Dear Councilmembers,

As we begin the new fiscal year, the Greater Washington Community Foundation and its Partnership to End Homelessness Leadership Council thank you for the substantial progress made toward ending homelessness through the FY 2023 DC budget. Thanks to your efforts, hundreds of individuals and families facing chronic homelessness will have the dignity and security of a permanent home, putting DC on a path to ending chronic homelessness. That is a truly amazing accomplishment that should be celebrated.

The Partnership to End Homelessness (PTEH) is a collective effort of private sector business leaders, philanthropists, and national and local nonprofits working to ensure homelessness is rare, brief, and non-recurring. The Partnership members engage directly to end homelessness in DC, but we know that public-sector investment, aligned with private sector resources, is the only way to ensure that everyone in our community has the stability that housing provides.

The progress made in the FY 2023 budget is laudable. We thank you for adopting a budget that provides permanent supportive housing to 500 individuals and 260 families, funding to help 400 families facing expiring Rapid Rehousing subsidies, and $51 million for badly needed repairs to public housing. We also applaud the provision of $444 million for the Housing Production Trust Fund, with a commitment to meeting the target that 50 percent is used to serve households with incomes below 30 percent of Median Family Income.

The budget is the necessary first step of the process toward ending homelessness, but not the end. It will be critically important to take steps to ensure that funds are put to use effectively, with assertive steps to implement them and with active Council oversight. In particular, we urge you to work with the DC Housing Authority to ensure that new vouchers are made available quickly and that public housing repair funds are used well. We appreciate the legislation adopted by the Council, that allows voucher holders to self-certify their identity, and other efforts to remove barriers to leasing up a unit. We urge you to do even more to ensure that residents can use their voucher quickly and easily to get into a home of their choice. And we fervently ask you to meet the HPTF requirement to target households with extremely low incomes, which has not been met for years.

Beyond that, maintaining the progress in the FY 2023 budget is critically important and will require greater future investments in deeply affordable housing and eviction prevention, places where the FY 2023 budget fell short. As we start looking toward the FY 2024 budget – it is never too early – we are concerned that the District’s budget did not provide enough funding for all families with expiring Rapid Rehousing subsidies, and did not create a plan for fixing that program’s serious problems. We urge the Council to pass pending Rapid ReHousing reforms, and for the mayor and Council to fund them in the next budget cycle. The 2023 budget also seriously underfunded emergency rental assistance and provided a very small number of LRSP vouchers compared with the need. These must be priorities as we continue to work toward our shared goal of ending homelessness in DC.

Thank you again for your leadership and commitment to ending homelessness in our city. We look forward to continuing to work with you to ensure everyone in DC has a safe and stable place to call home.

Sincerely,

Tonia Wellons

President & CEO
Greater Washington Community Foundation

Co-Chair Partnership to End Homelessness Leadership Council