"BLAME" DC Government, Mayor Muriel Bowser For DC Homelessness -- Not the Homeless People
The phrase "blaming the victim" was coined in 1971 in response to the Moynihan Report which claimed that family structures which were the result of slavery and many years of oppression were to "blame" for poverty among Afro-Americans. William Ryan's book, "Blaming the Victim" argues that it is the larger social structures (superstructures) of our society that keep Blacks poor. Now the phrase "victim blaming" is used in a completely different way -- to defend victims of sexual assault against being wrongfully ostracized -- and few people know the origin of the phrase. What's more is that the "victims" on whose behalf Mr. Ryan was speaking are still being victimized.
Before anyone can expect the poor and homeless to do better for themselves, they must first demand that Government do a better job of creating an environment that is conducive to poor people becoming self-sufficient. After all, it doesn't make sense to require more of the poor who lack resources than you require of a government that spends billions or trillions of YOUR tax dollars.
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If there's one word that you don't often run across in my blog, that word is "blame". There's a reason for that. I don't see any value in merely "blaming" someone for a problem -- in just saying that a problem "is so-and-so's fault". There IS value in analyzing the cause of a problem if that analysis is part of a problem-solving effort. In this post I'll offer an analysis of DC's homeless problem and foster a better understanding of the homeless issue for the voting public -- especially for those who plan to vote for the city's next mayor on June 19th (Juneteenth), 2018.
Most members of the public whom I encounter are principled pragmatists. They're not ideologues and they don't research an issue like homelessness before stating their assumptions and opinions. They're basically good people nonetheless. They therefore make the easy assumption that any person who is homeless suffers from mental illness and/or has some personal failings. A government that designs programs which adequately assist vulnerable, disabled homeless singles as well as vulnerable homeless children (along with their parents) gets a lot of brownie points for doing so. Great. The same government can also offer grossly inadequate services to the able-bodied, homeless singles who seem to the average, ill-informed person to lack any sense of principle; and, many voters are OK with that. Little do these voters realize the insurmountable challenges that even the most intelligent and moral homeless person can be faced with -- some of these insurmountable challenges having been created by government and its homeless service contractors. That's how government likes it.
Inverted totalitarianism serves government well. That is to say that citizens are offered opportunities to vote and thereby convey their collective desires to government; but, in actuality government has played the public by using demagoguery that appeals to the lowest common denominator in people's thinking and caused voters to choose what government wanted them to choose all along. Government often appeals to the popular thinking that aligns with government's preconceived notions rather than teach the public what they need to know before making a certain choice. Helping the most vulnerable while denigrating and punishing those who seem to be morally deficient appeals to a couple of humanity's most basic values. If voters are not offered a deeper analysis of why seemingly "bad" people do what they do or of the missteps that are taken and the games that are played by a government that claims to be curing a certain social ill, then that government's constituents will direct their ire and disdain toward the wrong group altogether. They'll "blame" the homeless for being poor and homeless instead of "blaming" government for only obtaining a 9.45% decrease in homelessness over a 13-year period after telling the public in 2004 that they'd solve 100% of the problem in 10 years. (It's safe to say that DC has spent about $2B on homeless services in 13 years -- a cool $500M after the 10-year plan should have ended homelessness.)
Such was the case when DC Mayor Muriel Bowser issued notice on February 9th, 2016 about seven meetings that would take place in different wards on February 11th. Those meetings were about the smaller shelters that would be built to replace the DC General Family Shelter. Hundreds of disgruntled people attended each meeting -- complaining first about the short notice and then saying "NIMBY" (Not In My Backyard) as politely as can be expected. The NIMBY-ites were playing right into the hand of a mayor who, just prior to that set of meetings, was ostracized for withholding the planned sites for the replacement shelters from the public until the last minute. YOU put two and two together.
I attended the Ward 3 meeting that evening, even though I reside in Ward 6. I was taken aback by how the citizens in attendance weren't given a teach-in about what the experience of homelessness is like. None of DC's dozens of homeless people who make speeches to churches, colleges and universities about homelessness were brought up to address the crowd. Attendees were told about what DC Government is doing around homelessness. Efforts were made by city officials to assure people that the homeless would be kept out of the way -- those ideas having been conveyed by government (who knew I was in the room) in the most polite way. Nothing was said to dispel stereotypes that the public has about homeless people. Ignorance breeds fear and government kept voters ignorant of the truths concerning homeless people and its failures toward them. After all, the public's false and exaggerated stereotypes about homeless people and the resulting NIMBY-ism fit nicely into the municipal government's desire to draw in high-income earners who can help to drive the rents up and push even more low-income workers out of the city.
Many voters are OK with the working poor being gentrified out of a city that they can't afford to live in anymore -- despite the fact that the poor worker's job and family may still be in that city and they might have lived there for many years before being priced out. Such thinking implies that it's fine for a few landlords and developers -- the primary funders of DC's mayoral campaigns -- to disrupt the lives of tens of thousands of Washingtonians by simply raising rents. It also implies that, if someone becomes homeless while continuing to work in the city, then this person who wasn't morally delinquent before their eviction has suddenly developed some moral delinquency, being as they're now homeless.
It's time to take a good, hard look at what government is doing -- or failing to do, as the case may be. It's high time that Americans developed a shared set of principles by which we can judge the doings of government -- something which a 241-year old democracy should already have anyway. Government has stated its intentions to end homelessness and to alleviate poverty time and time again. They've come up with five- and 10-year plans for ending homelessness. Those plans often fail. Good intentions have never done anything good. Because, a politician's handling of issues related to poverty generally doesn't decide an election, a politician who breaks his or her promises to the poor needs not worry about being voted out -- for that reason anyway. At least, that has been the case in the past. The election of Doug Jones over Roy Moore by a resurgence (or insurgency) of poor, Black voters in Alabama might be the beginning of a wave of elections that are decided by the poor. Let's hope. Let's make it happen in 2018 -- in DC and elsewhere.
One thing that government doesn't want is for middle-class people to get the perception that their tax dollars which have been set aside for the poor and homeless are being misspent and misappropriated; as, this might cause people of conscience and privilege to join forces with the poor and to come out against their government. In the short term, there might be rallies and protests. In the long term, there might be innumerable elections that are decided by the poor and their middle-class allies. An incumbent finds it easy to ignore protesters; however, it's not so easy to ignore the demands of voters around election time -- especially if there is a message which is shared by at least 60% of a candidate's voting base. All Americans of conscience (and social consciousness) demanding that government comprehensively address poverty and homelessness for once and for all or get fired at the ballot box does a lot to get us to a good place.
Washington, DC has been a hotbed of homeless advocacy since the early 1970's. After at least 13 years of advocacy, renowned homeless advocate Mitch Snyder and his movement were able to get the 100th Congress (1987-1989) and Ronald Reagan to pass legislation that mandated that locales across the country have a certain bare minimum of homeless services. That legislation has since been modified, renamed and re-authorized. Mitch and company went up against Reagan for over a year and Mitch endured multiple hunger strikes just to have one vacant federal building turned into a shelter. That's just how much Reagan didn't want to help the poor.
In 1988 the U.S. Dept. of Labor (DOL) began a homeless employment "social experiment" and issued a report in 1998 that more or less declared that efforts to connect homeless people to employment had failed. Since then, the various levels of government across the nation have offered funding for programs that are designed:
1 -- to maintain homeless people in shelter or on the street,
2 -- to keep homeless people out of the way of business and housed people,
3 -- to enrich the homeless service providers,
4 -- to soften the blow of rental-capitalism gone awry (while perpetuating it) and
5 -- to create a facade of caring sufficiently for the poor -- a facade which holds privileged people of conscience at bay.
The U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) made regulations in 2000 that required all cities that receive HUD funding to count their homeless in the last week of January -- initially every other year, but now every year. The first national point-in-time homeless enumeration was performed in 2001. (DC did the count annually before doing it annually was mandatory.)
Even though the McKinney-Vento Homeless Services Act was passed in 1987 and the city surveyed 7,058 homeless people (with another 1,267 refusing to do the point-in-time survey -- a total of 8,325 people) in 2001, the nation's capital didn't adopt a 10-year plan for ending homelessness until September 2004. One might say that DC Government was 17 years late getting started. To be fair, Bush 43 appointed a homelessness czar in 2002 which led to many cities developing 10-year plans beginning in 2003; and DC Government tends to create homeless programs only when federal funding is available -- at least for the upstart costs. So, it's really no wonder that a city that grappled with homelessness in the 70's made its first plan to end it in 2004.
The city had some level of homeless services well before 2004; but, those services weren't geared toward actually ending homelessness. Mayor Anthony Williams (1999-2007) lost his bid for reelection in 2006 and the plan was allowed to drift into oblivion in 2007 -- the year that DC counted its lowest-ever number of homeless people: 5,757. The number has since rebounded with a vengeance. The city has given up on multiple efforts to create enough affordable housing. A DC law establishing a Commission on Poverty was passed in 2006 and the commission was led by the late Councilman Marion Barry until he got censured in 2010 and the Commission on Poverty was taken from him and disbanded. In the fall of 2017 the DC Council decided to resurrect the Commission on Poverty -- after having lost a full seven years. Go figure.
In all fairness, I'll say that DC didn't do all that terribly when it came to dealing with the economic downturn of 2008. It's place as the seat of the federal government did much to cushion the District from the effects of the economy going south. The number of homeless people only went from 5,757 in 2007 to 6,044 in January 2008 and 6,228 in 2009. The two biggest annual increases ever recorded were well after the downturn -- going up by 889 from 6,859 in 2013 to 7,748 in 2014 and by 1,052 from 7,298 in 2015 to 8,350 in 2016.
It's clear that I have a way with numbers; but, what's more important than just knowing the numbers is knowing the story they tell. The story that emerges when you juxtapose the 2007 and 2016 homeless counts is a story of colossal failure by well-paid homeless service providers who claim to want to work many of those in their ranks out of jobs by ending long-term homelessness and needing only to retain a few resources for those who become homeless in the future -- so as to house them quickly. Yet there is neither a sense of urgency among these providers when the number of homeless people rises dramatically nor any conversation that I'm aware of that has to do with severance packages for the providers who will no longer be needed as homelessness decreases. This should make voters wonder.
Muriel E. Bowser inherited a terribly flawed system. For her part, she seems to want to implement a plan for addressing homelessness that is designed to fail, that appears to the public to be a genuine effort to help the poor and that causes both the poor and the homeless to leave town. City officials will gladly spend up to 2% of a $14B budget on poorly-designed homeless services that give them the space to say that they've fulfilled their obligation to the poor, while implementing less-publicized and more underhanded policies that essentially tell the poor who are in or coming to DC to "Get out and/or stay out!!!"
It may turn out that the best thing which DC Mayor Muriel Bowser does for the city's homeless is fail at what she (unintentionally???) caused people to perceive was her pet project. I can almost hear voters talking about how many homeless people they passed on the way to the polls on June 19th, 2018 and about all the news they saw or read concerning Bowser's efforts around homelessness. I can almost see the 11:00 news that night declaring [Ms. Not Bowser] to have won the primary. Being as the results will have come out too late on election night to make the 6/20 papers, hopefully the media will offer deeper analyses on June 21st, 2018 that indicate that her loss sent a strong message from the poor and their middle-class allies that the next mayor of DC must have a comprehensive plan for alleviating poverty, ending homelessness and creating affordable housing. Let's have a revolution at the ballot box in 2018!!!
I'm already in the process of writing a book about the games that government plays with YOUR TAX DOLLARS which it says are set aside for the poor and the games that they play with THE LIVES OF THE POOR. So, I won't belabor the topic too much further in this post. I hope you can see their game and that you won't get played.
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Below is an article that I sent to Street Sense Media (DC's street newspaper about poverty and homelessness). The paper is issued every two weeks. The following may appear in the 12/27/17, 1/10/18 or even the 1/24/18 issue. It helps to explain the game that I accuse DC homeless service providers of playing, as it explains the glitch pattern associated with decreasing the number of homeless people in the city. It also explains that the DC Council has allotted at least $160M annually in recent years to assist c. 8,000 homeless people. That works out to at least $20,000 per homeless person or $1,667 per month per person.
Though DC's average rent is $2,000 per month, there are still rentals that go for under $1,600 per month. (You might want to invest in a bullet-proof vest if living where rents are under $1,200/month.) The $20,000+ that the city pays annually for each homeless person actually goes to providers of shelter, food and free transit to the shelters etc. There's a name for that: "Poverty-pimping" (More than $20,000 is spent on some homeless individuals like a parent and their child or someone with health issues, while less than that is spent on healthy singles.) Have a read:
Is DC Ending Homelessness or Continuing the Glitch Pattern???
The number of homeless people in Washington, DC dropped by 877 (10.5%) from 8,350 in January 2016 to 7,473 in 2017 -- which is comparable to the 857-person drop from 8,325 homeless in 2001 to 7,468 in 2002. We dropped by 2,820 people from 8,977 in 2005 to 6,157 in 2006 and to 5,757 in 2007 -- the last time that DC had successive decreases. Interestingly enough, the great decrease of 2005 occurred the year after DC Government made its 10-year plan called “Homeless No More” and the year before the Inter-agency Council on Homelessness held its first meeting. This suggests that it may have been insufficient services an/or some draconian measures that drove the numbers down. (The DC Council has allotted at least $160M annually for such services in recent years -- which works out to more than $20,000/yr/person -- the amount of rent.) At any rate, I wouldn’t get too excited about the 2017 decrease until I see proof that we’ve broken out of the glitch pattern that has rendered a net decrease of 780 homeless people (9.45%) from 2004 to 2017. That’s 60 less homeless people per year, which puts us on track to end homelessness by 2142 A.D.
If we figure that the city had 8,000 homeless people at the October 1st, 2015 start of the 5-year plan (7,298 plus 702 of the 1,052-person increase from 1/25/15 to 1/25/16), then we should have been down to 6,000 people by 1/25/17 and should get down to 4,400 by January 2018 (1,600/FY. and 400 from Oct. to Jan.). But if we learn in May 2018 that homelessness dropped almost 900 people again to c. 6,600 in January, then DC voters are likely to give Muriel Bowser high marks.
Mayor Bowser’s policies which gave families greater access to shelter caused those who needed it during the Gray administration (2011 to 2015) to come out of the woodwork and bring the 2016 count 97-people above the 2004 number. Now we aspire to get back down to our 2007 level, better yet, to have three decreases near that of 2005. Even though homelessness hasn’t gone down by the 1,600 people per year that was necessary to satisfy Bowser’s five-year plan and a 2,800-person drop is likely a pipe dream, it would be commendable if the city saw successive decreases for the first time in 11 years and they totaled over 1,500. That level of success is conceivable would effectively make the five-year plan a 10-year plan; but, let’s take it for what it’s worth.
People in general know intuitively that affordable housing is the solution to homelessness for any able-bodied person, though the issues faced by the disabled and those with employment challenges are more nuanced. They don’t necessarily know the figures in this article or juxtapose them so as to tease out the stories those numbers tell. Most people are pragmatic. Though I tout the recent decrease, people tell me that they sense an increase in homelessness. It might just be that people from the encampments that Ms. Bowser is shutting down are coming into plain sight. Even so, in June voters will remember having been inundated with articles about Mayor Muriel Bowser’s homelessness plan. They’ll learn the results of the count in May and vote in June. They’ll judge her leadership ability by how well she did on her pet project, which makes it imperative for Mayor Bowser to consider the perceptions that she is creating and to have the difficult but important conversations about breaking the 13-year long glitch pattern. Otherwise she’ll join the list of DC mayors who have lost their reelection bids ever since I moved here in 2005.
In the spirit of fairness, I'll also note that I put the mayor's name in the title so that this post will appear when DC voters Google her name -- not because I blame her for all of the problems that I've describe.
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