Providers ask D.C. housing committee to fund more supportive vouchers and speed the voucher-to-lease process

Representatives from service providers told the Committee on Housing that D.C. must invest in permanent supportive housing (PSH) for single adults and fix backlogged voucher processes that delay placement of people experiencing chronic homelessness.

“Permanent supportive housing is a nationally recognized housing-first best practice,” said Andy Wosnick, director of policy at Miriam’s Kitchen, which leads the Way Home Campaign. He told the committee the Mayor’s proposed FY26 budget includes no PSH vouchers for single adults and urged the Council to fund PSH vouchers at the campaign’s recommended pace.

Wosnick and Community of Hope President and CEO Kelly Sweeney McShane described progress on voucher processing but said significant bottlenecks remain. McShane said providers, DCHA and the Department of Human Services had agreed to a third-party, facilitated process review to identify steps that could shorten the time from voucher match to lease-up, and that participants were aiming to reduce that timeline to 90 days.

Wosnick asked the Council to consider a multi-year commitment of new PSH vouchers. The Way Home Campaign asked the Council for 1,260 PSH vouchers per year for three years; Council Member White and other witnesses noted D.C. has struggled in the past to build administrative capacity when voucher allocations arrived in large, one-time infusions.

Several speakers, including Makenna Osborne of the Children’s Law Center, flagged an additional urgency: roughly 587 Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHV) that have been used locally will lose their federal funding in FY26 and will need a local subsidy to avoid exits from housing. DCHA and DHS are coordinating on a continuity plan, committee members said, and the authority reported it had been engaging with providers on prioritizing lease-up.

Director Pettigrew acknowledged improvements and said DCHA and DHS had begun biweekly coordination meetings with providers to streamline processes. Noeli Wishart, DCHA’s utilization supervisor, told the committee the average time from voucher issuance to lease-up for federal vouchers was about 97 days for households that do complete leasing, and that DCHA planned to continue working with partners to reduce that timeframe.

Committee members asked DCHA for process metrics, including inspection response times, and asked providers to submit concrete recommendations for pilots or short-term process changes that could be tested during the budget year.

Providers indicated a willingness to pilot contracted workflows — for example, nonprofit partners handling certain eligibility steps or inspections — but said such changes should be carefully scoped and tested to avoid creating new bottlenecks.

The committee kept the record open for written testimony through June 6.