The D.C. Housing Authority’s board of commissioners voted Wednesday to approve a rewrite of two massive documents guiding how the agency manages its housing programs, responding to the scathing 2022 report from DCHA’s parent agency dinging its administration of them.

The new administrative and operating guidelines – which include some old rules that DCHA officials say they will newly enforce – will apply to the 50,000 people who live in public housing complexes or use housing vouchers, along with those seeking to apply for either program.

Chief among the proposed changes is an overhaul to the agency’s public housing waiting list, which closed almost exactly a decade ago with 20,000 names on it. DCHA leaders will soon open up the waiting list to new applicants who will be able to sign up for units of specific sizes at certain complexes rather than joining a single, community-wide list. The agency will select new residents through a lottery system.

“Those who are looking from the outside, they don’t know all of the work that we’ve been doing to build organizational muscle and infrastructure at the same time to do this. And I have pushed my team [sic] that we can’t embrace any policy changes that we’re not ready to implement,” Brenda Donald, DCHA’s executive director, said during the Wednesday meeting. “These are not words on paper. This is part of a whole system change for DCHA.”

While early drafts of the proposals were published about two months ago, DCHA did not make public a final version of them on its website before the board held a vote Wednesday – meaning that program beneficiaries and their attorneys did not know going into the meeting which policies the board was voting to approve. (Preempting criticism about how quickly the agency moved on passing these documents, commissioner Christopher Murphy said, “It’s hard not to [ask], do you not understand the kind of pressure this agency is under?…I will be frustrated when the media inevitably suggests that people weren’t listened to.”)

During Wednesday’s board meeting, Donald said the site-based waiting lists would open some time this summer; DCHA will give families already on the public housing waiting list 30 calendar days to respond to the agency’s outreach before deprioritizing their cases.
But the nuts and bolts of that new system – including what information DCHA will provide about its complexes to prospective applicants, how many lists D.C. residents may join at one time, or how they will register for those lists – are not articulated in the new occupancy plan. It says only, “The DCHA will maintain site-based waiting lists; applicants can apply for the Development of their choice.”

“In general, the policies that they are proposing are very broad, very vague,” says Brit Ruffin, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. “If I’m an employee looking at it, figuring out how I’m supposed to implement this program – it doesn’t even have the complete requirements there that are in existence, in [federal] law or in our current D.C. law.”

When agency officials last sought to rewrite these documents about a decade ago, it took roughly four years, housing attorneys tell DCist/WAMU, and was written chapter by chapter in conjunction with legal service organizations that represent public housing clients. A third-party contractor drafted the current plan in just a fraction of that time, with DCHA making the occupancy plan public on February 14 with a 45-day comment period – prompting concerns from a coalition of housing advocates and legal service providers that the agency did not give the public adequate time to digest and weigh in on it.

“The speed at which this is all happening is very concerning,” says Amanda Korber, a housing attorney at Legal Aid DC, which joined seven other organizations in a letter asking DCHA to “reconsider its path forward.” Service providers have been given “no more detail [about programmatic changes] than has been in the public Facebook gatherings and at the two oversight hearings. We don’t have great insight,” Korber says.
In their letter to DCHA Director Brenda Donald, groups including Bread for the City, Children’s Law Center, Legal Counsel for the Elderly, and Equal Rights Center argue that the new rule changes do little to address known problems at the agency, instead saddling both residents and DCHA employees with bureaucratic paper-pushing that neither are equipped to manage.

The new regulations, for example, will require zero-income participants of the agency’s main voucher program to recertify their status every six months until they receive income. Yet critics have pointed to administrative issues, like DCHA’s struggle to manage the agency’s existing call volume – a problem articulated by residents and acknowledged by Donald during the D.C. Council’s annual performance oversight hearing of the agency last month – as evidence that the new changes will burden the agency. (Rachel Joseph, DCHA’s Chief Operating Officer, says these two processes are “not correlated as recertification happens on the property level.”)

“Not only will this place an incredible administrative burden on families that are no doubt contending with countless other intractable public benefits agencies, but it will also put a very real burden on DCHA,” the letter reads. “DCHA has not been able to timely process recertifications for years now, and yet it proposes that it will process many more with this rule.”

Other changes to DCHA’s priorities are old policies that the agency said it will be newly vigorous about enforcing. One of those changes will prevent most new public housing residents from moving in with some pets (grandfathering in two pets for existing public housing residents); another will require residents to perform 96 hours of community service per year.

Donald has touted the newly written administrative and occupancy plans as a response to the criticisms DCHA has garnered from HUD, whose Sept. 2022 review of agency procedures indicate that DCHA’s operating guidelines were often inconsistent with each other. But the corrective actions did not include a requirement that DCHA must completely rewrite its operating guidelines, and consequently, housing attorneys argue that doing so only obscures many of the agency’s most pressing concerns. (In an emailed statement to DCist/WAMU, Joseph wrote, “While we had originally proposed a more piecemeal approach to making policy updates, when we met with HUD in December, they recommended that we review and update every policy.”)

Lori Leibowitz, a housing attorney formerly with the Neighborhood Legal Services Program, testified Wednesday that “we have all been led to believe” that if DCHA approves the new protocols, “the HUD findings will be closed out.” Not true, she says: “All these people asking questions about process? That’s what HUD cares about. … Details matter. People will be denied vouchers and public housing based on these mistakes.”

Take for example the new site-based waiting lists, ostensibly designed to clear the years-long backlog that has prevented residents in need from applying for public housing for a decade. But much of the access issues residents face are compounded by the agency’s uniquely low occupancy rate – nearly 30% of units in the portfolio sit empty, making competition for housing even greater and forcing prospective tenants to wait longer for housing.

“Yes, [DCHA] had a waitlist problem,” says Korber. “But the public housing waitlist is stagnant because units have been sitting dilapidated and vacant. That’s part of my frustration – there is a mismatch between what they’re doing and what they’re trying to solve. That isn’t and wasn’t what the problem with the waitlist was.”

Joseph said in an emailed statement that DCHA “has taken extraordinary efforts – above and far beyond what is required by HUD – to engage applicants for eligibility,” but that only about 10% of waiting list applicants have responded to the agency’s outreach. Only another fraction of those deemed eligible, Joseph said, opted to “select available units on our public housing properties.”

Joseph said that DCHA will begin training staff on the new protocols in the next few weeks.

“These sudden changes feel punitive for many public housing residents. Many residents feel like they don’t understand new policies and mandates, and wonder how DCHA is going to help them understand them,” Daniel del Pielago, an organizing director at Empower DC, said during Wednesday’s meeting. “The problem isn’t the actual mandate, but the capacity of the agency to inform, manage, and track [them].”

This story has been updated to include comments from DCHA Chief Operating Officer Rachel Joseph.