Reply to Bowser Spreads the Wealth opens homeless shelters in each DC ward

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, say good bye to that nice Guy Mason playground. It's going to be fun to see litter and people sleeping all over it at 3pm. I am a firm believer in NIMBY. What next, a methadone clinic?

Oh, and whatever schools these shelters will be inbounds for, prepare for those schools to go downhill fast.[/quote]

So you are saying that homeless shelters should not be spread throughout the city and should be concentrated in less affluent neighborhoods?  Well, the people in Ward 5 and Ward 6, who have shouldered the majority of the burden thus far, want to know what makes your ward so special?  This is everyone's burden to bear. Sorry. [/quote]

What I have not seen in this whole discussion is where those folks are coming from. From outside DC? Mostly from DC itself? If so, from which Ward? Sorry, but if (imagine) all homeless people were raised in Ward 5, and that's what they know best, it makes no particular sense to spread them across all Wards. If they all come from (say) Virginia, why should DC wear the burden?

If Bowser trying to help existing homeless people or to disrupt a number of neighborhoods and potentially bring even more homeless into the city? Those are different objectives[/quote]

Bowser is trying to close DC General, the existing family shelter that houses ~230 families. These new shelters are for families who are living there, or in the NY Ave motels. I understand that there is the perception that homeless people are flocking to DC for our amazing homeless services, and while there is some truth to that, these families are overwhelmingly DC residents. I met with a man yesterday who is homeless and mentally ill from Ward 3 (born, raised, lived there when he had an address). He's not the target population of these shelters because he is a single adult male, but he is not a poor black man from Ward 8. [b]Many of these young women are from SE, from Brookland, from Trinidad.[/b] There is an argument that if you house people in a community with better examples - working people, good schools, easily accessible grocery stores (vs. high unemployment, failing schools, and an overabundance of stripmall 7-Elevens) - they will be better situated to get out of poverty.

These are not shelters to "bring more homeless into the city." They are shelters to rehouse the people living in the toxic human rights violation that is DC General into humane living conditions and help them break the cycle of homelessness.

I wish I wrote for the Washington Post so that I could write that into the first line of every single story, since so many of you seem to think that these are shelters for individual adults from other jurisdictions.[/quote]

If it is true that many of the homeless are "from SE, from Brookland, from Trinidad," that's where they should be taken care of. That's what community-based services means -- you serve people within their community. You don't just take them and spread them to random places.

This is especially relevant when talking about temporary housing. [/quote]

I don't disagree, but we're not talking about "random places." We're talking about building shelters in various parts of the city so that not all services are clustered in one neighborhood. We're not talking about sending them away to other cities - we're talking about spreading services around to multiple parts of one city.

There are already plenty of services in those neighborhoods. That's why the Ward 5 council member is objecting. The proposed location for his ward already has a lot of such services clustered around it. [/quote]

But it is equally uprooting people from their communities, their comfort zones, the places they know, their networks, and placing them in completely new surroundings to them. They are not going to spend the whole day in the shelter, correct?

This is the opposite of community-based work.[/quote]

As you can see, there will be shelters in multiple locations. They are not relocated all of DC General to Ward 3. Also, do you truly believe that "Glover Park" is a "completely new surrounding?" Do you spend all day in the neighborhood where you live, or do you get up in the morning, take your kids to school and then go to work somewhere else in the city? I know I do.

I get the feeling that people think that homeless people just sit around all day with nothing to do. Everyone has down time, but people also meet with case managers, take classes (life skills, GED, etc.), take their children to and from school, go to medical appointments, etc. [/quote]

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