With homelessness surging and nighttime temperatures below freezing for a 31st straight day in Washington, D.C., District officials asked a judge to suspend one condition of the law that requires the capital city to shelter homeless people on hypothermia nights.
Late Thursday, the judge ordered that D.C. does not have to provide private units to families under its right-to-shelter law. The privacy requirements stemmed from a court case last spring, when former Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration was blasted for resorting to cots in city rec centers as the District’s shelter system was overwhelmed last winter. Since then, homelessness has continued to surge in the area and affordable housing has grown more scarce even as luxury condos and high-end apartment blocks have gone up around the city.
“Partitioned, communal spaces are not anyone’s first choice in housing homeless families,” city lawyers wrote in Thursday night’s motion, “but under the extreme circumstances caused by the number of hypothermia alerts this season, the District simply cannot comply with all the terms of the Court’s Order.” The document says that no additional private space is available in city-owned buildings, and no additional hotels are willing to take on homeless guests beyond the four currently leasing rooms to the city. “The issue faced by the District is not financial. It is a lack of available physical space that complies” with the privacy rules.
While cold-weather homelessness is certainly a crisis, it’s one the city knew was coming. Last fall, the District’s Interagency Council on Homelessness published its Winter Plan, which predicted a 16 percent surge in homeless families needing shelter. The group projected that even after renting hundreds of hotel rooms, the city would still be unable to find adequate space to meet the leap in need. Advocates say renting motel rooms is suboptimal, in large part because motel rooms far from public transportation and homeless population hubs is isolating and doesn’t facilitate connecting people to social services. But the rooms are far preferable to setting up cots in rec rooms — a move Bowser had criticized when her predecessor Vincent Grey took it last winter under similar circumstances.
“Our intention with this was never to start using rec centers,” D.C. Director of Human Services Laura Zeilinger told ThinkProgress. “We wanted to make sure that we had the ability to meet the emergency need of families coming in in a way that would not put us in contempt. Our intention is to put families in the best position that we can for their safety and their well-being, and at the same time to transition them out of shelters into housing.” In addition to the 42 semi-private units at DC General Shelter that the emergency motion frees up for use again, city officials said they have identified several other residential spaces that can provide suitable shelter now that the privacy requirement has been relaxed.
Increasing DC General’s capacity to host families by 42 units won’t solve the District’s winter problem, both because it isn’t enough to meet the full need and because the shelter’s staff so overtaxed already. The city is putting 40 new families in shelter each week while only rotating 10 families out on average, according to the argument in the court filing. Former Mayor Gray froze $600,000 in city money that was intended to hire 10 additional caseworkers to help families move out of DC General into longer-term housing.
While the Bowser administration has thawed funding for a housing voucher program that helps address homelessness, according to the Fair Budget Coalition’s Monica Kamen, the caseworker money is still frozen. “When there’s a freezing night you see an influx in families, but no jump in ability to get them access to the services they need,” Kamen said. “The case managers that are there are working hard to get them services, but you see those families staying in shelter longer instead of being able to access those services earlier and move through the system.” Zeilinger said the Mayor would unfreeze the caseworker money “should there be a need to,” but that all sheltered families are currently connected with a caseworker, and the immediate focus belongs on physical space and safety. Whether it’s caused by insufficient caseworkers or insufficient space, the fact remains that the city-wide rate of transitioning families out of shelters has fallen significantly in recent months.
Zeilinger has only been on the job two weeks, but her presence in the administration is reassuring to many observers. Advocates and the homeless expressed a mix of optimism and frustration in December at a symbolic funeral for the 55 people who died sleeping rough in the District last year, and Thursday night’s move doesn’t seem to have dented the optimism. “The optimism stays very strong just in terms of what we have witnessed so far in Mayor Bowser’s administration,” said Tom Murphy, communications director for D.C. homelessness charity Miriam’s Kitchen. “The team she’s assembling comes with high regard.”
The administration and observers alike hope that dealing with this immediate crisis can make it easier to take longer-term actions. “Our legal obligation kicks in with the weather,” Zeilinger said, “but the need is not contingent on the weather. We’re trying to transition our system to meet the needs of families overall, 365 days of the year.”
Whether that’s a question of additional economic resources or mere political will, depends who you ask. “From the Fair Budget Coalition’s perspective, the city certainly has enough money” to end chronic homelessness, Kamen said, citing the city’s recent hundred-million-dollar investment in a soccer stadium for D.C. United. “There are steps we could take to bring in more revenue. It’s a matter of political will to make sure the money gets out the door and that we are actually prioritizing solving this problem.”
While eleventh-hour court filings bring spikes in attention, the District’s long-term success or failure at fighting homelessness relies on drier stuff, like the budget process. “There’s reason for the optimism, but this is where the optimism meets reality,” said Councilwoman Elissa Silverman, who shared advocates’ confidence in Bowser’s staffing choices. Still, Silverman has raised concerns to the administration about freezing spending on low-income housing needs when the city is enjoying a budget surplus. “If we have resources, we should be spending them on trying to get these families into stable housing, because we know that it’s not only the humane thing to do, it’s the fiscally responsible thing to do.”
There is expert consensus about the concrete ideas that can get a city off the crisis footing and onto the path to ending chronic homelessness. While right-to-shelter laws provide a crucial protection for homeless people, they also force the District into “a crisis-responsive rather than a crisis-averting approach,” said Eric Tars, senior attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Cities should also establish a firm and enforceable right to adequate and affordable housing, Tars said, so that the political system will have incentive to take bolder big-picture actions that might avert the kind of crisis that motivated Thursday night’s courtroom drama.
“This can’t be solved overnight,” he said. “But we do need to look at the systemic causes of why so many families are becoming homeless in the district, and what can be done to stop the flood from upstream rather than just dealing with it downstream.” Such upstream solutions include right-to-counsel laws for tenants facing eviction, more ambitious zoning rules and development incentives, and hard-line legal requirements such as those France and Scotland use to force local governments to ensure housing for all segments of the income distribution.
“I think the right to housing isn’t just about four walls and a roof. It’s also ultimately about the dignity of the individual, and the requirements that the courts have put on this right to shelter are flowing out of that concept of how to ensure a dignified existence for families under these conditions,” Tars said.
Such a long-term policy approach can’t come soon enough. Two of the largest and longest-running shelters in the District have been closed and redeveloped for private use in recent years, and an investigation of the sole remaining shelter found overcrowding, health concerns, and serious neglect of children. One such child, Relisha Rudd, was abducted last spring from the facility. Authorities suspect a janitor at the shelter kidnapped Rudd, who is still missing nearly a year later.