Long-Term Housing Affordability for The District of Columbia

Over the past decade, rising rents have eliminated nearly all low-priced unsubsidized housing in the District of Columbia’s housing market. This dramatic loss of low-priced market-rate housing has accelerated in the last decade, due to the District’s remarkable growth, which began in 2000 and reversed five decades of decline.

At the same time that we’ve lost this subsidized low-price (rental) housing, prices for homebuyers have also risen out-of-reach of most moderate and low-income households. With the unsubsidized market shifting away from providing homes for lower-income households, the preservation and expansion of committed affordable housing becomes an urgent part of the strategy to sustain a more inclusive DC.

Expiring affordable homeownership units are not tracked as closely. But many of the district-led investments in affordable homeownership units, which expanded in the early 2000s, are now expiring, enabling assisted owners to sell their units at market prices.

This turnover will eliminate the affordability of homes in neighbourhoods that might have long since been moderately priced. Taking on the unfolding crisis in expiring affordability requirements, the District of Columbia’s Housing Preservation Strike Force in June 2016 offered recommendations to stop the loss of existing affordable housing with expiring use restrictions.4 This paper explores how we can avoid the crisis of expiring affordability commitments in the future.

Read more: Global Affordability Crisis
 Innovative Affordable Housing Policy