Andrea Dicks, who has a D.C. housing voucher that subsidizes her rent, was approved to move to a new apartment in June but was still waiting on the city in August. She says pests and mold plague her unit. As soon as Andrea Dicks got approved to move into a new apartment in June, she started packing. She got rid of old furniture and stacked plastic bins full of toys and clothes against the wall — ready to leavethe boxes were still sitting there.
“It’s maddening because we know the urgency our clients have and you just wish that sense of urgency was shared all across the board,” said Andy Wassenich, the assistant director of outreach at the homeless services nonprofit Miriam’s Kitchen, “We were being held to a standard that we never claimed to be able to actually deliver on,” she said.
“More applications are coming. They’re constantly coming to us,” Jenkins said. “They’re funding more, so they’re sending more, which means there’s more families that we determine to be eligible right away, but more that we need to keep following up , and keep following up and keep following up.” Tired of waiting, driven by fear that the black mold in her current kitchen was making her child sick, Dicks went to the DHS in person to get answers.2019, after she lost her job as an aide at a charter school in the Hillcrest neighborhood in Ward 7.on friends’ couches until qualifying for the District’s rapid rehousing program, intended to provide subsidized housing and services to help people at risk of homelessness get back on their feet.
“Would she be alive if she had gotten housed before she had a heart attack? I don’t think we can say that. But at the time, which was during the pandemic, we were dealing with a lot of back and forth — how much she was receiving in Social Security and needing to get that verified but not having the right form,” Wassenich said. “It was a delay of at least six weeks over just the back and forth of this form. Then she died.”at the Petworth Library.
Before Operation Make Movement, an applicant who had been approved for a voucher could not move forward with submitting paperwork until he or she was paired with a caseworker — a process Pierre, who was the DHS interim director, said could take nine months in some cases. Since the DHS removed the caseworker requirement for application submissions, the average time to submit an application has fallen to about a month, Pierre said.