Many families experiencing poverty can feel trapped. Government assistance that helps them stay housed, fed, and healthy can cut off just as families begin to earn a little more money. These “benefits cliffs” also cut off assistance long before families can gain the education and experience needed to improve their earning potential and economic mobility. The DC Department of Human Services (DHS) is piloting the Career Mobility Action Plan (Career MAP), a program that offers families five years of housing and comprehensive support. By bridging benefits cliffs, the goal is to support families in breaking the cycle of poverty. The Lab helped design the program and is using a randomized evaluation to understand Career MAP’s impact on employment, income, and children’s performance in school. The implementation and evaluation findings will inform how the District assists families in achieving economic mobility.
Why is this issue important in DC?
Housing in the District is expensive. In 2022, 83% of low-income residents spent more than 50% of their income on rent.1 Low-income family budgets are tight and even small financial hardships can put them at risk for homelessness. On any given night in DC, about 450 families are homeless.2 The District aims to stabilize these families’ housing by offering them emergency shelter and then short-term support for 12 months. However, nearly 1 in 5 families who receive that support will re-enter DC's homeless system within a few years.3 Offering families comprehensive support for a longer period could allow them to gain additional skills to earn higher wages and could help them better maintain their financial stability and housing.
What are we doing?
The District is running the Career MAP Pilot program—five years of rental assistance, personalized case management, and rent discounts and cash payments that offset the loss of government assistance as a family’s earnings grow. The Lab is working with DHS to design and evaluate the program. In 2022, when DHS offered Career MAP to the 3,300 families in the District’s Family Re-housing Stabilization Program (Rapid Rehousing), we randomly selected around 500 households to participate. The families who enrolled receive rental discounts, cash payments of up to $10,000 per year if their earnings increase, and support from a Navigator. Navigators are the families’ coaches and advocates. They help them overcome challenges like finding quality housing, training programs, and reliable childcare. Families also receive support with job placement and advancement into higher wage opportunities.
The Lab is collecting and analyzing data from a few sources to learn if Career MAP can support the heads of families in securing jobs with higher wages and stable housing. We are also analyzing data to learn if children in the households have better outcomes such as increased school attendance.
What have we learned?
In 2022, our interviews and co-design sessions highlighted many of the barriers Career MAP families face. The two top concerns for most families were eviction from their homes and stability for their children. Most parents want to work, but many struggle to overcome barriers like finding the right childcare and/or mental health supports.
In 2024, the Lab ran a short study to learn what career coaches and program participants thought about the early years of the pilot. We learned that it is hard for some participants to navigate the trauma of their experience with housing instability. While many participants continue to pursue employment or education related goals, some are focused on achieving stability first.
“I want my children to be able to have something to aspire to, to say ‘Mommy did this,’ or ‘My mom was a manager or supervisor’ or eventually ‘an owner of her own company’. ”
What comes next?
We aim to report on the first year of data in late 2025. Throughout the pilot, we will continue to work with DHS to adapt the program to participants’ needs and support participants in finding economic mobility and family stability
What's happening behind the scenes?
We plan to assess participants' economic outcomes by looking at their employment and earnings over time. We have found it challenging, however, to find a reliable data source for these outcomes for our study group as DC’s administrative data only covers people who work in DC. In 2022, we secured a contract to use credit bureau data, but we have found that this data does not completely cover our study population for two reasons. First, many employers in the DC metropolitan area, such as federal government agencies, do not share data with credit bureaus. Second, there are many employers that do not allow the earnings data they share with credit bureaus to be used for research purposes. We used other data from the credit bureau, like credit scores and debt data to get a more nuanced view of economic outcomes, but we are still looking for other data sources at the federal and local level to get a more complete view of families’ financial well-being.
1 National Low Income Housing Coalition, Housing cost burdens in the District of Columbia (2022)
2 The Community Partnership, Homelessness in DC (2025)
3 2023 DHS Performance Oversight Document, page 64. Based on FRSP exits prior to the pandemic since the program had few families exiting between 2020-2023.