Grade DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, Congress & tRump on Homelessness in Lieu of 2018 Elections & Sure Revolution

Washington, DC is a strange place. (That's the understatement of the millennium.) It's getting stranger by the day. But, since this is a blog post and not a book, I'll only visit matters pertaining to strange governance for now. The strange White House 'resident, tRump, is showing that there's a method to his madness -- at least for anyone who's paying attention. By his inauguration, he'd shown contempt for all things intellectual and scientific -- having disparaged 17 federal intelligence agencies, having denied climate science and having threatened to shut down the Department of Education as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Since taking office, he (with the help of Congress) has installed secretaries at HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and the EPA whom many citizens have good reason to believe were put there to tear the agencies down. In a stroke of apparent consistency, tRump has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord and gone on to place a heavy tariff on imported solar panels -- making his campaign against the environment the most consistent one thus far. Maybe it's good that he doesn't acknowledge global warming. If he did, he'd start a nuclear war, in hopes that the resulting nuclear winter would cool things down.

Drumpf's second most consistent campaign would be is fight with the supposedly "fake media". Some might argue that this is his most consistent fight. I'd push back by saying that, while he jacks his jaw a lot concerning the media, he hasn't made and can't make any laws or policies that would prevent the media from seeking and divulging the truth. So, on this matter, he's all talk. I'm also a bit baffled by how he spends so much time saying that he's being lied about and misrepresented and he fails to tell us what the truth is -- though he has the bully pulpit the whole while.

Forty-five's third most consistent campaign after a year in office seems to be his war against the poor which stands in sharp contrast to President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty, even as we approach the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr's assassination and Resurrection City (a tent city on the National Mall that brought attention to the issue of poverty). The ways in which Congress and 45 are hurting the poor are not understood intuitively by the masses -- not yet anyway. It stands to reason that Americans are in for a rude awakening as early as October 2018 or as late as the spring of 2019 -- some time after the real effects of the tax plan ("ax plan") begin to manifest. I'm treading dangerous territory as I write about this matter -- not only because of my support for a Second American Revolution in 2018 that could cause some troops to be called back from countries we've invaded in order to defend the American war machine, but because I'd come off as as being sensationalistic and crying "Wolf!". I hope that I'm never rightly accused of employing emotionalism and thereby discrediting myself.

The flip side of the issue is that I might end up having been overly cautious even as the crises that I foresaw festered and eventually unfolded. The decision to predict the impending calamity is made easier by the fact that there is no chance of cognitive dissonance around the issue of being safe rather than sorry. There is no safe option. The choices are to either watch the sustenance of the poor being taken away by government or fighting the government -- starving slowly or being shot to death quickly. Actually, there IS a third option -- committing crimes of survival and being sustained in jail or prison -- at least until the jail staff locks you in and leaves you there unattended and unfed for lack of funds. (Don't say that it could never happen in America. Many, including myself thought that tRump as 45 couldn't happen.)

As a matter of fact, it's the lack of funds for social services that the [t]ax plan will lead to which is at issue here. (It should be said here that a path to a living-wage job is the best social service; but, until that becomes every able-bodied person's indefinite and invariable reality, a social safety net is needed.) Since the plight of America's poor was brought to the attention of the U.S. Government in the 60's and the plight of the homeless was highlighted in the 80's, there has been a proliferation of non-profits that serve and advocate for these populations. Advocates have developed an annual routine that includes fighting against any threat governments make to slash social service funding. Until now, these advocates have been able to preserve enough funding to keep the lid on the pressure cooker and avoid a Socialist (i.e. Christian) or Communist Revolution. However, the size of the most recent tax cuts, when taken together with other economic factors, might give congressional Repugnants...err Republicans all of the justification they need to implement their little-known plan to eliminate HUD and possibly SNAP (food stamps) over the next 10 years. While several corporations have stated their intent to do more hiring and/or to give their current employees raises and bonuses, it's highly unlikely that this will even come close to making up for the totality of what America's poor will lose in the way of sustenance. That's not to speak of the fact that the basic necessities of life are being priced out of the reach of many people. Case-in-point: We're on track to lose all remaining "affordable" housing by the end of 2020, though not as a direct result of the developer-in-chief's policies. Even so, capitalism gone awry is giving us an ever increasing cost of living, a decrease in safety net funding and a growing number of people who need that safety net. This confluence of crises and atrocities will inevitably culminate in a very dramatic event -- hopefully a revolution.

What's more is that, immediately following federal budget cuts to the social safety net, lower governments generally try to fill the gaps through tax increases and/or pulling funds from other parts of their respective budgets in order to fund safety net programs. I vividly recall the frenzy that was created in October 2008 when the DC Council threatened to cut much social service funding because of the economic downturn. Hundreds of advocates and concerned citizens inundated City Hall with our demands that they find the funding to maintain social services. This crisis response would become an annual springtime routine until at least 2011, die out for about three years and get co-opted by non-profits that receive government funding (which means they're unlikely to call out systemic flaws) every year thereafter -- albeit in a more proactive manner. The District of Columbia (local) Government's ability to fill the gap is complicated by the fact that the nation's capital is not located in a state and therefore lacks that funding stream.

Add to this the fact that there is a moral mandate to care for the most vulnerable people among us which politicians recognize as well as the political will to attract only high earners to DC; and, what you get is a mixture of social programs for the disabled, an effort by many non-profits to label even the able-bodied and -minded as disabled and a mere token effort by government to connect the poor to living-wage jobs -- with jobs programs being too small, training people for jobs whose prevailing wages don't come close to paying the average rent and which are under-advertised lest the long lines of people seeking entry serve as proof positive that government's efforts toward employment of the poor are woefully inadequate. So, the nation's poor spend almost as much time jumping through hoops in order to maintain their eligibility in programs that give them handouts as they would spend working on jobs which, in turn, prevents them from finding and maintaining employment. Consequently, the dispossessed who realize that one "must hold onto what they've got until they get something better" remain in homeless shelters and continue to receive other social services -- only to be denigrated by government and the general public for doing so. It would seem that the persistently high number of homeless families in DC, coupled with the persistent insistence of these families and their advocates that they at least be afforded safe shelter has finally paid off insomuch as they're in the process of getting something better -- albeit better shelter, as opposed to affordable housing.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser recently announced that her administration will close the dilapidated DC General Family Shelter later this year -- thereby keeping a campaign promise that she made as she rode the wave of emotion surrounding the disappearance of eight-year old Relisha Rudd from the shelter in March 2014. (The abductor killed his wife and himself, with Relisha having never been found.) While this announcement offers reason for celebration and for developers who've sought this valuable piece of property for decades to fund Ms. Bowser's 2018 mayoral campaign, it's important for all concerned citizens to keep a close eye on a government that has executed homeless shelter closures poorly in the past. After all, three of the poorly-executed shelter closures that I was privy to were carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2010 by former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty whose protege Mayor Bowser was -- her having outgrown his straightforwardly argumentative arrogance, as she is much more underhanded (a character assessment I've heard more than a few people give of her). I prefer his manner over hers, by all means; because, at least I know where he's coming from. I believe many other DC voters feel the same way.

That said, the DC General Family shelter holds more than the combined total of people in all three of the shelters that her mentor closed. Though she's outgrown him, she hasn't outdone him. Whereas he replaced shelters with housing programs, she's replacing a dilapidated shelter with several smaller shelters -- essentially subdividing Hell into smaller more manageable sections. To be fair, Mayor Bowser is connecting some of the city's homeless families to housing in programs that predate her tenure as mayor -- such as the Rapid Re-Housing Program (RRH-Families). DC has had over 1,200 homeless families at different times, a fraction of which reside at DC General. If all were to go according to plan, the smaller replacement shelters will fill immediately and the number of families using hotels in DC and Maryland on the city's dime would decrease -- until the next economic crisis (which is likely to be a federally-generated crisis).

Mayor Muriel Bowser's ICH (Inter-agency Council on Homelessness) Director Kristy Greenwalt has gone on the record saying that the rush to close the shelter by the fall of 2018 is not politically motivated; but, she should (and probably DOES) know better -- especially since Ms. Bowser has been striving for seven months thus far to reverse the public's perception that she is not doing enough to decrease homelessness or to create affordable housing. However, Ms. Greenwalt (the only departmental director without a profile on the government website) gets a pass when it comes to her lack of knowledge around shelter closures, having been appointed by then-Mayor Vince Gray in early 2014 and retained by the Bowser administration (2015-2019). Fortunately, there are a few ICH members and member agencies who've worked in their respective fields since at least as far back as 2007, though it remains to be seen as to whether or not they'll remember the lessons that were learned from those flawed processes. (I'm still here to remind them, which they hate.)

Before we even begin to consider the problems created by city officials during these three closures, it's important to note that, when the DC General Hospital was closed in 2001, it was known that the building was dilapidated. Even so, DC Government began to use it as an overflow shelter as they moved 35 families into the building in 2005. By 2010 that number had grown to over 100 families and advocates began to complain of overcrowding, poor maintenance and inappropriate behaviors from shelter staff. The city then renovated a large portion of the hospital such that it had a capacity to serve 288 homeless families. But this building which is over 150 years old would eventually prove to be irreparable and the cost of maintaining it unreasonably high. At any rate, the local government should have known when they began to use the defunct hospital as a shelter that there would soon come a day when they'd have to move shelter residents to another shelter or, better yet, into affordable housing. So, don't believe the hype when government says that it cares too much to allow people to continue to reside in a dilapidated government building. Sadly, it took the abduction a little girl to spur the action that should have been taken at least as far back as the first major complaint in 2010, with Mayor Muriel Bowser having become a council woman from the summer of 2007 (when she took the place of Fenty who'd become mayor that January) and having held that post through 2014. As the late Relisha Rudd might say, "Better late than never" -- even if Ms. Bowser failed to promote better circumstances for the city's homeless families until it was politically advantageous for her, having only done so when riding the emotional wave promised to land her in the mayor's office.

As if the past failures of the government that Muriel Bowser has been part of for over 10 years are not enough, buried within the jargon used on the ICH website is the hidden fact that the current administration intends to ignore the insurmountable employment challenges of able-bodied, single homeless adults (those who don't have vulnerable children in tow). The term "chronic" refers to those who have a debilitating condition AND have been homeless for a long time, not to all people that have merely been homeless for a long time. Able-bodied men without dependent children in tow are a politically toxic group for government to assist -- a group that many people within and without the government love to hate. That said, the Fenty administration which worked in earnest to do something better for the homeless families at the now-defunct DC Village Family Shelter ended up moving many families into DC General which had closed as a hospital six years prior.

By the end of 2006, there had been many complaints of deplorable conditions at DC Village -- rodents, bedbugs and a poorly-maintained building. Then Councilmen Adrian Fenty and Marion Barry held a town hall meeting (which I attended) and they heard people's gripes. As mayor in 2007, Mr. Fenty appointed Clarence Carter to direct the Dept. of Human Services (DHS). Mr. Carter began his job on July 23rd, 2007 and, as a test, was given three months to close DC Village. He passed. The families were placed in the System Transformation Initiative (STI) housing program and led to believe that their housing would be indefinite. Program funding dried up the next year; and, Fenty would become notorious for beginning more than one multi-year program using one-time funding streams. STI was converted to STEAP (Short-Term Exit Assistance Program) and families who'd been given a bait-and-switch were told that a decreasing percentage of their rent would be paid for a year, after which they'd have to pay the high rents entirely out of pocket -- these high rents being the very reason that a lot of these families became homeless in the first place. Between families that defaulted when their portion of the rent in STEAP was too steep for them and those who became homeless for the first time, the need for family shelter remained. More space was opened up at DC General which had held 35 families since 2005. The inability of families to pay the entirety of their rent after the STEAP subsidy ended are reasons for homeless families to be extremely wary about entering a program with a decreasing subsidy unless and until the $2,000+/month average DC rent (for a two-bedroom) is forced down. It's a matter of good planning, not laziness, that causes homeless families to reject a housing program that only sets them up to fail. As for the funding failures of the STI program, that's a lesson for government. Hopefully they've learned and retained it.

On April 1st, 2008 the Fenty administration announced that it would close the Franklin School Shelter which was housed in the building from which Alexander Graham Bell sent the first phone signal in the history of the world. On April 6th several administrators from DHS met with the 300 men which the shelter held (in a building with many steps, no accessible entrance and no working elevator). The men expressed in the days and months that followed this meeting that they felt they'd been talked "at" by government -- that government had told these homeless men what would be done "to" them and not "with" them. Government administrators would end up visiting several more times between April 6th and the September 26th closure of the Franklin School Shelter. During those visits, they connected 60 men who had debilitating mental and physical conditions to housing. At least another 180 disabled men were taken from other shelters and housed before Franklin was closed. The shelter beds that were vacated by these men and another 60 vacant beds at these other shelters were offered to the 240 men from Franklin who weren't housed. The Fenty administration received what was supposed to be a one-time infusion of federal funds to create a local Permanent Supportive Housing program for the vulnerable homeless. This program was begun in conjunction with the Franklin School Shelter closure; and, the feds ended up giving a second year of funding (which caused Fenty's DHS director, Laura Zeilinger, to jump for joy in her office -- literally).

All of this goes to show that DC Government doesn't choose to hear from able-bodied homeless singles and that they will house the disabled while moving the able-bodied around until they become disabled or they die. The lesson here is that government needs to hear and heed the words of the able-bodied homeless, help them surmount any employment challenges and create housing that is affordable to these newly-employed homeless people. I have a sneaky suspicion that no local (fascistic) government really wants to learn that lesson lest they draw hard-working low earners to their city and decrease the tax dollar to citizen ratio. In 2010 the La Casa Shelter (the city's only Hispanic shelter) closed under similar circumstances to those of Franklin. There have been lawsuits around the Franklin and La Casa Shelter closures; but, as you might imagine, the courts tend to side with the administration.

It's too soon to give Mayor Bowser her final grade for how well she did at her pet project of making homelessness "rare, brief and non-recurring" -- primarily for homeless families. (Despite what she may have led the public to believe, the documents and what gets said in meetings point toward a plan to help only the subsets of homeless people wherein it is not politically toxic for Bowser to do so.) Washington, DC's homeless people were counted on the night of January 24th, 2018 and the results of the count will be issued in the Washington Post between May 10th and May 15th. The 2017 count was 175 people higher than what we counted in January 2015 (the month she took office). In all fairness, the 1,052-person increase in homeless people from 2015 to 2016 (from 7,298 to 8,350) was a result of the policies of her predecessor, Vince Gray. (Ms. Bowser granted access to shelter for those who needed it during the Gray administration and they came out of the woodwork.) Homelessness in the city then dropped by 877 people to 7,473 in 2017.

Coincidentally, the 2016 count was 25 more than the 8,325 homeless people that the city counted during its first-ever federally-mandated homeless point-in-time count in 2001; and, the 2017 number was five more than the 7,468 people counted in 2002. The homelessness population went up to 7,950 people in 2003, 8,253 in 2004 and 8,977 in 2005. Since the two successive decreases from 2005 to 2007 (2005: 8,977; 2006: 6,157; 2007: 5,757), DC has not seen two decreases in a row. This leaves us to wonder whether the pattern will continue to play itself out by rendering some 7,935 homeless people this year and rising to 8,922 in 2020 (a year into the second term that Ms. Bowser hopes to win) or if it will be broken -- even giving us a second successive decrease for the first time in over 10 years. While DC's homeless population would have to have gotten down to 6,000 or less people this year in order for there to be any hope of ending ALL long-term homelessness (more than 60 days long) by the end of 2020, I'm guessing that another decrease of almost 900 people would cause her to get high marks from voters concerning her work on homelessness. Now it's just a waiting game so as to see what numbers are published in May.

Mayor Bowser is up for re-election in the Democratic Primary on June 19th (Juneteenth), 2018. (The 2014 primary was held in April -- BEFORE the homeless count numbers were released that year and got moved to June for 2016 and the foreseeable future.) With Washington, DC being a Democratic town (where tRump only got 4% of the vote and where every mayor has been a Democrat), the mayoral Primary is the de facto election. It stands to reason that, as people go to the polls in June, they'll still have the data from the homeless count swirling through their heads; and, they might step over and around a few homeless people on their way to vote. It will be interesting to watch how it all plays out.

Let's imagine for a moment that Muriel Bowser wins the primary and doesn't become the first Democratic primary winner to lose the DC mayor's seat in the general election. That would also make her the first incumbent mayor to win since I moved to DC in 2005. Mayor Bowser would find herself in office during what promise to be very trying times -- the likes of which haven't been seen since World War II. After all, the experts have guessed that we'll be at war with North Korea by March 20th, 2018 -- at the latest. The confluence of lower taxes, higher wartime expenditures and decreased social service spending by the feds promises to put a strain on DC Government's social service budget. (About one-fourth of DC's local $14B budget comes from Congress.) If we're lucky, we might not see the worst of these impending troubles until 2020.

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I like to give credit where credit is due. So, I must say that DC Mayor Muriel Elizabeth Bowser handles the media much better than tRump. It's not just that she presents herself better than he -- a low bar, by all means. It's not just because she tells her version of "the truth" instead of ranting about the "fake media". Additionally, Ms. Bowser responds to media reports that she realizes can be used to gauge her work. Since a June 2017 poll indicated that 55% of respondents were unhappy with her work to create affordable  and 62% of respondents were dissatisfied with her work to end homelessness, the mayor has stepped up her game -- in part because of the June 2018 election. That said, we can get through to her (and tRump) by way of the media. If the media were to grade the mayor's work through a series of articles that highlight what campaign promises she has or hasn't kept as well as other factors, we can really give her the run for her money.

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