Dupont Circle residents want better access to housing

Dupont Circle residents are looking for candidates who care about the issues they face in their neighborhood. For many, those issues include finding affordable housing and helping those who are homeless.

“It’s a quality-of-life issue when you see people sleeping on the streets,” Angie Holan, who works in media and lives in Dupont Circle said.

The affordability crisis is not a new hurdle for D.C. residents. 

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, “renter households spending more than 30% of their income on housing costs and utilities are cost burdened; those spending more than half of their income are severely cost burdened.”

The 2026 Point-In-Time Count, which is the annual census of homeless people, found that 9,790 people in D.C. were experiencing homelessness, a 131-person increase from the year before.

For the city’s elections, many candidates are considering these circumstances in their campaigns. 

Democratic mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George has touted “homes for all.” Her campaign website states that she plans to lower costs for tenants, build more and better homes, expand homeownership and deliver accountability. 

Robert Gross, the Green Party mayoral candidate, also has included improving these conditions in his plans. Housing and commerce are among his pillars, where he wants to reform housing vouchers. His goals would be vouchers for single-living households and prioritizing vouchers for households with children, his campaign website said.

City council candidates’ plans pertain to affordability and housing, too. Robert White, who serves on the D.C. Council, vows on his campaign website for D.C.’s congressional delegate to “make D.C. affordable for working people.”

Dupont residents have these topics at the forefront of their minds. 

For Holan, the issues she sees are not just in her neighborhood but ones that impact the city as a whole.  

She said rent is increasing and quality of life issues exist, but the district government is always working on those factors.

“You can’t feel good about that as a neighborhood resident when you feel like there are other people in your community that don’t have a place to live or a place to go,” Holan said.

Maddie Downs and Samantha Baker feel similarly. 

Baker, a nurse who previously lived in Adams Morgan but now lives in Chicago, said more money being allocated towards keeping the homeless safe would probably be helpful for them.

“I actually worked in an ER here when I lived here, and it was hard to see because if someone was homeless, they didn’t really want to go back to the halfway house or a sober house or a woman’s shelter because there is a lot of them here that are dangerous,” Baker said.

Downs, a nurse who lives in Adams Morgan, said it is important for local government candidates to bridge the gaps in D.C., including considering the polarizing poverty between the wards. 

“I have a good job, and I still feel like I don’t make enough money to live comfortably in this city the way that some people do,” Downs said. “But we also live in Northwest D.C., and I know that the Southeast area, there’s a lot more poverty down there.”