One downside to allocating housing based on “need” like this, is it creates a lot of bureaucracy and work to qualify someone who is eligible because you’re using bureaucracy to ration a limited resource rather than price.

If you’re a market rate owner you set the price and run a credit, income and reference check and that’s it.

This same issue applies to IZ units as well. I genuinely think the way to go is just flat subsidies and also remove a lot of the red tape around vouchers. Even better, expand the EITC instead and continue working to significantly liberalize zoning so construction can catch up to demand.

I’d hate to be in the job of running DCHA as I imagine it’s 100x as hard as running a similarly sized portfolio of market rate units bc of all the red tape associated with every aspect of the business.