DC Bill Puts Priority On Homeless Youth

The DC Council seems again poised to amend the Homeless Services Reform Act — the basis for much of what the District does to address homelessness in our community.

The bill is nothing like so controversial as last year’s amendment, which, as you may recall, sought to restrict emergency shelter to people who could prove they were D.C. residents.

The new amendment was jointly introduced by Councilmember Jim Graham, Chairman of the Human Services Committee, and Councilmember Michael Brown, Chairman of the Housing and Workforce Development.

It’s got nine cosponsors — all sitting Councilmembers who had an opportunity to sign on except Jack Evans and David Catania.

Last month’s hearing on the amendment was a virtual love fest. All but two witnesses supported it as-is.

And those two had reservations about just one part — seats on the Interagency Council on Homelessness designated specifically for represents of organizations that serve homeless youth and homeless families. Not, I think, a make-or-break.

The strategic plan ICH issued last April pays a good deal of attention to homeless families — as well it should. Virtually nothing, however, about homeless youth who aren’t with adult family members.

Concern about them dominated the hearing. And it’s surely a legitimate concern.

As a majority of witnesses emphasized, homeless youth are distinctively different from homeless adults.

Many become homeless for different reasons, e.g., because they need to escape abusive situations, because their parents throw them out, because they “age out” of the foster care system or get released from detention without provisions for housing.

They’re still developing emotionally and cognitively — more vulnerable, but perhaps more open to help than people who’ve endured years of hardship, humiliation, downright hostility, etc.

They’re more likely to be in unstable housing situations — couch surfing in homes of friends and relatives — than in shelters or on the streets. And, for that reason, we’ve got no idea of how many there are.

The Graham-Brown amendment aims to give the DC Council a better fix on the problems and solutions — not only for homeless youth, but for other subgroups that the ICH strategy and homeless counts already distinguish.

It requires ICH to develop a new five-year strategic plan, plus annual plans for implementing it. The Council is supposed to get these as part of the administration’s annual budget proposals.

Many specific parts to the plan. Some seem to me very challenging — for example:

• A gap analysis of the shelter, housing and support needs of discrete homeless populations, along with numerical goals for housing production or rental assistance for each.
• A strategy for working collaboratively with surrounding jurisdictions.
• An account of trends in federal homelessness funding, plus an analysis of how local agencies and nonprofits can get more federal funds and, as if that weren’t enough, how said funds would be “utilized and prioritized.”

Heavy lifting, I think. But something along these lines could be feasible if all the senior District officials now nominally on the ICH actively participated — and committed staff support.

That in itself could be a heavy lift for agencies already struggling with budget-driven staff shortages.

I’ve remarked before that the DC Council seems better at making good policies than at providing the oversight and resources needed to make them work.

I fear that the Graham-Brown amendment may prove a case in point. But I hope it passes anyway.

We have nonprofits in the District that specialize in services for homeless youth. But our government needs to make serious investments in helping these young people out on their own get connected to caring adults and onto a pathway out of poverty.

Clearly also needs to do a much better job of making sure there aren’t so many homeless youth to begin with.

Can’t do that until it knows where it is, where it should be going and what it must do to get there. And the rest of us could use better data and benchmarks too.

Right To Shelter In DC Dies On Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day

Yesterday, the shortest day of the year, marked the 20th annual National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day.

Around the country and here in Washington, D.C., public officials, advocates, service providers, homeless people and other community members gathered to commemorate men and women who died while homeless during this hard year.

Let’s also pause to mourn the death of major protections formerly provided by the District’s Homeless Services Reform Act. Because, in an unwitting irony, the DC Council yesterday passed Councilmember Tommy Wells’s amendment to the act for the second time.

This virtually ensures that restrictions which expose homeless people in the District to greater — even life-threatening — risks will become law. And Councilmembers were well aware of the impacts.

Opponents warned that the amendment will be “cruel” to District residents, that we’ll be putting homeless people “who arrive at our doorsteps” out into the cold, that we’ll be “dumbing down” standards for family shelter accommodations.

Reminded their colleagues of someone homeless whose birthday we’re about to celebrate.

All over-ridden by self-congratulatory explanations that homeless people have been flocking here because we’re such a “liberal” jurisdiction.

By recurrent references to the prospective funding shortfall and a potential “over-concentration of facilities” in Ward 4 — a fine justification for letting families freeze if there ever was one.

Plus an assurance that the bill won’t take effect until mid-March, so there’s no danger of “immediate harm” — as if that’s the only kind we should worry about.

“These are difficult times we find ourselves in,” says Council Chairman Vincent Gray as a wrap-up. More difficult than someone comfortably housed can imagine, I think.

Debate notwithstanding, positions were already set in stone. The amendment was a done deal before the vote was taken.

So now what?

Councilmember Wells informs his colleagues that DC General is full, that there’s a long line of families awaiting shelter and that the District “can’t even guarantee a private room” — the new minimum standard for family shelter units.

In other words, the District can’t comply with the weakened law. And there’s not a shred of evidence that the problematic proof-of-residency requirements (see here and here) will make much difference.

No difference at all to the homeless families that can’t get into DC General because the Council failed to ensure that the Department of Human Services could in fact cope with needs for shelter beyond the dubious projections in this year’s winter plan.

More About Changes In DC Homeless Services

As I recently wrote, Councilmember Tommy Wells made changes in his proposed amendment to the District’s Homeless Services Reform Act before the Committee on Human Services and then the full DC Council approved it.

I’ve already tried to account for changes related to eligibility for shelter. Here are the other big changes I see.

Families can’t be sheltered in barracks-style facilities. Like the original version of the bill, the final allows the District to place families in non-apartment style shelter units during severe weather conditions if no apartment-style units are available.

However, the final version says that families must be given private rooms. This seems to address some of the most urgent health and safety concerns about eliminating the apartment-style housing requirement.

Or maybe not. Washington City Paper reporter Jason Cherkis acutely notes that it doesn’t say that each family must have its own room. On the other hand, the Homeless Services Reform Act doesn’t say that each family must have its own apartment-style unit either. I doubt we’d have the outcry now if it weren’t understood that way.

However interpreted, the provision clearly relieves the District from any obligation to move toward more suitable shelters for families. Professor Matt Fraidin’s testimony about conditions at DC General should give one pause.

I’m thinking here particularly about conditions that can’t be remedied by improving maintenance and investing in some modest remodeling, e.g., refrigerators that all parents can use 24/7.

Such upgrades would still leave children with no quiet place to do homework, no safe place to play, limited opportunity to socialize and exposure to a host of rules that undermine a healthy relationship with their parents.

As Fraidin recently told Cherkis, even a good communal shelter, which DC General isn’t, “is a bad place for kids” and will probably cost the District more in the long run than moving away from institutions like DC General.

Homeless people may, in some circumstances, receive other services without proving residency. The original version of the bill would have required proof of residency for all homeless services — even a blanket, a warm drink or a lift to a shelter to ward off hypothermia.

The final version of the bill allows the mayor to exclude certain homeless services, provided he publishes a notice identifying them. This could ultimately take care of the ban on crisis services.

Till then, it seems that, as the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless has said, the proof of residency requirement is “akin to requiring an ID before administering life-saving medical emergency services.”

Methods of proving residency have been expanded. In the original version of the bill, only someone who lived in the District — and could present the requisite proof — could verify the residency of a homeless person who couldn’t present other acceptable evidence.

The final version includes someone who is not a District resident, but works for a service provider in the District. But only if he/she produces evidence of such employment.

No indication of what evidence would qualify. So we don’t know whether an employee could satisfy the requirement without setting aside services to other clients to take an ID or whatever to a shelter or the Virginia Williams intake center for families.

The final version of the bill also either expands or clarifies another proof of residency option. Now someone may “demonstrate” residency by “reporting a mailing address in the District, valid within the last two years.”

That could certainly take care of documentation problems that service providers and advocates have raised. But are we to understand that this will be a trust, don’t verify situation? If it is, then what’s the point of the other residency proof provisions? If it isn’t, then the problems seem as great as ever.

Bottom line. Councilmember Wells seems to have made an effort to address some of the concerns that services providers and advocates raised. But, as the old saying goes, you can’t make a silk’s purse out of a sow’s ear.

The law is going to be a deuce to administer — mainly because Wells would only tinker at the margins. And it’s still going to put our most vulnerable residents at even greater risk of harm.

All because of some fragmentary evidence that some non-resident families might have been given shelter in one of the soon-to-be-legal single rooms at the warehouse the District now has less incentive to remodel or replace.

NOTE: The Legal Clinic reminds us that the final vote on the amendment is this Tuesday, December 21. It urges us to e-mail or call our Councilmembers and ask them to vote “no.” E-mail addresses and phone numbers are at the end of its action alert.

DC Council Passes Homeless Services Restrictions

Last week, the DC Council passed Councilmember Tommy Wells’s amendment to the Homeless Services Reform Act. This was the first of the two votes generally required for District legislation. The second is scheduled for December 21.

The bill, as you’ll recall, aims to reserve publicly-funded homeless services for District residents. It also, as Wells now acknowledges, seeks to protect the District from lawsuits based on its failure to provide homeless families with apartment-style accommodations, as the Homeless Services Reform Act requires.

The final version of the amendment is different from the bill Wells originally introduced. You can see the differences in the marked-up version I’m linking to.

I’ll leave the legal analysis to the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, which still finds the amendment thoroughly objectionable. Will instead confine myself to remarking on what seem to me the biggest changes.

There are quite a few of them. So I’ll review only the provisions related to eligibility for shelter here. A followup posting will deal with the rest.

Shelter in severe weather is no longer absolutely restricted to District residents. The final version of the bill would allow the District to make shelter space during severe weather conditions available to non-residents so long as priority is given to residents.

This surely sounds less harsh than the original. But it’s hard for me to see how it would work out in practice.

Would non-resident families have to wait until the Virginia Williams Family Resources intake center made sure there would still be space if more resident families asked for shelter? Would a non-resident family get kicked out if a resident family showed up the next day?

I’m focusing on families here because the final version of the bill expands the earlier exemption for low-barrier shelters, i.e., shelters for individuals that, by definition, require no identification. Responding to testimony and/or the Legal Clinic’s analysis, Wells added an exemption for severe weather shelters that operate as low-barrier shelters.

Homeless people may be admitted to a shelter in severe weather without first proving residency. In the final version of the bill, a homeless individual or family seeking shelter in severe weather may be afforded a three-day grace period to prove residency.

Note that this is a contingent grace period. No indication of who would make the decision or on what basis. Seems to me an open door to inconsistency and confusion.

How, for example, does one reconcile this provision with the required priority for District residents? How reconcile it with a separate provision that establishes a priority for all homeless services to those who can prove residency at the time they apply?

But homeless people can’t get shelter until they’re actually in danger. The final version of the bill restricts eligibility for shelter to people who are homeless and “living in a place not intended as a residence,” e.g., on the streets, in a car, or “in any situation that is dangerous to the health or safety of any household member.”

Clarence Carter, Director of Human Services, indicated in testimony that he wanted such a definition because, he said, it would conform to the definition of “homelessness” in federal law. Unless I’m much mistaken, it’s more restrictive.

Last year’s HEARTH Act, which reauthorized the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s homelessness programs, expanded the definition of “homeless” to include, among others, individuals and families who’ve been notified they’ll be evicted within two weeks and those who are living in a hotel or motel but don’t have the resources to stay there for more than two weeks.

The District’s definition would deny shelter to these people until they’d already spent at least one night without a roof over their heads — unless, of course, the place they were living was so bad as to endanger health or safety.

If this itself isn’t a major health and safety risk, then I don’t know what is.