In reviewing this year’s Point-In-Time Count, the annual measurement of homelessness in D.C., one shift becomes immediately clear: more families are living in shelters, a 20% increase from last year. District officials say that’s due largely to a change in one program.
Rapid Rehousing provides short-term housing — usually 12 months — for those exiting the shelter system, with the goal of developing a stable income to eventually become independent. Those who enter RRH work with case managers, receiving services and support that enable them to secure housing and employment, like childcare, health care, or education. Families or individuals participating in RRH pay 30% of their income towards rent.
In D.C., advocates have argued for years RRH has been failing participants, most of whom don’t exit the program earning enough to cover their housing when the program ends. According to a D.C. auditor’s brief from 2025, between the fiscal years of 2022 and 2024, 79% of families exited RRH without any increase in income, with 15% of families seeing a decline, the opposite of RRH’s stated goals.
This has led to calls to revise the program, including from D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson, and now the District seems prepared to make changes. The program has seen a budget decrease over the last few years. And Department of Human Services (DHS) Director Rachel Pierre said at an agency budget hearing this May, DHS, which runs the program, recently made adjustments to ensure families entering the system are well-equipped to succeed, sending fewer families into the program.
Despite this recent update, advocates question whether the issues with RRH run deeper and require more fundamental changes to ensure accessibility and progress for families.
A cyclical battle for survival
Despite RRH’s aim to get families to a stable income level, the program was not initially designed for families with little to no income. A product of the 2008 stock market crash, RRH “was really designed for people who had a stable job, well-paying job, and were able to afford rent until there was the market crash,” explained McKenna Osborn, the senior policy attorney at the Children’s Law Center, a legal service provider in the District working with children and families experiencing housing and economic instability.
According to Osborn, the way RRH operates has made it difficult for families — who often have high levels of economic instability — to build up income levels enough to pay rent after the RRH subsidy ends. As a result, landlords have lost trust in the system and no longer see an incentive to maintain their apartments, leaving families in unsafe or unlivable conditions.
Rather than families developing stable, long-term employment, Osborn argued the system creates a precarious, survival-based mode, which pushes adults to look for quick money to pay rent. “You’re not incentivized to enter a longer career program or college because you are focused on, ‘I need to be able to pay rent in 12 months.’ You survive,” Osborn said. “So you might take a lower-paying job or not pursue other career development opportunities because you’re so focused on, ‘I need to figure out how to pay rent.’”
Despite the services RRH provides, barriers exist that affect anyone seeking employment. One primary source of instability is childcare. While RRH can connect families to providers of childcare and apply for a D.C.-provided subsidy, childcare in D.C. is generally inaccessible and difficult to afford, especially for parents who have an unstable income.
For many families, their children are too young to enter school. And even when they are old enough, parents cannot predict when they will need to prioritize their child over work; so often, the decision can come down to taking care of their child or keeping their job.
Osborn shared an anecdote of a mother who, despite following the path towards stable employment, was not given the space to juggle both her professional and maternal responsibilities. “We had one client who worked hard to get her dental hygienist certificate – had only been working a few weeks, and her daughter’s daycare flooded, and the daycare just said ‘we can’t take care of the kid.’ Like they were shut for a week,” Osborn said.
This client ended up having to take time off work to take care of her child, resulting in her losing the job she worked tirelessly for. “She had to start all over,” Osborn said.
Beyond the barrier of childcare, families and individuals entering RRH are not always able to find stable income as quickly as the program expects them to.
Andy Wassenich, director of policy at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit providing services for individuals experiencing chronic homelessness, explained many homeless people in D.C. are nearing retirement age, in their 50s and 60s, which can make employment difficult and untenable.
But Wassenich also emphasized the trauma of homelessness that afflicts a person’s body, mind, and well-being. More often than not, employment is a much further step on the path to recovery.
“I don’t think people understand like really how traumatizing — and not just like necessarily because there’s been traumatic events, which there probably have been — but just simply what the compounded traumatic stress of being broke and being homeless, the toll that that takes on a body,” Wassenich said.
The impacts of homelessness on physical and mental well-being are clear: people experiencing homelessness have a greater mortality rate, 3.5 times higher than housed populations.
Despite the reality that RRH is largely treating people who are in acute conditions, Wassenich explained that the program is often misinterpreted as a less intensive support system: “Because you’re in Rapid Rehousing and not in Permanent Supportive Housing, the notion is that you have less vulnerabilities and you’re more capable, and so therefore, you require less case management intervention. And I don’t know that that’s the case.”
Per the 2025 auditor’s brief, most families leave RRH without any progress in their income or employment stability, suggesting the program doesn’t always provide the right support.
Where does RRH go from here?
The current changes DHS is implementing for RRH mainly involve restricting support to families with stable incomes or the potential for employment growth.
In her budget presentation this spring, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser acknowledged the program hadn’t always worked. The budget for the family side of the program has decreased in recent years, down fro more than $111 million in fiscal year 2024 to $36 million in fiscal year 2027. According to Mayor Bowser’s proposed budget, for individuals, the budget will decrease by $3 million in the coming year, effectively pausing entrances to the program.
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Alongside the budget changes, advocates are pushing new reforms to the program to ensure its future productivity. According to Osborn, the Children’s Law Center advocated for a RRH reform bill, titled the Rapid Re-Housing Reform Amendment Act, that would keep people in Rapid Rehousing who are eligible for another voucher in the program until they can be connected. The bill has yet to see any progress since being referred to committees in 2025.
One variation of the program currently under consideration is Career MAP, a five-year program structured similarly to RRH, with 30% of a family’s income expected to go towards rent, but with more support and benefits aimed at career development.
Based on DHS’s description of the program, one of Career MAP’s primary goals is to help families in overcoming benefit cliffs, described as “a sudden and often unexpected decrease in their public benefits that can occur with a small increase in earnings.” Because the decrease in benefits is often greater than the increase in income, families are disincentivized from higher earnings.
Career MAP has been running a pilot since 2022, and is expected to release its final results in 2028. The Lab did run a short, early study on Career MAP’s implementation in 2024, which found that mental health/trauma and childcare were two of the major influential forces that impacted participants and what they needed and/or lacked from Career MAP.
The future of these programs and alternatives to RRH may be uncertain; nevertheless, those currently serving families and individuals experiencing homelessness retain hope that the potential of these programs is worth waiting for.
“I think it is like certainly in an ideal world, but I think also in the real world, I think it [RRH}’s a vital tool that we should have available,” Wassenich said, “because there is a subsection of folks who become homeless for whom it is a good intervention, and I think we just have to find make sure that we’re putting those people into that intervention and tailoring it in a way that it works.”
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s July 29, 2026 edition.
