number for how many landlords or number of units it is aiming to see signed up, but will look at the length of time it takes voucher holders to secure an apartment as a measure of the program’s success.

It also isn’t the only step that the District is taking to engage landlords.

DHS is rolling out a series of initiatives in response to concerns they have raised. The agency has built a resolution portal where landlords can get responses to their concerns or issues within 48 hours, worked to tighten case management requirements, and developed a less complicated payment structure for rent in the rapid rehousing program.

“It is really rough on folks to be continuously rejected from housing opportunity after housing opportunity after housing opportunity when they’re trying really hard to get to a place of stability,” Zeilinger says. “We really want people to have a second chance. They need a second chance.”

Previously:
D.C. Has Made Remarkable Progress Toward Ending Chronic Homelessness. Will It Continue?

Updated to reflect that the Ban the Box legislation for housing took effect on October 1.