To help combat the rising price of housing in D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has made a big pledge: 36,000 new housing units built by 2025. But that commitment has a price tag, and Bowser is accusing the D.C. Council of denying her the money to help pay for it.

The mayor is particularly peeved at Council Chairman Phil Mendelson for stripping money from her 2020 budget that she says could help build and preserve thousands of units of affordable housing. On Tuesday, the Council unanimously approved its amended version of the budget, which included the following changes to Bowser’s housing proposals:

• Bowser advocated increasing the annual investment to the Housing Production Trust Fund—the city’s main tool for building affordable housing—by $30 million, to $130 million, but the Council took out $10 million of that.
• She proposed putting $15 million into a Housing Preservation Fund—up from the $10 million it got last year—to help preserve existing units of affordable housing, but the Council eliminated the funding altogether.
• Bowser created a new $20 million Workforce Housing Fund, which she said would help build housing for middle-class families and residents working as teachers, police officers, firefighters, and nurses. The Council replaced that fund with a $14 million package (spread out over four years) to give developers who build middle-class housing a break on their property taxes.

“By cutting these investments by $45 million—including completely eliminating the Housing Preservation Fund and the Workforce Housing Fund—what the Council Chairman has done is cut funding for more than 2,300 affordable homes,” Bowser said in a statement Friday. “Without this funding, more families will be displaced from our city and fewer new homes will be affordable for low- and moderate-income residents.”

Much like the way she waged an aggressive campaign promoting her budget proposal in recent weeks, Bowser has now taken to Instagram and Twitter to criticize Mendelson’s changes to the budget. And on Thursday, she published an op-ed in the Washington Business Journal tying the proposed investments to her broader plan to spur housing construction in the city. “Solving our housing challenges must be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” she wrote.

The Council’s View

Mendelson has largely brushed aside the criticisms, saying that his changes to Bowser’s housing proposals enabled the Council to fund a broader set of housing and homelessness programs.

“While there is a reduction in [the Housing Production Trust Fund], there is an increase overall of $20.5 million in the area of vouchers, permanent supportive housing, other services both for those who are homeless as well as the production of affordable housing,” he said Monday.

Mendelson also said that his package of incentives for nonprofit developers to preserve housing for middle-class residents would go further than Bowser’s, creating 1,200 units over four years. If those developers produce housing units targeted to certain income groups, they will be exempted from property taxes.

“We think the leverage will go farther and result in more units,” he said.

The Council also directed money towards implementing a new law that will limit the rent increase the owner of a rent-controlled property can take once the unit is vacant, from the current 30 percent down to 10 percent. And it imposed new spending requirements on money from the Housing Production Trust Fund, mandating that 50 percent of the money be used to build or preserve properties for the lowest-income individuals and families.

Mendelson also directed $30 million towards making repairs to 2,610 units of public housing, though Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey DeWitt has objected to his means of doing so—by taking money from the reserves of Events DC, the city’s sports and convention authority.

What Advocates Want

But advocates for more spending on affordable housing say they’re weren’t pleased with what Bowser initially offered or how Mendelson changed it.

“The thing the Council tried to do was fund our rent subsidy program—which reaches our lowest income families, that the mayor really hadn’t adequately funded,” said Ed Lazere, director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, citing one example in the budget.

“The Council deserves credit for that. The problem is the only way they did that was cutting our housing trust fund and our program to preserve existing affordable housing, and we just shouldn’t be doing it that way,” he added.

Lazere says he wants the city to significantly increase its investment in affordable housing programs across the board—including by increasing the annual investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund to $200 million—and hopes that changes can be made before the Council casts its final vote on the budget at the end of the month.

Some other housing organizations hope so, too. The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, one of two groups that manages Bowser’s $10 million Housing Preservation Fund, is asking the Council to save the program.

“Working on it,” tweeted At-large Councilmember Anita Bonds, who chairs the Council’s housing committee and largely signed off on Bowser’s housing proposals with only minor tweaks.

As for Bowser, she’s asking the Council to restore all of her housing funding priorities—$45 million worth. But she has also asked the Council to leave other priorities untouched—including the free D.C. Circulator, funding for United Medical Center and a tax credit for child care costs—and was ignored.

This story originally appeared at WAMU.