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In 1984 voters in Washington, D.C.approved an initiative to guarantee overnight shelter. The city was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to legislate aright to shelter and, to this day, the only one to do so by popular initiative. But the law, which emerged during one of the city’s most politically progressive periods, was overturned by the local legislature, and a voter referendum failed to reinstate it. Based on archival research and 25 in-depth interviews, this paper examines how a homeless shelter policy was made to fail. This paper analyzes the work of activists, service providers, city officials, and legal actors who created, contested, and eventually repealed the law. This analysis contributes to understandings of urban governance with theoretical explorations of the notion of policy-failing and empirical attention to the institutional mechanisms, political ideologies, and regulatory practices through which policies can …