DC Bars Shelter Doors to Families With No Safe Place to Stay

The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless shares another outrageous story — a classic example of the needless hardships homeless families endure because the Gray administration has decided to retreat to what it views as its minimum legal obligations.

Hence we’ve got a mother and five children spending their nights in a bus station, though there’s plenty of room for them at DC General — the main local shelter for homeless families.

They wash up in the morning at a nearby McDonald’s. Heaven knows how the children do their homework.

You’d think the Gray administration would worry about this. The Mayor, after all, has made a big deal of his plans to ensure “high-quality educational outcomes for [the] District’s children.”

But the Department of Human Services is shy $7 million. And it’s bound and determined to make the Winter Plan work — within or under budget if it can.

As I earlier wrote, the plan calls for leaving 118 units at DC General vacant unless and until DHS would otherwise have to place families in costly motel rooms, as it did last winter. So families can’t get in now, even though there are reportedly about 100 units vacant.

This is not, I think, what the DC Council intended.

The Budget Support Act — the package of legislation that’s paired with the actual appropriations bill — includes specific instructions for what DHS is to do before the winter season officially begins.

It says that DHS “shall ensure” that at least 100 families in hotels, motels, shelters and/or transitional housing are in “apartment-style housing units” by September 30.

But that’s not all the BSA tells DHS to do. “Once there are vacancies in temporary shelters, severe-weather shelters, or transitional housing,” it says, “the Department [DHS] shall use all available resources currently budgeted for homeless families to place new family-shelter applicants who cannot access other housing arrangements … into shelters or housing.”

DHS reportedly contends that it’s currently budgeted for only 153 units at DC General — those that it designates for regular use in the Winter Plan. How it could have been funding 271 units at the time the BSA passed is a mystery, at least to me.

But this is all legalistic niggling. DHS wants those 118 units vacant. They won’t be if it allows homeless families like the Legal Clinic’s client to move from the bus station to DC General now.

So, as things stand now, families who’ve got no safe place to stay have to wait for shelter till the first freezing cold day.

As if hypothermia is the only thing that can harm them. As if the top priority for homeless services is avoiding a lawsuit — or a funding shortfall that the Mayor and Council could remedy, if they chose to.

The Legal Clinic urges us to tell that Mayor that homeless families need shelter — or even better, stable housing — now.

His e-mail address is mayor@dc.gov. And his Twitter handle @mayorvincegray.

UPDATE: The Fair Budget Coalition now has an editable letter we can use  to send to the Mayor and key decision-makers in his administration. As it says, there are not only vacant units at DC General, but about 65 unused, fully-funded housing vouchers that could go to homeless families.

Can You Help A Family With No Place To Stay?

Another urgent e-mail from the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. Same issue as the e-mail that triggered my last posting on the District’s homeless family crisis.

This time, a father with a two year old and a four year old who’d been evicted and were facing the prospects of a weekend outdoors, with a temperature forecast of 110.

One of three families the Clinic was trying to place that night because all the shelters were full and the District still hasn’t come up with a plan for emergency relief. As of July 18, the Family Resource Center had 543 families on the waiting list for shelter.

But I’ll let the Clinic tell the story because it’s got a brand new blog that fills in the background and tells us how we can help.

Anyone in the District who works with homeless people and/or follows the issues that affect them knows that the Legal Clinic has been out in front as an advocate for a very long time — nearly 25 years, says the welcome to the blog.

Now we have a new, ongoing way to get to know them, their clients and evolving developments in the District’s faltering efforts to serve our homeless and at-risk neighbors. And a new way to join them in the struggle to make “housing and justice for all” a reality in D.C.

A welcome and needed addition to the blogosphere.