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Homes for an Inclusive City: A Comprehensive Housing Strategy for Washington, DC
On April 6, 2006, the Task Force released its final report, Homes for an Inclusive City. The report lays out a fifteen-year blueprint of the goals, methods, schedule, and estimated public and private funds for improving the housing of District residents and ensuring better access to affordable housing.
The Task Force recommendations fall into several categories:
Doubling the effort. The city should implement its "Vision for Growing an Inclusive City" and do so by doubling current annual expenditures on housing.
Preserving Existing Affordable Housing. The city must give priority to preserving at least 30,000 existing affordable units including all federally assisted housing.
Producing New Housing. The city should produce an additional 55,000 units by 2020 and ensure that at least one-third or about 19,000 units are affordable on a long-term basis. The District should support a balanced growth policy which allows for increased population densities and mixed income, mixed-use development along major corridors and at transit stops and approve a mandatory inclusionary zoning requirement for all new housing.
Increasing Homeownership. The city should increase its homeownership rate from 41% to 44% and provide more assistance to tenants seeking to purchase their units.
Supporting Extremely Low Income Renters. The city should directly assist an additional 14,600 extremely low-income renter households by adopting a local rent supplement program.
Supporting Neighborhoods. The city should target existing neighborhoods with the potential for sustained improvement and coordinate its investments in them. The city should continue its efforts to transform distressed public and assisted housing projects into viable mixed-income neighborhoods. The city should pursue its efforts to convert the numerous large parcels of land into new neighborhoods with housing affordable to all income levels.
Housing for Persons with Special Needs. The city should integrate housing for persons with special needs into all types of housing in neighborhoods throughout the city. Permanent housing solutions should be favored over short-term fixes. Housing and support services for special needs populations should be closely coordinated. The mayor's plan to end homelessness should be fully implemented. Eight percent of all units in the city should be accessible to people with physical disabilities.
Streamlining the Process. The mayor and council should designate a member of the cabinet as chief of housing, charged with improving, streamlining, and coordinating the actions of the several city housing agencies. The mayor and council should support needed reforms of, and provide the resources necessary to, the critical housing regulatory agencies, especially the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs.
Other Critical Programs. Housing programs alone cannot create a livable, inclusive city. Equally critical to attracting and retaining residents are much needed improvements in schools, public safety, health care, recreation facilities, transportation, and air and water quality.
Funding the higher effort. The city can and should tap new sources of revenue for the Housing Trust Fund to support the subsidies needed to keep homeownership and rental housing affordable. This includes:
- increasing the portion of the deed recordation and transfer tax dedicated to the Trust Fund from 15% to 20%;
- restoring the level of the deed recordation tax to 1.5% and dedicating the entire proceeds from the 0.4% increment to the Trust Fund;
- earmarking 5% of the increase in revenue from residential real estate taxes over a base year for the Trust Fund;
- assessing a direct linkage fee for some types of commercial-residential development; and
- requiring commercial developers granted planned-unit development zoning to contribute a fee to the Trust Fund.
Implementation. The mayor and council should act immediately on these recommendations. The mayor should report regularly on implementation progress.
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LEGISLATION
Download a PDF of the Comprehensive Housing Strategy Act of 2003.
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