DC Winter Plan Meeting Exposes Affordable Housing Problems

I thought a second public meeting to discuss the District’s Winter Plan would be a calm, even dull affair.

Not so. David Berns, Director of the Department of Human Services, got an earful of anger and anguish. More of the same at the meeting of the Interagency Council on Homelessness that followed.

Nothing much he could do — even if DHS had a reasonably ample budget for homeless services.

Because the frustration, outrage, tears even had nothing to do with shelter or related services the agency funds.

Nor with the short-shot homelessness prevention and temporary housing solutions the department still claims will significantly reduce pressures on DC General — the main shelter for homeless families.

They were mostly about the egregious shortage of affordable housing and/or long-term housing assistance here — and a perceived lack of concern on the part of the Gray administration and administrations that preceded it.

Delores, for example, told us that she’s 63 years old, disabled and receiving about $11,000 a year in Social Security benefits.

She’s visited one apartment complex after another and been told she’d need to prove an income of at least $19,000. “All these lists,” she said, waving them, “and nothin’.”

Several other participants remarked on all the multi-family housing construction they were seeing. Why didn’t the District require developers to make some portion of the units affordable for low-income people?

And why didn’t the District rehabilitate some vacant buildings as housing for homeless people instead of putting them into shelters?

“We’re just kicking the bucket down the road,” one homeless advocate said. And that’s surely true.

As I earlier remarked, the prevention and temporary housing solutions DHS plans to rely on won’t help families who can’t pay market-rate rents at the end of a year.

The casework improvements DHS promises are, as Berns admits, a longer-term solution. And I seriously doubt they’ll lead to jobs that pay enough to make housing affordable for more than a fraction of homeless adults.

A modest one-bedroom apartment, for example, would be affordable only for those earning more than three times the local minimum wage.

And what about people like Delores who can’t work and have only Social Security benefits, based on years of low-wage work, to cover all their daily living expenses?

Or the many hundreds of homeless individual men and women who’ll be out on the streets in April unless a future revenue forecast comes in at least $7 million more than the last — or Mayor Gray decides to make up for the shortfall?

Say the money materializes. That will only mean shelter on a night-to-night, first-come-first-served basis for men and women who want — and need — a secure, stable, reasonably decent place to live.

DHS does have some permanent supportive housing units now — enough for nearly 1,130 people, including children. I infer it’s planning to open more, though not until some time after October 2014.

But there will never be enough of these units to move everyone out of the shelters. And there won’t be vacancies unless people who’ve resolved the problems the supportive services are supposed to address can find another affordable place to live.

DHS may advocate behind closed doors, but there’s really nothing else it can do about this.

Our local government has allowed the stock of housing that’s affordable for low-income people to dwindle — arguably even facilitated its replacement with those high-end developments that meeting participants understandably resent.

It’s kept funding for the Local Rent Supplement Program — the District’s solution to the long-standing shortage of federal housing vouchers — below the level that would be needed to provide more residents with this sort of housing assistance.

True, the DC Council put funding for 250 or so new LRSP vouchers into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget. But they’ll all go to homeless families DHS is already housing, plus some who are — or will soon be — at DC General.

Good for them, but no help for the families that will fill in behind them. Or those who won’t because the doors will be closed to newly-homeless families when the winter season ends.

Delores went to the ICH meeting hoping someone would help her. She ultimately stormed out, shouting, “This is asinine.”

And, in a way, it was.

Because the District has failed to come to grips with the reasons there are so many homeless people here — and an ever-increasing number of homeless parents with children.

But both she and many other community members there wanted the ICH to deliver what only the Mayor and Council can.

As we were repeatedly reminded, the Winter Plan is supposed to help ensure that the District meets an important, but narrow legal obligation, i.e., to protect people from literally freezing to death.

Presumably the District will. What it won’t do, barring some radical priority changes, is meet the basic human need for a home.