Reply to Shooting at Brandywine & Connecticut Ave NW This Afternoon

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]The caseworkers essential to the city’s housing-first approach work for service providers contracted by the District. They are supposed to help program participants like Watts with tasks that include creating household budgets, building community support networks and connecting with mental health and substance abuse services. For this, city contracts show, the Department of Human Services pays $755 per tenant per month. The contracts allow caseloads of up to 25 clients per caseworker.

Under the agreement, [b]caseworkers must make at least two contacts with participants a month, one of which must be in person — down from a minimum of four contacts a month required until last year. [/b][/quote]

Yikes, that is not much and it's my understanding that participants do not need to even open the door if a caseworker knocks, never mind be compliant with MH treatment, addiction treatment, etc. [b]Housing First does not allow requirements re: job training or education or moving toward self-sufficiency,[/b] in fact DC seems to have recently converted what used to be 1 year vouchers into PSH, not sure how that will be financially sustainable or if the end is built in when the buildings will be emptied, tenants who could exercise TOPA rights gone years before, and flipped to condos? No idea if audits are done to substantiate even these extremely minimal contacts, we know from WMATA how often records are faked. [/quote]

If this is true then Housing First is Bull* in terms of benefiting ANY constituents, and I will no longer listen to a word they say. Is it?[/quote]

Once again, why should basic housing have requirements? When you have too many unhoused people, crime will arise because those people have nothing to lose. That is a dangerous place to back a human into a corner. [/quote]

why should one person get to ruin the quality of life of others? if they can’t follow community norms, they can go elsewhere. [/quote]

Why are you linking unhoused peoples with crimes of violence? Most unhoused people are not the ones committing acts with guns and smash and dashes. [/quote]

We’re talking about the voucher recipients who are very much linked to a whole lot of disorder. Not all of them, but many. [/quote]

It's not even recipients themselves necessarily but boyfriends, family members, associates. In public housing you can be kicked out. DC has made it hard to evict voucher recipients and in a recent WP piece it was noted that they almost never lose voucher even if violent crime is committed by them or a visitor to their unit, they are just relocated. The young mom who was tied up, strangled and thrown out of the window in front of her toddler in the Connecticut House was the voucher holder, her boyfriend was not an official tenant. He had a veritable arsenal in the apartment, drugs and cash too and was a felon in possession of a weapon.

At one time, embassies encouraged staff to locate their family in the Forest Hills rental corridor, with the kids attending Murch and Deal for the few years they were here. The safety, walkability and school quality were noted by foreign governments. Things have changed a lot on Connecticut and Wisconsin. That is where 3,000 of the 5,000 permanent supportive housing vouchers are being used.

Visible drug dealing and public use has really increased in Cleveland Park, Van Ness and Forest Hills. No idea if those people live here or not but it's new. And with dealing valuable merch for cash come guns and violence. No idea if Saturday was a deal gone wrong, an attempted robbery, some crew dispute, mistaken identity or what, but in the past a shooting on the corner of Connecticut Avenue at 3pm on a Saturday by a playground was unthinkable.

[/quote]

Selfishly, the decay of the Conn Ave apartments has been a big disappointment to me personally. We are EOTP without a huge housing budget, and my backup plan was to move to a 2-br apartment to send my kid to Deal or JR. Although I think I have identified some buildings that are safer than others, it’s a totally different scene than I expected even a few years ago. And I do not begrudge economic/racial diversity in schools *at all*. (My kid attends a school more diverse than any leftie who wants to scold me for being a “nice white parent.”) But I need my kid to at least be safe in his own apartment building. As a consequence we would likely move to Bethesda instead of NW DC. It’s a real shame that bad DC housing policy has hollowed out options for the middle class even more than they were before. [/quote]

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