Let's Work with Mayor Bowser to Decrease homelessness
It's wonderful that DC now has a mayor
who is fully committed to making homelessness “rare, brief and non-recurring”. In 2003 and 2004 Tony Williams oversaw the creation
of a 10-year plan to end homelessness – a plan that was discarded
after three years. Adrian Fenty oversaw the creation of Permanent Supportive Housing for the elderly and disabled homeless. Vince Gray
committed to addressing homelessness in the waning months of his
administration, following the abduction of 8-year old Relisha Rudd
from the family Shelter in March of 2014. In the meantime, the city
has gone from having 5,757 homeless people in January of 2007 to
having approximately 8,000 homeless people in DC proper now -- which
shouldn't be confused with the 12,000 in DC Metro. (The foot count of
DC's homeless wasn't done this year due to Snowstorm Jonas
“Snowzilla”.) Howbeit, Mayor Muriel Bowser might just be the one
to reverse the trend – though not without the help of the DC
Council.
Mayor Bowser has retained Kristy Greenwalt as the director of the Inter-agency Council on Homelessness
(ICH). Kristy, who assumed her current post on April 28th,
2014, is the first director of an agency that has been meeting since
June 2006. Kristy has overseen the creation of a 5-year plan which is
slated to connect all of the city's current homeless to housing by
the end of 2020 and which will lead to all newly-homeless people
being connected to housing within 90 days. These represent awesome,though ambitious, goals.
Mayor Bowser has also brought back Laura Zeilinger who served as assistant director of the Dept. of
Human Services under Fenty and has made her director of DHS. Evidenced by a recently-released audit that was done on DHS in 2014, Laura is
working hard to rebuild the department and fix its many flaws. If the
several women whom the mayor has appointed to direct departments that
serve the poor, homeless and socioeconomically deprived are the
mayor's “Poverty Dream Team”, then Laura Zeilinger is definitely
the quarterback – and she often gets sacked by the media and
mounting public pressure. She's a real champ.
The fact remains that Mayor Bowser has
made significantly decreasing homelessness in DC – an effort that
three men before didn't succeed at – into something of a pet
project. Since it may come to define her first term, she's highly
motivated to succeed – a truth which has its pros and cons. What's
more is that the general public is becoming more politicized as the
nuances of dealing with DC homelessness get played out in the public
sphere – from the Amber alert posters of Relisha Rudd on buses and
bus shelters to the media coverage of tent-city closures to the
council and ward meetings about the mayor's plan to replace the DC
General Family Shelter which, for the most part, replaced the DC
Village Family Shelter – the former having increased its capacity
from 115 units to 288 units in 2012 after the latter was closed in
2007.
It was a man who passed homeless people
under a bridge each day on his way to work who decided to buy a few
tents out of pocket. He then began a crowd-funding site through which
he raised $24,000 and bought many more for the homeless in other
locations around the city. This led to residents of the Foggy Bottom
community taking notice of dozens of homeless people who'd been
camped out near the Watergate hotel for years – but without tents
until late 2015. Some of these residents contacted city officials in
order to have the tent city dismantled. Since then, DC Government has
begun a campaign to dismantle tent cities all over the city. The man
who began it all, though he's not happy about the tent cities being
dismantled, is glad that he was able to play a role in bringing
attention to the issue of homelessness.
Members of the public have voiced their
concerns at meetings which the Bowser administration held in various
wards on February 11th, 2016 to promote her family shelter
plan. They can also be seen testifying at the March 17thcouncil hearing on this matter. They can be heard raising many
technical and logistical questions from the proposed shelter sites'
cost to their proximity to bus lines and transit stations. (This post
won't due justice to the many things people said. View the hearing.)
But it was the residents of Ward 5 who really set the bar for the
public's engagement in this process of remaking the family shelter
system. Residents thought that the proposed site for the Ward 5
family shelter was not suitable for many reasons. However, they
didn't stop there. They scouted around and found alternative sites,
loaded them onto a website and sent the link along with a letter to
city officials. This is a prime example of how we can avoid merely
complaining about the doings of public officials and we can actually
work together to make DC a better place.
It's worth noting that many homeless people have barriers to employment that won't be resolved within 90
days. This doesn't preclude the administration from housing them first and addressing their employment challenges later. After all,
the designers of the city's Permanent Supportive Housing program said
during the series of meetings between April and September of 2008
that the plan was to start out housing the most vulnerable homeless
who have mental and physical disabilities and to eventually
transition into also housing those who are able to work (A-bods). In
either instance the city would use a “housing first” approach
that places the person in housing and then addresses the issues that
led to that person becoming homeless. With city officials scrambling
to implement the federal law called the Workforce Innovations and opportunities Act (WIOA), this might be a good time to complete the
transition to also housing the able-bodied homeless – a transition
that began with the crisis response to the DC General Family Shelter
situation but has yet to spill over into the singles' shelters.
It's imperative that we take note of
the fact that DC homelessness is the result of a toxic mix of social
ills – low wages, increasing rents, gentrification, a
problem-ridden educational system etc. Some of the residents who
experience these and other social ills never actually become
homeless. Others take years after losing a job to finally enter
shelter. But all DC residents should want cures to these ills and to
the homelessness that often results from them. As many homeless
advocates often say, “We're all just a paycheck away from becoming
homeless”.
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