Economic Justice.

• Approximately 36,600 District children lived in families with incomes below the federal poverty line in 2024 (which was roughly $25,800 for a family of three in 2024), sharply up from recent years.
• Over 8 out of 10 of the children living in poverty are Black, and there are major differences between the wards – with 41% of ward 8 children living in poverty compared to just 4% of children in ward 3 (in 2020-2024 5-year estimates). But regardless of the ward a family resides in, in every ward a higher percentage of Black households live in poverty than the White households living in the same ward.
• Gender also plays a role in child poverty. While 43% of children raised by single women are in poverty, only 23% of children raised by single men and 4% raised by married couples are living in poverty.
• These numbers are based on the official federal poverty rate, which compares before-tax income to food costs. The more comprehensive supplemental measure, however, accounts for non-cash benefits (e.g. SNAP benefits) that can be used to meet basic needs, as well as subtracting taxes or adding tax credits (like the Child Tax Credit), and instead of looking just at food costs, includes food, clothing, housing, and utility costs. Nationally, the supplemental poverty rate for children fell nearly in half between 2020 and 2021 (from 9.7 to 5.2) as the expanded Child Tax Credit was introduced, then doubled between 2021 and 2022 (up to 12.4%) as the expanded Child Tax credit ended. During the same time, the official poverty measure stayed essentially flat nationally. While state-level supplemental poverty rates are not available for a single year, these national numbers show what’s possible.

• While median income for families with children  (under age 18) rose in every ward between the 2015-2019 5-year estimate and 2020-2024 5-year estimate, in ward 3 the 2023 (5-year average) median income for families with children was over $250,000 whereas in Ward 8 it was only $47,108.
• Racism continues to drive the economic divide in the District. White families earn nearly four times (once the average gets over $250,000 a precise estimate is no longer reported) as much as Black families ($70,897), and well over twice as much as Latinx families ($133,982). In DC concentrated income inequality and poverty only persists for Black and brown families.
• Because of historic and ongoing segregation within DC one might think that the geographic income disparity explains the racial disparity, but within every ward the median income for white families is higher than the median income for Black families.

• In 2024 DC’s Black unemployment level was nearly four times the white rate.
• Youth unemployment in 2024 was 16.4%, three times the overall DC unemployment rate. An estimated 6,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the workforce were unemployed in 2024, with far higher unemployment rates for Black than white youth (28% vs 8%).

• 36% of DC children live in households that spent more than 30% of their monthly income on housing in the 2020-2024 5-year estimate.
• On a single night in winter 2026, the official count found 971 homeless children in DC families.
• The official point in time count number doesn’t include many, including families who are “doubled up” (e.g. on a friend’s couch). In the 2024-25 school year, DC public schools reported 9,104 homeless students (6,112 of whom were between the ages of 5 and 17), painting a very different picture of child homelessness than the narrative of decreasing numbers sometimes elevated based on the Point in Time count.
• Slightly older youth also face housing challenges. In fiscal year 2025, the District’s Department of Human Services youth homelessness system served 1,303 youth (ages 18-24) experiencing homelessness  without a parent or guardian.

In addition to dealing with the effects of racism, many of the youth who wind up homeless have been failed by our systems in the most profound ways. Based on Youth Count in 2024:

• 40% of non-parenting homeless DC youth are LGBTQ+. 4% of non-parenting homeless DC youth identify as transgender
• 15% of homeless youth reported that at some point in their life they had experience with the justice system
• 2 in 5 youth who are homeless without a parent or guardian did not graduate from high school
• 17% of homeless youth reported that at some point in their life they had experience with the child welfare system
• 40% of homeless youth have experienced domestic violence, and more than half (61%) of those report that they started having housing issues because of that violence
• In 2019 roughly 1 out of 12 youth who were homeless without a parent or guardian reported being sex trafficked (7% of non-parenting youth and 9% of parenting youth)