For the District’s extremely low-income residents, affordable housing can serve as a foundation for overall stability and well-being. Yet the District’s recent efforts to create and preserve affordable homes, while important, have not substantially expanded the availability of housing affordable to city’s lowest-income residents. By examining the subsidy cost of addressing severe rent burden among DC’s extremely lowincome residents, this report contextualizes the District’s present investments and outlines a ten-year blueprint to create 30,000 units of deeply affordable housing. The full subsidy cost to the District would be $2.6 billion in construction subsidies over ten years, with $732 million per year required for ongoing operating assistance once all affordable units have been created and occupied. This cost is on par with what the District spends on other key city services, such as public education and police and emergency services.1 The magnitude of the required investment suggests that the District would need to pursue forward-thinking strategies to maximize its subsidy dollars, such as the aggressive utilization of public land, and consider progressively raising revenue to dedicate to deeply.