Three D.C. families are suing the city for ending their rental subsidies, potentially forcing them into homelessness.
The families, who until recently rented housing with the help of D.C.’s Rapid Rehousing (RRH) program, were removed from RRH along with hundreds of other families earlier this year. They are asking to be reinstated in the program, citing a lack of due process along with claims the city had the funds to keep families in the program “yet chose, arbitrarily and capriciously, not to consider individual extensions,” according to the lawsuit.
RRH is a short-term subsidy that pays a portion of a family or individual’s rent for a market-rate apartment over a year, with the possibility of a six-month extension. The lawsuit claims the city broke a 2023 law that amended RRH and required the city to consider extensions of the time-limited program on a case-by-case basis when the Department of Human Services (DHS) decided to mass exit 2,200 families from the program earlier this year. According to Amber Harding, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, families who were removed from the program received an exit letter that included language that denied them the right to be considered for extensions.
“Families are individuals with individual concerns and needs, and just saying with a broad stroke nobody gets extensions is an incredibly harmful, and we think unlawful, practice,” Harding said.
Plaintiffs Angel Gregory, Sierra Moore, and Britne Thomas are represented by the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless and the D.C. Children’s Law Center in the suit, filed on Oct. 22 with the Office of Administrative Hearings. The nonprofit law firms are aiming for certification to make the case a class action lawsuit and include all 816 families removed from RRH between April and June of this year, according to Harding.
The case is the first class action lawsuit to be filed in the Office of Administrative Hearings. If it is certified, other families exited from RRH can join the case and be eligible for any remedies, like reinstatement in the program. The process is uncharted territory, Harding says, so she’s unsure how long the whole case will take. But in her mind, it’s the best way to help all the exited families maintain their housing.
Many families enter RRH from a homeless shelter, and the program is the lifeline allowing them to get stable housing. Once it’s gone, families struggle to stay afloat.
Britne Thomas, a 35-year-old mother of two, used RRH to move out of a shelter in 2020. Like many other families, she received extensions throughout the pandemic to keep her family housed. But now the city claims these extensions are why the program has ballooned and become unsustainable.
Thomas has had three jobs throughout the program, which aims to help families get back on their feet and increase their income, a feat few families achieve. Thomas said before she even joined the program, she heard from other people who had been through RRH that it was a “set-up.” The program helps you move in, but then you can’t afford the rent, and you end up back in the shelter, they said.
“I’m not going to say they haven’t been a help, because where would without them paying that portion of my rent, but at the same time, where am I now?” Thomas asked.
Thomas says she is perpetually underemployed in an apartment she can’t afford. The program hasn’t paid her rent since June, so she’s waiting for the inevitable eviction notice that will mean her next stop is a shelter unless she can find friends or family to live with.
“It’s not just me, there’s really people going back to the shelters,” Thomas said. “And that’s a place I don’t want for nobody. Even though it’s not as bad as people make it seem, I wouldn’t want that for nobody.”
In 2018 and 2019, that was the case for many families, as 42% of the people who exited the RRH program then returned to the homeless services system, according to a report prepared by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness and cited in an article on the failures of RRH by the Washington City Paper.
In 2024, the cycle of homelessness continues. DHS is in shelters offering RRH to new families, even as it removes 2,000 families from the program and claims there’s no funding for the housing vouchers set aside in the budget to keep families being exited from the program off the streets.
DHS spokesperson said the agency does not comment on active litigation.
Families who were removed from the program have likely lost other benefits as well. During the pandemic, the nearly $30,000 on average that went to many low-income D.C. families was a lifeline that kept many from facing food and housing insecurity, and now the families are again struggling to make ends meet, according to a new report from the United Planning Organization and broken down by Street Sense.
“If this last year has shown anything it’s how dysfunctional this program and how badly in need of reform it is,” Harding said. “Unfortunately it just keeps getting worse and more and more harmful to families. We’ll do everything we can to mitigate that, but the program needs to be reformed.”
