Reply to New Ward 3 Homeless Families Shelter Site

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "New Ward 3 Homeless Families Shelter Site"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Again the shelter proposed for your neighborhood that you are paranoid about is to serve as transitional short term housing for families recently made homeless.

You keep talking about the mentally ill long term homeless who often also have substance abuse issues and are difficult to employ.

This shelter will be serving people who for whatever reason have hit a stretch of bad luck and need housing to get back on their feet - many of these folks are even employed.

One of the reasons to immediately house these people and get them back on their feet is so that they and their children don't become part of the long term homeless population - get them sheltered and protected and keep them employed or employable and keep their kids in school rather than allowing their situation to deteriorate which is bad for everyone including taxpayers.[/quote]

I'm not the PP you've been bickering with, but another PP from a few pages back.  A few thoughts:

1. I've read all of the Mayor's materials about these 8 new ward shelters, and I understand that she's claiming they will be short-term transitional facilities for families only.  But I also know (and I hope you'd admit) that it's not unreasonable to be wary of a bait-and-switch, where these supposed short-term transitional facilities for families only get converted into long-term housing for high-risk singles.  Indeed, I've even seen some of the later DC materials that start to water down their promises about how the facilities will be used, for example adding wiggle-room language about how the shelters are [i]primarily [/i]designed and [i]intended initially [/i]to house [i]mostly [/i]families.  When I see ambiguous words like those, I get suspicious of the Mayor's true intentions.  That suspicion is increased by how the Mayor announced these shelter locations and tried to force them without any public input.

2. I suspect most of the people posting about this topic genuinely do want to help the needy population.  You are being unfair to them, and quite frankly discouraging them from wanting to help, when you take a condescending attitude and accuse anyone who raises concerns of parroting right-wing talking points.  I know your approach turns me off.  Consider whether you might achieve more good by seeking a compromise that works for both (1) the homeless population, (2) the neighborhoods that are expected to absorb the shelters.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics