“We know you can’t just snap your fingers and get 100 percent affordable housing in a project,” says Eliana Golding, an analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. “But we can do a better job of asking developers to get on our page versus getting on theirs.”
As the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) wrote in a letter in late January to Bowser and the council, over 40,000 families are at risk of being evicted for non-payment of rent now that the eviction moratorium is lifted.
For permanent supportive housing applicants who were born in the District, the process to get these documents is fairly straightforward, according to Kate Coventry, a senior policy analyst at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
Tazra Mitchell, the policy director at the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, said there’s an economic imperative to stopping evictions in the District as well as a moral one.
An eviction crisis would deepen racial, economic and housing oppression in the District and stifle our ability to rebuild a prosperous economy. Averting this crisis is the right call, and dozens of organizations, including ours, are urging DC officials to act
Qubilah Huddleston, an education policy analyst at the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, which conducts research on budgets, said the spending increases sound “great overall.” But she said she wants more information about how the money will be spent.
Late last month, 38 organizations, including the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, Bread for the City, and Miriam’s Kitchen, called on Mayor Muriel Bowser to use roughly $500 million in reserve and surplus funding to immediately halt future evictions.
There’s no research suggesting that unhoused people who are offered homes contribute to a rise in crime in their new communities, a point that Kate Coventry of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute raised on Twitter Friday.
This month, a coalition of parents, educators & other education advocates sent a version of the letter below urging Mayor Bowser to commit funding for DC Public Schools technology tools and infrastructure to ensure equitable technology access for all students.
In 2020, the DC Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) partnered with the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center (Urban) to create an online tool to demystify the local police budget in DC, one of the most heavily-policed jurisdictions in America.