Reply to MLK closing--DC General needed more than ever to serve homeless!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As Muriel Bowser and the Council prepare this valuable city property giveaway, they are not accounting for the surge of chronic homeless who bus to and fill MLK library daily and now will have few alternatives with the coming 3 year renovation. The city is suggesting other library sites for their 'customers without homes'. So the city wants to close the large capacity shelter it owns (rather than renovate it and rethink services) but would encourage satellite libraries as the space for now displaced homeless to gather?
Have they considered renovating DC General and providing, as part of it, a cozy central space with table, computer monitors, newspapers, libraries, tables...not to mention beds and services...so that libraries are libraries and shelters are shelters? 
The proposal below costs additional money to the 8 shelter program or uses an existing facility in a way it was not intended for.

"[b]The city would like to create a downtown day center for the homeless[/b], like the one it operates on Adams Place in Northeast Washington, she said. Until then, it will add shuttle stops to its buses to give the homeless other options....
The library system itself is also trying to help the homeless adjust. It is one of the few library systems in the nation to employ a full-time homeless coordinator, Jean Badalamenti, a licensed social worker who assists homeless people and trains staff to recognize and work sensitively with “customers without homes.”
Badalamenti said [b]the library has been encouraging the homeless to use other branches[/b]."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/where-will-they-go-mlk-library-a-refuge-for-the-citys-homeless-closes-for-renovation/2017/03/03/4f9b6218-fc7e-11e6-8f41-ea6ed597e4ca_story.html?utm_term=.b14778662c58[/quote]

DC General is a family shelter. Homeless adults without children cannot stay there and other than the women's shelter planned for Ward 2, none of the new shelters would be responsive to your concern. The suggestions I've seen to renovate DC General all involve keeping it as a family shelter and simply improving facilities/adding services - not changing the population served by it. [/quote]

D.C. General is also nowhere near most of the jobs that homeless adults without children might want to apply for so they can afford to get housing, which makes it sort of a less than ideal place to try to push them to spend their time at. Except, of course, for those D.C. residents who would prefer that all homeless people be confined in neighborhoods we rarely set foot in.[/quote]

The 300 plus homeless who are quoted in the article as spending decades camped out in MLK during the day are clearly not job seeking. They want a warm place to read the paper, surf the web and sit in a favorite chair. Donuts and coffee would be a plus. This could be arranged at a refurbished dc general and some services to get them in a state to work could be thrown in. The current plan, if you read the article, is to drop them off by shuttle at neighborhood libraries. And of course we know, to sell DC General to developers, probably at a long term loss to the city coffers.[/quote]

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