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=jsteele]Here is the complete list of sites for which proposals were submitted:

http://mayor.dc.gov/sites/default/files/dc/sites/mayormb/page_content/attachments/Short-Term-Family-Housing-Site-Selection.pdf

It looks like they tried hard for Tenleytown.
[/quote]

Statistics show higher crime, higher rates of substance abuse, and higher rates of violence among low income/public housing residents. Will higher crime rates come along with the shelters- especially if they become permanent housing? It is a valid concern. Not sure I agree with the shelters neon in all wards. They should be near where the families work and go to school and at their last address.[/quote]

Dear Ms. Nimby,

Low income housing that has the effect of concentrating poverty and other social problems should not be conflated with a small family shelter.  There are 200+ families living at DC General shoulder-to-shoulder with a methadone clinic, TB clinic and the DC Jail.  It's a dumping ground.  Shame on you.[/quote]

I want to help the homeless and have done a lot. However, you can't debate the facts that along with lower income and subsidized housing comes higher crime and a slew of other issues. The facts and statistics do not lie. You can't help one group while harming another. You would be surprised that the people fighting this idea the most are not the über wealthy but are the people that used to live in those neighborhoods or circumstances and were able to move away. They do not want the crime and issues that come along with public housing to come to their neighborhood. [/quote]

So what, pray tell, is your solution? [/quote]

We obviously do not currently have sufficient wraparound social services to help get the folks in DC General on their feet - and now we're going to spend a bunch of money on what appears to primarily be a real estate boondoggle which will take even more money away from actually helping the homeless aside from providing them with expensive housing that could have housed 3x as many people...

I for one will admit I don't know what the solution is but it seems pretty clear the Bowser administration and folks here on DCUM have even less of an idea of what the solution is than I do since there is zero clear strategy being articulated here, along with poor tactical usage of funding.[/quote]

PP, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole again, but setting aside concerns about cronyism and the NIMBYism that has characterized at least 40 of these 50 pages, all told...

Family homelessness in DC is at a crisis point. There are 800-some children living in DC General, which was closed when it was no longer possible to maintain it as a hospital. The building is disgusting. Have you been there? I have. I work there 2 days a week, and it is disgusting, unsafe, and BLEAK.

It is easy to talk about "better solutions" and the ridiculousness of spending $3300/mo on ritzy dorms, but when I hear "new building" what I hear is "...where the children will experience regularly functional heat and hot water and the absence of rats and bedbugs." It's not that I don't think the other things are important, but tomorrow morning, I will be back at DC General and those things will fade in importance when compared with the ~320 babies who live in that horrible place.[/quote]

Nobody here disagrees with you on how bad DC General is.  But what people are clearly skeptical about is how much better this will be.  If people still don't have basic life skills, hygiene skills, et cetera there will still be babies being raised amidst roaches, bedbugs, lice, et cetera...  except now in a $3300/month unit.  Simply throwing more money at apartments doesn't somehow magically solve those problems.  Even rich people can engage in behaviors like hoarding and poor care of their self and home that allows those things to happen, but it's far more likely to happen among the very poor who in many cases either never learned how to take care of themselves and their surroundings in the first place, or for whom given other issues it may be so far down on their basic survival hierarchy of needs that even if they know how they can't or won't.  And it also doesn't make the legitimate concerns about cronyism magically disappear either.

We want ALL of those concerns addressed and dealt with in some form.  Simply redirecting back to "yabut DC General is horrible" doesn't accomplish any of that.[/quote]

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