D.C. will terminate the housing subsidies of 384 families who receive rent relief through the city’s “rapid rehousing” program throughout March and April of 2022. The decision will plunge hundreds of financially vulnerable people deeper into housing instability as the city continues to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing crisis of long-term homelessness.

The planned subsidy terminations will mark the first wave of people to lose their rapid rehousing benefits since the D.C. Department of Human Services paused terminations at the start of the pandemic, when the city enacted an eviction moratorium. Normally, rapid rehousing benefits last only about a year.

The city’s rapid rehousing program is intended to help extremely at-risk, low-income individuals — people who, without the subsidy, would likely face homelessness — by paying the majority of their rent for an allotted amount of time. The program has been criticized in the past as a short-sighted solution that sends families right back into homelessness when their benefits end. 

As recently as a Nov. 10 roundtable with the D.C. Council, DHS Director Laura Zeilinger could not provide an exact figure of how many people would lose their benefits when the agency eventually resumed terminations. In September, the agency estimated 271 families would be affected.

But officials revealed the final count — 384 households — during a meeting last Thursday with a housing task force, according to a member present and confirmed by a DHS spokesperson in an emailed statement. 

“This will have a big impact on my family because we don’t have a support system,” says Brittany Gillis, a 28-year-old single mother of six children who received a notice in late October that DHS will terminate her rapid rehousing subsidy. A full-time caretaker for her young kids, Gillis will be on the hook for about $1,800 in rent for her two-bedroom apartment. “I don’t have family to go to until I can get back into a program. I don’t have that. So we will be homeless,” she says.

The terminations will come at the tail end of winter, an already fraught time for D.C.’s shelter system, which sees demand spike as temperatures plunge.

Because about 15% of people terminated from rapid rehousing end up back at the city’s central intake center for homeless services within a year, DHS spokesperson Curtis Smith says, “we do anticipate some families being exited from [rapid rehousing] may experience a return to homelessness.” 

The number of families receiving rapid rehousing subsidies has ballooned during Mayor Muriel Bowser’s time in office, from 1,600 families in fiscal year 2016 to more than 3,400 families in fiscal year 2022, per Smith. (That number is far greater than the roughly 3,300 people who stay in emergency shelters on a given night, and greater still than the estimated 681 people who live on the street.)

Roughly 1,000 families currently receiving benefits entered the program only within the last year and a half, Smith says. 

And because DHS has previously estimated that 90% of people who exit rapid rehousing cannot afford to continue rent payments on their own, housing lawyers worry that DHS’s forthcoming spate of program terminations will force hundreds of families back into homelessness.

“This is coming at a time where the eviction moratorium is lifting. We’re starting to see more and more evictions get filed and we anticipate an increase in family homelessness this winter and spring even without [the subsidy terminations] happening,” says Amber Harding, a housing attorney with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless who is representing Gillis. 

“These are families that we know are highly likely to come back into the shelter system and certainly go back into homelessness,” Harding says. “But if even a small portion of them come back into the shelter system, it’s absolutely going to take up the available space that we have in shelters.”

Gillis says that her case manager has effectively told her that there is no guarantee she’ll receive another kind of housing voucher, or even that there will be room for her in a family shelter. “That is fearful to hear that,” she says. “I have six children [and I have to] make sure I can put a key in a door, and they can come into a house every day, every night after school.”

Her notice of termination says that her case management services will expire next month, though Smith tells WAMU/DCist that most case services for the affected families will end at the beginning of 2022, shortly before their subsidies end.

The fiscal year 2022 budget passed by the D.C. Council allocates significant new investments in housing subsidies across a number of programs, including 1,012 permanent housing slots for individuals and 255 for families, along with more than 300 housing slots for “targeted affordable housing,” designed for those who have lighter case management needs. 

But DHS’s Smith says that despite the funding for those new vouchers, the current budget “does not allow the agency to continue to extend families in the [rapid rehousing] program indefinitely.” The agency hopes to potentially connect some of the existing rapid rehousing participants who face termination with other benefits, though it is unclear how many will qualify for different programs or whether the agency has enough financial resources to accommodate all of them.

“The agency is excited about the resources included in FY22 budget and we are taking all the necessary steps to assess and connect families to these resources based on the eligibility criteria,” Smith says. “100% of the resources allocated for FY22 will go towards transferring families from [rapid rehousing] to a permanent housing resource … or a program such as DC Flex [which provides families with roughly $600 in rent assistance per month].”  

During the Nov. 10 D.C. Council roundtable, DHS director Zeilinger said that the agency is “particularly focused” on adding eligible applicants — people who work or have worked in the last six months — to the DC Flex lottery. 

She also maintained, as she has historically, that the rapid rehousing program is not meant to provide indefinite support to families. 

“It is not realistic that homeless services will stay with a person until they are middle class. We will support at the time of crisis and sometimes [provide] longer-term supports, but we are not, by ourselves, going to be able to solve the rest,” she said.

While rapid rehousing recipients technically have 90 days to appeal a decision to terminate their benefits, Harding says that it’s critical residents file it within 15 days of receipt to ensure they receive a hearing date before the subsidy expires. 

“I’m just really worried that people are going to look at that date and feel like it’s far off and not appeal [the decision],” she says.

The announcement comes as Mayor Muriel Bowser begins her annual “Home for the Holidays” campaign, which promotes the city’s effort to accelerate the placement of homeless families in long-term housing.