A D.C. woman has filed suit against the District of Columbia Housing Authority for cutting her voucher benefits after she divorced her allegedly abusive husband, despite several attempts from her and her legal counsel to advise DCHA of her new family structure and multiple requests for an informal hearing with Housing Authority staff, court filings show.

According to the suit, DCHA is violating its own policies, as well as the federal Violence Against Women Act by failing to grant existing housing benefits to the victim of a domestic violence case after the breakup of the relationship. DCist is not naming the woman in this story because she is a victim of domestic violence.

The plaintiff was married to her ex-husband for about 20 years, and the two have three children together (with two school-age children still living in the home), according to the suit. She alleges that he was abusive, and that in September of last year, he verbally threatened her life in the presence their two younger children. She reportedly called police, filed a police report, and eventually got a civil protection order against her husband, which required him to move out of the home they shared.

That kickstarted a chain of events that eventually cut off the plaintiff’s housing benefits, leaving her unable to pay rent since February 2019. The suit alleges that, as a result, she and her two younger children are in danger of becoming homeless.

“The process is supposed to work a certain way for her and it hasn’t, and I think that’s very stressful for her, because it puts her whole life at risk,” says Elena Bowers of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, which is representing the plaintiff in this case alongside law firm Alston and Bird. “She’s spent the last five months waiting for her landlord to kick her out, and that’s a very stressful way to live for anyone … for someone with kids. It is overwhelmingly stressful for her.”

This is the sequence of events, according to the lawsuit: Since 2017, the plaintiff and her husband had been paying rent on that home with a housing voucher provided through DCHA’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, which provides very low to moderate-income D.C. residents with housing assistance. Without the plaintiff’s knowledge, her husband went to the Housing Authority and made himself the designated “head of household” for their voucher benefits. This is a crucial designation—according to D.C. regulations, heads of household are the only people able to request informal hearings or reviews of the family’s benefits.

In her household, the plaintiff was allegedly making about two-thirds of the family’s income, and the rest came from her (now ex) husband. DCHA calculated a voucher benefit (about $300 per month) that accounted for the spouses’ combined income. After the plaintiff filed the protective order and her husband left their home, she was worried that he would try to take the housing benefits with him, says Bowers. In early October, the plaintiff and her counsel first contacted DCHA about her divorce. Later that month, she had a physical meeting with her Legal Aid lawyer and three DCHA officials, where she provided them with a copy of her protective order against her ex and a letter from D.C. Survivors and Advocates for Empowerment, which said that she had sought services there as a domestic violence victim.

This documentation should have secured her eligibility to keep her benefits, says Bowers. According to the federal Violence Against Women Act (and D.C.’s own laws), when a family breaks up because of domestic violence, housing voucher benefits should go to the victim.

After that meeting, though, Bowers says she and her client heard radio silence from DCHA for weeks. She wrote several letters requesting a hearing on the plaintiff’s benefits as a result of the departure of the head of household due to domestic violence.

On December 26, DCHA sent the plaintiff a letter notifying her that it would provide her with a “temporary voucher,” though her benefits could be revoked at a hearing that her ex-husband had a right to call as the head of household, once he “received notice from the Housing Authority,” according to court filings. That temporary voucher was for the same amount she had already been receiving (which does not account for the absence of one adult in the home and, therefore, a lower income). Bowers says another part of the fight has been in trying to get DCHA to recalculate her voucher based on her single income.

“My client works full time in D.C. making $45,000 a year and just can’t … that’s not enough,” she says. Moreover, if the plaintiff is made to reapply for housing voucher benefits, she will be placed on a waiting list that is about 40,000 people long, Bowers says. Getting a new voucher could take years.

Finally, on January 11, DCHA rejected the plaintiff’s request for a hearing, in which she would have argued to be made the head of household and for a recalculation of benefits based on her income only. “[Y]our request for an informal hearing—[is denied because] … it has been determined according to our records that your client is not the head-of-household and therefore, not entitled to an administrative review,” the letter read, according to the suit. “While I am sympathetic to your client’s circumstances, the administrative grievance process does not entitle individual members of a household composition to request a hearing except, the head of household.”

Since then, DCHA has stopped making payments to the plaintiff’s landlord, putting her and her children “at imminent risk of irreparable harm through eviction from her housing,” the suit says.

The suit is seeking immediate restoration of the voucher payments (calculated only on her income), as well as back pay from the months of rent the plaintiff has missed paying, late fees from the landlord, damages, and attorney’s fees.

A DCHA spokesperson declined to comment because the litigation is still pending.