14,400 Units: DC is Nearly Halfway to Meeting 2025 Housing Production Goals

• January 26th 2021

by Nena Perry-Brown

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At the beginning of 2019, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser stated that the city needed to add 36,000 new housing units by 2025, later adding that one-third of those units need to be affordable.

Roughly two years later, data shows mixed progress toward those goals.

Approximately 14,400 housing units delivered between January 2019 and December 2020, per data released recently on the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (DMPED) dashboard. Of those units, 2,028 were affordable, not quite 17% of the goal set for affordable housing production.

The city also released a report in 2019 specifying affordable housing production goals in each of the city's ten planning areas. The report considered “affordable housing” to be units that cost no more than 30 percent of household income for households earning up to 80 percent of median family income. 

As seen in the table above, Rock Creek West is the only area that hasn't produced any affordable units in the past two years. Conversely, almost all of the units produced in the Far Northeast/Far Southeast planning area were affordable.

Overall, housing production in the Lower Anacostia Waterfront/Near Southwest planning area has far outpaced that seen anywhere else in the city, with more than double the number of units constructed there than in the Mid-City planning area (which includes a central swath of the city between Mount Pleasant, through Shaw above S Street, and covering Eckington).

While the data starts in January 2019, the mayor didn't codify the housing production goals until a May 2019 executive order. This also isn't the only time a DC mayor has set specific housing production targets in the past decade — in 2013, then-mayor and now-councilmember Vince Gray set a goal of 10,000 new units by 2020.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/dc-is-nearly-halfway-to-meeting-mayors-housing-production-goals/17804.