Councilmember Nadeau made the following remarks ahead of the vote on the Committee on Housing’s FY27 Budget Markup on Wednesday, May 20.
Chairperson White, I want to offer congratulations to you and your team for the fine work on this budget – as always, I believe approving these committee recommendations today leaves these agencies in a much better place than where you found them.
I am glad that I was able to support some of our shared goals through transfers from the Public Works & Operations Committee. This includes 12 new LRSP housing vouchers starting in FY28, which combined with your contributions supports a total of 38 new vouchers. I believe I’ve been able to contribute funding to affordable housing vouchers in every single budget I’ve worked on as Councilmember. Given that this is the last Housing Committee budget I will be voting on, there’s no way I was going to break that streak now, even in a tight budget. The need for residents is just too great, and I hope that Council will continue to carry this torch in years to come.
I was happy to send a transfer to for personnel resources at DHCD that are required to fully-implement reforms and improvements to the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act included in Title 4 of the RENTAL Act passed last year. I will flag for colleagues that there is at least $700,000 in non-personnel costs outstanding to fulfill that bill’s fiscal impact.
Those funds start in FY28 as well – candidly, I hope that will allow for implementation of TOPA reforms under a new administration that is less actively hostile to such a bedrock of the District’s housing ecosystem.
Outside of the Housing Committee, I also appreciate your $1M transfer to help close the significant gap in funding for the Access to Justice Program. I know many others are very grateful for that contribution.
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I want to briefly elevate a few components of the Housing committee’s proposed budget:
First, I appreciate the committee’s changes to the Mayor’s proposed subtitle on HPTF reporting, which sends a clear message that affordability targets are meant to apply on a fund level, rather than imposing those requirements on each individual project that’s funded. We’ve heard in no uncertain terms that the agency’s recent pivot in this direction has been disastrous to the viability of projects, without getting us much closer to our goals of more affordable housing production.
I also see your proposed reforms to streamline Inclusionary Zoning as an important step towards making that program work as promised, both for owners of IZ units and prospective tenants. There is no reason that IZ should be as onerous of a process as it currently is, and I hope this subtitle is something the Council can build upon in the coming months.
Also – on the topic of making sure people can actually occupy the units that we’ve provided subsidy for – your $1.7M dedicated funding for security deposit assistance helps address a long-running pain point for DCHA voucher recipients. This is something I dealt with as Human Services committee chair (back in the day) and am glad to see it being addressed head-on.
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I appreciate your team’s cleverness in finding efficiencies in DCHA’s debt service budget, which I can see helped fund a lot of immediate operating budget needs.
I do want to flag my great interest in getting the Bruce Monroe New Communities Site towards ground-breaking in the next year. While I’ve made this clear to the Executive, they have still admitted that it faces a funding gap of $33 million. Since that is a joint development between DMPED and the Housing Authority, I would value this committee’s help and expertise in DCHA’s capital budget, to make sure DCHA is adequately contributing to the completion of this project that has been in the pipeline for over a decade.
Again, I am greatly appreciative of you, Chairperson White, your committee staff, and your budget analyst Joe Wolfe, who was as dependable as ever in getting the information we needed to fund these critical priorities. I look forward to lending my support to this report.