D.C. has surpassed a goal Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) set to add 36,000 housing units to the market by 2025 — a housing construction boom that officials expect to cool rocketing rental prices in a city that has long struggled with major housing affordability challenges.
Addressing a large crowd of city employees at the new Department of Housing and Community Development headquarters in Anacostia, Bowser reflected on what led her administration to set the ambitious goal five years ago. With housing costs on the rise and the housing market still catching up to D.C.'s population boom, Bowser said one thing was clear: The city needed to rapidly build thousands of new homes.
“We have good paying jobs, we have great transportation, we have incredible amenities, and so when you have all of those things, the demand on housing is high,” Bowser said. “When we came together in 2019, I told you we can’t undo the previous 15 years — but we can double down on what we’re doing now.”
Advertisement
The District eclipsed the goal with the completion this week of Terrace Manor Apartments in Ward 8, a formerly dilapidated complex that a D.C. developer bought out of receivership and rebuilt. In exchange for funds from D.C.'s Housing Production Trust Fund, the city’s main vehicle to build affordable housing, the developer, WC Smith, pledged to keep all 130 new units affordable for the next 50 years.
Among the 36,000-plus new homes added to the housing market, Bowser set a goal to make 12,000 of them affordable for households earning below 80 percent of the area median income, or $121,700 for a family of four based on the median income of about $152,000.
Bowser said Monday the city expects to achieve that goal next year, with several projects in the pipeline — although not every neighborhood appears on track to meet its target.
Advertisement
Bowser set the housing goal as government leaders across the region were grappling with a serious problem: a drastic gap between housing supply and demand.
That problem was especially pronounced in the District, which experienced dramatic population growth beginning in the late 2000s, spurring an economic development boom. The city’s population ballooned by more than 100,000 between 2000 and 2015, driven largely by young professionals in the latter half of the period. That huge growth in turn accelerated gentrification and displacement, reshaped entire neighborhoods — and hiked rents.
Data from D.C.'s Office of Revenue Analysis, an arm of the chief financial office, puts in perspective how significantly new housing production accelerated in recent years. While D.C. managed to add more than 36,000 new housing units over only 5½ years, by comparison, the city added about 40,000 new units in the previous 18 years, according to a 2020 study from the ORA in partnership with Howard University.
Advertisement
The study estimated that, if not for the city’s plan to build 36,000 new units, rents could have been 5.5 percent higher by 2025.
Bowser’s goal was part of a regionwide effort by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments to increase the housing supply — though as of last year only a few jurisdictions, including D.C., were on track to meet their own targets by 2030.
Leah Hendey, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute who studies D.C.'s housing market, described the District as a leader in addressing a regionwide housing shortage problem, owing in part to major investments that have incentivized more affordable housing production over the past decade. Since taking office in 2015, Bowser has invested more than $1.3 billion in the Housing Production Trust Fund.
“It is really important that they’ve been adding these units to the housing stock, because they’re desperately needed,” Hendey said. “And I think increasing the housing supply is going to help with affordability in the market overall. That’s not something that happens overnight, though. It’s going to take some time, because we were making up that shortfall of housing to begin with.”
Advertisement
Terrace Manor is one of almost 200 buildings added to the District’s stock of apartment buildings since 2019, ORA data shows. Many of the new buildings have been concentrated in the Waterfront/Near Southwest and Central Washington planning areas — according to a city map — as a succession of new luxury apartment buildings remade the city’s skyline.
Hendey said natural market forces stemming from D.C.'s population boom — and, in turn, a housing demand boom — were largely to thank for the acceleration in housing production in the mid- and late 2010s. But she said a number of D.C. policies contribute to higher housing production as well. For one, more land is zoned for multifamily housing, making it easier to build. D.C. pumps significantly more money into affordable housing than its neighbors through its Housing Production Trust Fund, she said. And the city also seizes on opportunities to require affordable housing when developments are built on public land, such as an affordable housing plan slated for the Chevy Chase Library and community center.
“D.C. has really incentivized and set the stage for folks investing in affordable housing in more robust ways than any other jurisdiction in this region,” Hendey said.
Advertisement
Nina Albert, D.C.'s deputy mayor for planning and economic development, said the city’s consistent efforts — including the use of federal pandemic relief dollars to further boost housing production — “were an advertisement to the market that we’re open for business.”
“When you make a big commitment into HPTF [the Housing Production Trust Fund], it makes the lenders, equity providers and investors pay attention,” Albert said.
Colleen Green, director of the Department of Housing and Community Development, pointed to neighborhood planning efforts such as zoning changes and working with the D.C. Housing Finance Agency to secure bond financing for affordable housing products.
“Every aspect of affordable housing has been put on steroids in the District to meet this goal,” Green said. “The commitment that has been made here is bar none in the nation, and I think that’s really what it is.”
Advertisement
Housing advocates have for years pushed for more urgency to address the affordable housing shortage. Census data has shown almost half of D.C. households are cost-burdened or severely cost-burdened — meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on rent — while a November Urban Institute report estimated 12 percent of D.C. residents, or more than 80,000, experience housing insecurity.
As part of the goal to build 12,000 affordable units, officials set out to more equitably distribute new affordable housing across the District — especially in areas where, historically, exclusionary housing policies contributed to segregation.
But data shows the District is woefully behind producing new affordable housing in some areas, such as Rock Creek West, while far exceeding its goals in others, such as the Far Southeast and Southwest, where lower-income residents are more concentrated. Rock Creek West has met only 11.6 percent of its 2025 affordable housing goal — raising the stakes for the city to garner neighborhood support for projects like the one at the Chevy Chase Library. Meanwhile, Far Southeast and Southwest have more than doubled its target goal; about half of the projects preserved affordable housing through new affordability covenants, like that at Terrace Manor.
Advertisement
Albert said part of the reason neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River have carried a greater share of the affordable housing goals is because much of the city’s affordable housing already existed there. But many residents have struggled with deteriorating or unlivable conditions in their buildings. In those cases, Albert said the city could invest in major renovation projects counting toward the goal, while both preserving the affordability of the buildings and making them more attractive to residents. That was largely the story of Terrace Manor.
“There’s a combination of what existed in the past, where we’ve been putting huge amounts of money to make sure that continues to be a quality place for people to live,” Albert said. “But if you look at new ground-up construction, you’ll see it’s much more equitable” citywide.
Housing officials on Monday also noted that, when reviewing applications from developers for Housing Production Trust Fund dollars, they would give greater weight to projects in planning areas that are lagging in their target goals.
Advertisement
For some residents, such as Ciara Williams, who introduced the mayor on Monday, the expansion of affordable housing in D.C. drastically changed her family’s quality of life.
Williams, a 39-year-old mother of two, was homeless and living in a hotel between 2020 and 2022 when the father of her children was killed. In the city’s shelter system and with nowhere else to turn, a case worker helped her secure a permanent housing voucher to live at Spring Flats — a housing project announced by the city in 2020 with a majority of affordable units.
Now, instead of a hotel room with two queen-size beds, Williams lives in a spacious apartment; her children, ages 13 and 9, have their own rooms.
She called the opportunity a “blessing.”
“I can actually let my hair down and not feel frustrated when I come in, not have to worry about strangers walking around my door,” she said. “My kids can have their own room and just relax and be themselves, and not have to worry about where we’re going to be tomorrow.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaW5oamlksaR5x6isrKGenHqou8ClZg%3D%3D