Since 2013, nearly 40,000 low-income D.C. residents have been on a waitlist for federal housing vouchers. In 2024, almost half of those people were finally “pulled” from the voucher waitlist, but thus far, only a fraction of them have actually moved into housing.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program is a federal assistance program that helps Washingtonians who struggle to afford housing by providing a subsidy they can put towards rent. Over the last decade, the need for housing assistance has become far higher than the supply, and so few people have come off the waitlist and into housing. Advocates and voucher holders blame the low conversion rate from being on the waitlist to moving into housing on outdated information, communication issues, and a lack of support throughout the application and housing search process.
2024 was the first full calendar year on the job for Keith Pettigrew, the new executive director of the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA), which manages both the list and the vouchers. After Pettigrew took over, DCHA “pulled” about 20,000 names from the federal housing voucher waitlist, contacting the families who asked for help years ago to see if they were still interested.
As of January, just under 600 families have moved into housing. In all, 4,527 people have been pulled and put on the road to housing, according to the numbers DCHA provided to Street Sense.
Between December 2023 and Jan. 8, 2025, DCHA contacted 19,563 people on the waitlist, sending each applicant two separate pieces of mail in the post. This contact deems families and individuals “pulled” from the waitlist, according to a DCHA spokesperson. The outreach notified applicants their names had come up on the waitlist and provided the next steps to determine eligibility.
Only about one-third of people responded to this initial step, according to a DCHA spokesperson.
Of those 19,563 “pulled” applicants, mail to 3,405 was returned undeliverable, and 9,829 had no response — as in, the notification was delivered, but the applicant did not respond. Given many of the applicants first signed up for the waitlist years ago, it is possible they moved, and the notification went to an old address.
Lakisha Mooney, who received her voucher eight years ago, would have been in that “delivered but no response” category. Her name was up on the waitlist for years, but she didn’t know it because the programs she was in and DCHA didn’t communicate with each other.
Mooney, 49, disabled in a mobility chair, was on the voucher waitlist for 19 years. She remembers her daughter was two years old when she first signed up for the waitlist. She’s 29 now. During those years, Mooney was in Rapid Rehousing (RRH). She rented a home for over two years, became homeless again, went back into the shelter system, and then lived in a Motel 6 on Georgia Avenue NW through RRH again for five years before finally getting a federal voucher.
But, as she’d later learn, during those five years at Motel 6, Mooney’s name had been pulled from the federal voucher waitlist. Through happenstance, as she was working through housing issues within the RRH program, she ended up at the desk of a DCHA worker who’d been looking for her for five years. The DCHA worker had every address she’d ever lived at. He said he’d been to Motel 6 looking for Mooney multiple times and was told Mooney had moved out. In some of those cases, she had only moved hotel rooms.
DCHA’s official stance is that it’s the applicant’s responsibility to update the agency with their current address. For the time being, the 13,234 people DCHA has reached out to but has gotten no response from won’t lose their place in line and can contact DCHA to apply for a voucher years later. People who think their names may have been pulled from the waitlist can contact the DCHA’s customer call center at 202-535-1000.
Of the fewer than 6,000 people who did respond, just one-third of the total number contacted, 1,801 had their application deemed ineligible or denied. Applicants have been waiting on the list for years, so they could have seen a change of income, marital status, or even moved to a new state, which results in denial of an application.
Another 1,789 families had an incomplete application, which was returned to them to complete. This could mean they failed to answer a question or attach a supporting document, like a pay stub. Another 436 people have an application in progress, and 563 applicants are eligible and just need to attend a voucher briefing to officially receive their voucher. Just 9% of those contacted, 1,740 people, have received vouchers so far.
But the voucher isn’t the end of the road. Of the 1,740 people who have received vouchers, 978 are looking for an apartment; 165 had their voucher expire because they couldn’t find housing within the required 180-day period; and 597, or 3% of all those contacted, have moved into homes or apartments.
This is partially because voucher holders often feel like they get little support in finding an apartment, Daniel del Pielago, the housing director for the advocacy group Empower DC, said. The organization helps residents, specifically low-income residents, organize and create community coalitions and campaigns around issues such as environmental justice, housing justice, and combatting gentrification. Through del Pielago’s work, he often meets with federal voucher holders and those on the waitlist to hear their issues with DCHA, organizing to seek change around common issues, including the difficulty of finding housing with a low barrier to entry and the process of finding housing before a voucher expires.
Voucher holders may have to deal with illegal source-of-income discrimination when landlords refuse to rent to voucher holders. DCHA also has to approve the rent of the unit, so if an individual finds a good place but the rent is too high, they have to start over. “There’s a briefing that happens when people get their voucher,” del Pielago said. “But after that briefing, people feel like they’re left to their own devices.”
An expired voucher doesn’t necessarily dash a family’s dreams of housing, but it does mean a voucher holder needs to ask DCHA for an extension and cite a viable reason, like a medical emergency or the landlord filling the unit as a voucher holder was going through the application process.
In addition to those still in the housing process, another 18,000 people on the waitlist have yet to be contacted. As of December 2023, the waitlist had 38,622 applicants, according to DCHA. The agency has modeled how the prioritization of 1,300 families exiting the Rapid Rehousing (RRH) program for federal housing vouchers will impact those still on the waitlist, and staff said in July projections they predict the agency will begin addressing people on the waitlist again in early 2025.
Being “pulled” from the Housing Choice Voucher Program waitlist can mean many things. But by the numbers, more often than not, it doesn’t mean moving into housing. For five years, Mooney was considered pulled from the waitlist. Her case begs the question: where are the 13,000 people DCHA hasn’t heard back from, and are they still struggling to find affordable housing? Have they, like Mooney, been going back and forth between Rapid Rehousing and homeless shelters?
“How did I get Rapid Rehousing when I have a federal voucher waiting for me in your office?” Mooney asked. “How?”
