Nothing seemed to be off-limits at the eight-hour D.C. Council Housing Committee Oversight Roundtable on Oct. 22. The D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) faced intense scrutiny and a glimpse of praise from residents, advocates, and community leaders on its reform efforts.
The roundtable, the sixth of its kind in the past two years, was not only a critical checkpoint for DCHA’s reform progress, but a forum to hear from over 60 public witnesses whether policies and achievements were improving the everyday lives of public housing residents and voucher holders. As the city’s largest landlord, over 50,000 District residents rely on DCHA for affordable and safe housing.
The housing authority has solved 75% of the 113 issues found in a 2022 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report, according to Committee on Housing Chair Robert White. The report, which dinged the housing authority for issues like unliveable units in its public housing properties, low occupancy rates, and poor management of its voucher programs, set off two years of heightened oversight of the agency, including the October hearing.
According to White, some of the issues found in the report the agency has addressed include new leadership and senior management; increased transparency and accountability around budgets and salaries; allocating millions of dollars to improve public housing; and reengaging residents through in-person meetings and office hours. While voucher utilization and public housing occupancy rates have also raised considerably, delayed lease-ups and lack of overall communication still need to be resolved, according to White.
While community members who testified praised the achievements of DCHA’s Executive Director Keith Pettigrew’s first year, they were clear the agency still has a long way to go. Pettigrew replaced the embattled former Executive Director Brenda Donald in 2023.
Dozens of witnesses expressed concerns about the need for more clarity and communication around the agency’s new three-year recovery plan, the agency’s lack of transparency regarding the process for setting rents for housing vouchers, and the lack of resident representation in DCHA’s Stabilization and Reform (STAR) Board.
The road to recovery
In June, Pettigrew released DCHA’s Three-Year Recovery Plan, outlining goals for each of the agency’s 14 departments. White criticized the lack of specific timelines for many of these goals, saying he expects Pettigrew to release a written update of the plan with more concrete timelines in December of this year.
However, service providers and advocates, including Empower DC’s Housing Director Daniel del Pielago, say tenants have not been fully informed about the plan’s rollout and its consequences. The plan includes potential changes to subsidies and the process of repositioning — converting public housing units into other rental assistance programs, which could involve selling buildings or extensive construction.
“This makes public housing residents feel left out of important plans that will affect their housing and their lives,” del Pielago said.
Ahead of the December update on the plan’s implementation, DCHA shared the three main time-sensitive and measurable goals White asked them to prioritize and update the council on: raising public housing occupancy rates, increasing voucher utilization, and reducing the lease-up timeline. As of September, the agency met the first two goals.
In the last year, residents moved into 790 public housing units, raising the public housing occupancy from 74% to 84%, beating the agency’s goal of 83% occupancy by the end of December 2024. About 1,200 units are still available, excluding the 1,700 units that need more than a month to be fixed from unlivable conditions and the 500 that will be demolished or dispositioned rather than brought back.
While DCHA also reached its goal of 85% voucher utilization, there are still 2,400 voucher holders that still need to be connected to housing, according to Pettigrew. Out of these 2,400, 1,100 have federal vouchers and 1,300 have vouchers issued by the city.
Many voucher holders are experiencing homelessness or housing instability as they search for a unit, leading to the third goal, which was to reduce the local voucher lease-up timeline to 75 days on average. As of September, the average timeline was 91 days.
Jamar Byrd Bey, a multi-generation Washingtonian who is currently homeless, reminded the council of the people behind the data and the importance of addressing D.C.’s housing problem.
Byrd Bey said he spent over $100 in application fees — money he said he didn’t have and was the difference between going hungry or not — after receiving his voucher in April, only to finally get an approved apartment and lose it, because DCHA failed to inspect it within six to eight weeks and the landlord leased it to someone else.
“You all here on the council and committees, you need housing to do your job because you need to be mentally stable in order to handle all these problems that people are coming at you with and trusting you to solve,” he said. “So I think that every one of you guys should be able to understand how housing, adequate housing, affects the mental health of a person, and allows them to be successful in life, in the world.”
Rent reasonableness and the voucher backlog
One issue potentially causing delays for the 2,400 voucher holders who still need to find an apartment is rent reasonableness. Since July 2023, DCHA has used the process to approve voucher leases, considering an apartment’s location, size, type, age, amenities, and utilities to determine whether the rent the landlord is asking for is reasonable. The housing authority began using rent reasonableness in 2023 after HUD said their past process for checking rents was too lenient.
DCHA reviews rent for reasonableness using AffordableHousing.com software after a lease application is submitted and then informs the landlord and prospective tenant of the result. While there is a public tool on AffordableHousing.com that can be used by anyone to gauge what prices have been accepted at similar properties, it is not a precise measure of each individual apartment’s differences.
“Two identical units in the same building can have different rent reasonableness outcomes because they’re based on different comparable units each time a search is generated,” Kelly Sweeney McShane, president and CEO of Community of Hope said.
Witnesses argued that knowing if a unit is rent reasonable earlier would spare residents from paying non-refundable fees for applications that might ultimately be denied.
According to McShane, the wait time between application submission and DCHA’s rent reasonability check often surpasses 30 days. This, she said, creates undue stress in an already complicated process and often results in families and individuals losing housing opportunities.
DCHA Deputy Executive Director Nicole Wickliffe said that before the end of the year, DCHA will have staff available to run rent reasonableness for landlords in advance of a tenant applying. If a landlord has all the information necessary to run the program, it can be done in 10 to 15 minutes, according to Wickliffe.
Resident representation on the DCHA board
The 2022 HUD report underscored significant mismanagement within DCHA, citing failures in providing maintenance and liveable housing. The findings prompted the D.C. Council to vote to replace the previous 13-member DCHA board with a temporary, nine-member, and two non-voting participants, Stabilization and Reform (STAR) Board in early 2023.
While the previous board had three elected public housing residents, the new structure only has one voting resident, leaving many residents feeling underrepresented.
Linda Brown, who lives in Greenleaf Senior with her adult daughter, was one of several people in the meeting to decry the lack of representation on the board.
“The board’s lack of resident elected commissioners is a major concern. There needs to be residents’ elected commissioners from the following property types: seniors, the disabled, family, and current actual voucher holders,” Brown said, referencing the structure of the old DCHA board. “Why I’m concerned is I don’t feel represented, especially in those decisions that limit the ability to live in safe environments inside and out.”
The temporary STAR Board recommended implementing a new permanent seven-member board starting in 2026 in a report to the mayor and the council, according to STAR Chairman Raymond Skinner. Skinner said at the hearing the preliminary recommendation includes only one public housing resident, the current resident of the Citywide Resident Advisory Board, who is elected by residents, and a voucher holder, appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the council.
This limited representation has led to distrust and frustration among residents.
“How can public housing residents be fairly represented with one vote on the entire board?” ANC 6D Commissioner Rhonda Hamilton said. “If we don’t share our stories from our own mouth someone else will tell their own versions of the truth. The suffering of the people in the city from policies, dysfunctional systems, and ineffective agencies runs deep and cannot be sugar-coated.”
