For the last few years, D.C.’s homeless services system has given Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) vouchers to dozens of people each month, helping them move out of shelters and off the street into apartments. But this winter, as the fiscal year 2025 budget cuts kick in, only 10 to 11 individuals experiencing homelessness will be matched with a voucher each month — the result of the lowest funding for PSH since the District passed its first strategic plan to end homelessness in 2015. Service providers expect this change to strain an already overburdened system.
Along with the beleaguered Rapid Rehousing program, permanent housing has been key in the city’s efforts to end homelessness. The PSH program is designed to provide long-term housing vouchers for those who are chronically homeless and remain at immediate risk of being unhoused. The District’s former Mayor Adrian Fenty started the program in 2008, as part of his Housing First initiative, and its availability varies each year with the D.C. Council and mayor’s willingness to fund it. The ‘housing first’ approach of programs like PSH has widely been regarded as one of the most effective ways to offer long-term housing stability nationwide.
Between April to June of this year, 5,050 of the 7,000 individual adults who accessed homeless services in D.C. were recommended for PSH according to data from the Department of Human Services (DHS) presented at an Oct. 10 Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) meeting. Almost 1,000 of those adults are chronically homeless, meaning they lived in shelters or places not meant for habitation for at least a full year or four times in three years, and have a disabling medical condition.
Though the demonstrated need is great, the city only has 148 PSH vouchers for individuals in the 2025 fiscal year, a fraction of the 1,260 vouchers advocacy groups such as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and The Way Home Campaign pushed the city to fund. This is the third consecutive year the city has decreased the budget for PSH vouchers for individuals.
However, advocates stress voucher availability is only one challenge in an inefficient process, as long processing times delay the ability of voucher recipients to move into housing. As of October, 1,197 individuals with a PSH voucher remained unhoused, and the city still had 227 PSH vouchers left to be allocated from previous fiscal years.
What this means for the next year
Thanks to the large investment the council made in fiscal year 2022, D.C. was previously able to match as many as 100 people to housing each month. But with only 148 new vouchers, the city now expects to match just 10 to11 people a month from October 2024 to September 2025. Thirty of the total vouchers are reserved for transfers from other programs such as Rapid Rehousing (RRH), which got cut in half for individuals this fiscal year.
The vouchers were helping more people get on the path to housing each month, but now the system will face greater challenges as demand far outweighs availability.
“The big problem is that there are more than 10 or 11 people entering homelessness or becoming chronically homeless, becoming fully eligible for a voucher on a monthly basis,” said Andy Wassenich, policy director at Miriam’s Kitchen.
Pointing to the rising homelessness rates in D.C., Wassenich noted that though rates of homelessness are lower than in the recent past, rates of unsheltered homelessness have been increasing consistently over the past two years. He’s also concerned by an expected rise in the number of people who visit drop-in centers or engage with outreach workers as they wait for housing during a year where DHS-funded outreach teams, such as Miriam’s Kitchen, have reduced their staff due to budget cuts.
“When we get to this time next year, there are going to be even more people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness as we’re not really putting a dent into the inflow and addressing a lot of the causes that make people homeless to begin with,” said Wassenich.
Getting connected with housing resources can be a long and challenging process. The first step to housing with a PSH voucher involves undergoing a Vulnerability Index-Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Tool assessment, to determine what resources a person is eligible and recommended for.
People with the highest scores and longest periods of confirmed homelessness are prioritized for vouchers. With fewer vouchers available, advocates say many people who desperately need housing, especially those with vulnerable health conditions, will be left out.
“There are people who are literally going to die without housing in our system because they have diseases that are manageable and treatable if you have housing, and are not manageable and treatable if you don’t,” said Kate Coventry, deputy director of legislative strategy at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.
Why the process is so long
The amount of time it takes between being matched with the PSH program and moving into housing has decreased since 2022, from 506 days to 241 days on average. But hundreds of people who have vouchers are still homeless; only five people have been able to sign a lease and use their vouchers from the 150 funded vouchers for the 2023-2024 period, according to data from DHS.
This is not a new challenge for DHS and the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA). Even when the city funded a record 2,400 PSH vouchers in FY 2022, only 600 people moved into housing within the fiscal year. Out of the remaining 1,800 voucher holders, 600 were still waiting to move into housing at the start of October.
This trend has continued over the years, with hundreds or thousands of applications piled up and still waiting to be processed when newly funded vouchers become available. After someone is matched to a voucher, they still have to apply for the program, find an apartment, and have the apartment approved by the city, and delays can arise at every step.
For instance, even with a PSH subsidy, individuals are expected to pay 30% of their income towards rent. When someone applies for a voucher, DCHA requires income verification and data to not be older than 30 days. If a reviewer reaches the application more than a month later, due to the backlog, this starts a lengthy back and forth to get updated documentation, which still might not be reviewed in time.
“We’ve had situations where people have had to resubmit income information multiple times,” Wassenich said. “We had one person, I think it was 10 or 12 times.”
And there are still hiccups even after someone is approved for a voucher. Voucher holders must apply specifically to the unit they want to lease, so the apartment’s rent can be assessed as reasonable or not, and if the rent is too high, they have to start their housing search over
Though the city has sped up the process some, advocates think there is more to do.
“One thing we used to do a long time ago was to have these things called boot camps,” Coventry said. “It’d be 100 days, and you’d set a goal of like, in 100 days we’re gonna house 60 people. And then, as you did it, you identified: what were the problems that were making it so that it was taking longer than 100 days?
According to advocates, it is impossible to solve homelessness in the District without an investment in housing resources.
“The only thing that ends homelessness is housing,” Wassenich said. “We need to be better about finding ways to fund that and make that happen. I think we need to as a community, as a homeless services community, be more vocal about the fact that in a down budget year, it’s not okay to slash budgets like this, when the need is so great.”
