HUD has published DC Flexible Rent Subsidy Program: Findings from the Program’s First Year, which provides preliminary quantitative and qualitative data from the first year of the District of Columbia’s pilot shallow-subsidy rental assistance program. Quantitative evaluation found no statistical difference in the likelihood of entering emergency shelter or transitional housing in the first year for program participants and those receiving standard homelessness prevention services. The authors found that while 80% of participants were very satisfied, when asked about one thing they would change about the program, nearly half (44%) said the program should offer a larger or longer-term subsidy.
The Flexible Rent Subsidy Program, or DC Flex, offers participants up to $7,200 per year in assistance. Each month until the limit is reached, the program deposits enough money into a participant’s checking account to bring the balance up to the participant’s full monthly rent amount, and participants can determine how much to withdraw. The flexibility is meant to provide households who have some financial stability to handle fluctuations in income or unexpected expenses. Money not spent is rolled over into the next year as savings, participants can receive assistance for up to four years, and they can keep whatever remains afterwards. Spread evenly throughout the year, the program would offer a $600 monthly supplement. For the sake of comparison, HUD’s average monthly expenditure per Housing Choice Voucher client in the District of Columbia in 2020 was $1,317, including administrative costs. The average monthly rent for participants in the DC Flex program in 2019 was $1,147.
The authors describe DC Flex as a middle ground between short-term emergency assistance and rental voucher programs with deeper subsidies. DC Flex is a locally funded program designed to stretch resources to serve more people, and the pilot aims to test how well such a program might serve renters. Participants must be extremely low-income families with children, and they must have recently applied for homelessness assistance or emergency rental assistance. Because a shallow subsidy may better serve families with low service needs and some financial stability, administrators required participants to have a recent work history and be living in their own homes with their names on the lease.
As part of the evaluation, researchers at the Urban Institute conducted a survey of participants in early 2019. They also conducted focus groups with participants, staff, and stakeholders. Over one-quarter of participants (27%) said what they liked best about the DC Flex program was its offer of four years of rental assistance. Twenty-eight percent of participants gave up enrollment in a rapid re-housing program (which has a higher average monthly subsidy than the DC Flex program) to obtain longer-term assistance. Another 27% said what they liked best was the flexibility the program offered, though some wanted the ability to use the funds for purposes other than rent.
Many participants said the subsidy was too low for extremely low-income households to afford rent in Washington, D.C. Forty-three percent of participants said they used the DC Flex account to pay all or most of their rent until it ran out, rather than using a mix of Flex subsidy and other sources. One-third of participants had spent down their accounts in full by the eighth month. Sixty-nine percent believed it was likely they would use all their DC Flex subsidy before the end of the program year. Partly in response to data showing that participants were exhausting funds before the end of the program year, administrators changed the rules midyear to allow participants to also take part in DC’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program to cover rental arrears.
Researchers at The Lab @ DC used administrative data to conduct a quantitative analysis of the program in its first year. DC Flex was launched as a randomized controlled trial—program applicants were entered into random lotteries, and their outcomes were compared to those who were not selected and who instead received usual care. Households not offered DC Flex might have received any other homelessness prevention and housing support services, including both one-time and short-term services and more substantial supports, some of which may have constituted a larger annual benefit than what is provided by DC Flex. For the quantitative analysis, researchers used data from participants enrolled by October 2018 who were in the program at least one year. This evaluation found no statistically significant difference between the rate of entry into emergency shelter or transitional housing among DC Flex participants and those receiving usual care. Since households in the control group may have been in rapid re-housing in the first year, larger differences may emerge in subsequent years when transitional housing support ends.
The authors emphasize that because this report focuses on the first year of implementation, it is too soon to draw conclusions about program effectiveness. Future research will continue to monitor outcomes for participants, including records of evictions, applications to other rental assistance programs, and employment.
Read the report at: https://bit.ly/37NnL7L