One District body has a new answer to the perennial question of how the city should respond to homelessness.
D.C.’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) adopted its third strategic plan to end homelessness in the District on July 28 following a year-long delay after the previous plan expired last fall. Homelessness increased by 4.4% between 2025 and 2026, according to the most recent Point-in-Time Count, with 5,363 people experiencing homelessness in the nation’s capital.
If adopted by the mayor, the new plan, called Homeward D.C. 3.0, would govern D.C.’s response to homelessness until fiscal year 2030. It aims to prevent homelessness when possible and ensure it ends “quickly and permanently” when it occurs. Priorities include ensuring access to homeless shelters and supporting programs that can help people exit homelessness.
This is the third iteration of Homeward D.C. drafted by the ICH, D.C.’s group of advocates, service providers, and individuals with lived experience who convene to shape the District’s homelessness policy. Homeward 3.0 is much shorter than the past plans — with only four pages compared to Homeward 2.0’s 61 — and would be implemented in conjunction with annual work plans each year it is in effect.
During the final vote to approve Homeward 3.0, ICH members acknowledged it is sparser and less ambitious than previous versions, reflecting the District’s scaled-down resources to address homelessness following big investments earlier in the decade. They also spoke about the difficulty of creating a plan in the current national environment, as the Trump administration has put the fate of several programs up in the air. This uncertainty was part of what led the ICH to make Homeward 3.0 a three-year plan, rather than a five-year one, as in years past.
“I would like to be able to readapt and expand our scope as more resources become potentially available,” Lynn Amano, advocacy director at Friendship Place and member of the ICH, said at the meeting.
The plan comes as homeless services face not just federal, but also local uncertainty; D.C. prepares to vote in a new mayor in November, who may have different priorities around homelessness. This plan will not officially take effect until the mayor, either current Mayor Muriel Bowser or the next one, approves it.
Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, a self-described democratic socialist, won D.C.’s Democratic primary in June and is the clear frontrunner to replace Mayor Muriel Bowser. As a councilmember, Lewis George opposed Bowser’s cuts to homeless services and voted no on the fiscal year 2026 budget, arguing it did not protect the District’s most vulnerable residents.
In her final term, Bowser has handed down cuts to homelessness and social services, leaving advocates scrambling and the D.C. Council searching for funds to protect programs the District’s most vulnerable rely on. This summer, the council found one-time funds to reverse some of Bowser’s cuts, but Bowser refused to sign the budget, warning it will leave the next mayor and council with significant financial challenges.
Homeward 3.0 was drafted to build on the lessons learned from the Bowser administration’s last two plans, Homewards 1.0 and 2.0. As part of achieving the goals outlined in those plans, D.C. added more Permanent Supportive Housing for people experiencing chronic homelessness, built new shelters and bridge housing for single adults, and reduced family homelessness by 73% between 2015 and 2021.
However, the same level of investment was not made for individuals and youth, according to Homeward 3.0. And, the plan states, people experiencing homelessness were more vulnerable and required more support than the first Homewards accounted for. Homeward 3.0 cites multiple challenges the past plans faced, including a lack of funding, limited capacity among service providers, and difficulty coordinating across D.C. agencies.
The goals set in Homeward 1.0 and 2.0 fell short. When Homeward 1.0 was announced in 2015, the plan set out to reduce homelessness by 65% by the end of 2020. In reality, homelessness only declined by approximately 30%, based on Point-in-Time Count data collected in 2015 and 2021.
Homeward 3.0 does not have a similar goal. Instead, it outlines four priorities and 13 strategies meant to guide the District’s homeless services system over the next three years: supporting voucher and transitional housing programs to help people exit homelessness; providing year-round access to shelter; improving collaboration between D.C. government agencies, service providers, and those with lived experience; and maintaining homeless prevention and diversion programs, like rental assistance programs, the Homelessness Prevention Program, and Project Reconnect.
“One of its biggest strengths is that it’s intentionally trying to be kind of a more shorter, more focused document where we can highlight sort of the key values and goals,” said Adam Rocap, deputy chief executive officer and chief strategy officer at Miriam’s Kitchen and member of the Homeward 3.0 planning steering committee.
Each goal is accompanied by no more than four strategies to reach it, which generally name specific programs within the goal. For example, goal two calls for the maintenance of a year-round crisis response system for unhoused people. The strategies to reach this include providing shelter, case management, and essential services, and strengthening “outreach and day drop-in centers to connect people sleeping outside and in unsafe places to shelter and services.”
Rocap said previous plans were more robust, combining overarching goals and all of the action items needed to complete them into one document. Each goal had multiple pages of objectives, which were hard to keep track of, Rocap said, and the ICH was not successful in turning the lengthy document into annual project plans the city could implement.
Past plans also included goals around more than providing basic services. For example, in Homeward 2.0, goal 12 called for the city to provide leadership on creating a “right to housing in the United States,” and outlined action items for agencies like the D.C. Housing Authority and Office of Planning. There’s no evidence this advocacy was a focus of the D.C. government in past years, and creating a right to housing is not a goal in Homeward 3.0.
Under Homeward 3.0, the ICH would draft an annual work plan to interpret the strategic plan based on available resources and changing community needs. The work plan would evaluate how changes to local and federal budgets have impacted different populations and use data to assess the need and performance of D.C.’s homeless services system.
“Every year, we want to get in a rhythm of saying, ‘What are the resources? What’s happening this year? What do you prioritize?’” Kelly Sweeney McShane, co-chair of the ICH Strategic Planning Committee and head of the Homeward 3.0 committee, said at a recent ICH meeting.
This is a change from previous plans that tried to project the available resources in the future. Reevaluating funding each year for programs the plan relies on, like housing vouchers, transitional and bridge housing, and rental assistance programs, could better tailor the ICH’s recommendations.
“There’s a lot of changes in the city and in the federal government on lots of different levels, so that it’s even harder than it was in the past to say, ‘hey, this is how we think things should play out over five years,’” Rocap said. “So I think it’s a smarter structure.”
Recent federal funding fights show available funding can change quickly and significantly impact the programs available year to year. In July, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform advanced a bill that would prevent D.C. from making changes to its taxes and fees without Congressional approval, which would impact the District’s ability to budget. Nationally, the Trump administration is also attempting to reshape federal homelessness funding and move support away from permanent housing programs.
Continual conversations regarding funding obstacles occurred throughout the drafting of Homeward 3.0 and contributed to the plan’s one-year delay.
When Homeward 2.0 expired at the end of September 2025, Homeward 3.0 was supposed to be drafted and ready to go into effect. However, when Bowser enacted a city-wide government hiring freeze in May 2025 in an attempt to counteract a hole left by a lack of federal funding in the city’s budget, the ICH was left with only one full-time employee and forced to scale back its monthly meetings.
These staffing shortages delayed the development of Homeward 3.0, ICH Executive Director Theresa Silla told Street Sense last August. In fiscal year 2027, the ICH will only have the funds to support its executive director and possibly one deputy director.
ICH Strategic Planning Committee Co-Chair Aaron White said it is “heartbreaking” there will be at most two staff members supporting the ICH next fiscal year.
“I feel that we need more government support from the ICH as far as staffing,” White said.
Rocap agreed the reduction in staff is concerning, but pointed out the ICH has never been “particularly successful,” regardless of staffing. The ICH’s bylaws state it was created to facilitate collaboration between advocates, D.C. agencies, and those with lived experience on planning, policymaking, and performance management regarding homelessness services. However, the body does not pass laws, set agency policy, or have a say in how the city’s budget is used, limiting its impact and potentially the implementation of this latest plan.
The ICH unanimously passed Homeward 3.0 and passed its fiscal year 2027 work plan with one objection. The plan will now be submitted to the mayor’s office for review and adoption, and a roundtable about the plan is proposed for Sept. 30. But Silla said the dates and next steps for Homeward 3.0 are a “best guess,” as Bowser may decide not to adopt the plan and wait for the next mayor.
“We might, in fact, have to wait until January of next year, or even until that administration is set up and is able to review and approve or adopt our strategic plan,” Silla said at the July 28 meeting.
Still, ICH members seem ready to get to work with this new guidance. White said Homeward 3.0 is the best plan the ICH has adopted because it highlights a more practical approach to homelessness policy over the next three years.
“Right now, we have something a little smaller. We have something that’s more gradual that we can track, we can monitor, and then we can have other communities, stakeholders, government agencies, and providers pitch in and do the work as well,” White said. “This is a community effort.”
Rocap agreed, saying this new plan is a collaborative effort he hopes will be more successful, as advocates, government agencies, and other stakeholders have committed to working on an annual plan.
“What gives us the best chance of it being effective is sort of building this type of plan that’s leaner and everyone’s sort of committing from the outset to invest in that annual planning process,” he said
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s August 12, 2026 edition.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the plan will not go into effect without mayoral approval, and to correct that Lynn Amano’s quote was referencing the federal administration, not the local one. We regret the error.
