D.C. Homelessness Doubles National Average as Living Costs Soar
By NOAH WEILAND
New York Times
JAN. 1, 2017
Anita White, a lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., who is staying in transitional housing at Valley Place Family Apartments. She said she would like to leave the city. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In the shadow of the house where Frederick Douglass spent his final 17 years, and just across the snaking Anacostia River from the trendy Washington Navy Yard neighborhood, are the Valley Place Family Apartments, a transitional housing complex for some of the most vulnerable residents of the nation’s capital.
This is where two mothers, Anita White and Jasmine Kelly, awake at dawn each day to make a life for their families.
Ms. White, 27, and Ms. Kelly, 25, live in what amounts to a parallel universe in Southeast Washington, as the city and its suburbs accumulate staggering wealth while its poorest residents grow poorer. In December, a devastating survey of 32 big cities prepared by the United States Conference of Mayors showed Washington with the highest rate of homelessness. There are 124 homeless people for every 10,000 residents here, more than twice the national average. Nationally, homelessness has shrunk 12.9 percent over the last seven years.
The survey numbers were taken from the annual “Point in Time” count distributed by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, a nonprofit that works with the local government. As of last January, according to the count, 8,350 people experienced homelessness: 318 on the street, 6,259 in emergency shelters and 1,773 in transitional housing. Outside of the homeless numbers, 17.3 percent of residents in the District of Columbia live in poverty, according to recent census data.
Those who research and confront the homeless crisis — members of the Conference of Mayors, District of Columbia officials, legal advocates, shelter providers and homeless parents — all point to one thing: the cost of urban living. Median home prices in Washington soared to record highs last year.
“There are no ‘new homeless,’” said Michael Ferrell, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, which runs 10 shelter programs in Washington, including Valley Place. “The one single thing that really has changed is the lack of affordable housing.”
“The housing that’s being created today in the District is not for working-class people,” he said.
The problems for Ms. White and Ms. Kelly, who have been at Valley Place for over a year, look familiar to many here.
Ms. White is a student in mortuary science at the University of the District of Columbia during weekdays and a sales associate at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the weekends. She has been homeless twice. Just a few years ago, she appeared to be recuperating, living in her own apartment while she worked as an assistant manager at a clothing retailer. She ended up in Valley Place with her 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when she could not afford her rent.
Before Valley Place, Ms. Kelly, who has four young boys, spent time in what she called the “torturous” D.C. General Family Shelter: the city’s largest homeless facility, which houses hundreds of families. The mayor and City Council want to close the complex and replace it with more intimate shelters spread out across Washington. The city spends around $80,000 every night on hotel rooms for homeless families.
“People underestimate the degree to which housing is out of reach for certain people,” said Laura Zeilinger, the director of the Department of Human Services in Washington. She said her department had a commitment to make sure that families were safe and able to survive custody battles and violent homes, and that they were not “living in gas stations or McDonald’s or laundromats while we try to fix the system.”
In such a desirable real estate market, landlords are circumspect, taking government subsidies for affordable housing before screening out potential tenants for qualities associated with homelessness, Ms. Zeilinger said.
Often the last line of defense for those facing this kind of discrimination is the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, where for 25 years Patty Mullahy Fugere has supervised a staff of lawyers who offer legal counsel on shelter and emergency resources to the homeless.
“There’s a bit of a double standard with the city that we’ve seen: We improve our schools, our roads. We put in bike lanes and dock parks and spent a lot of public money trying to attract outsiders,” she said. “It’s low-income residents who are drawn into the District who want to relocate here because there’s a stronger safety net to help them get back on their feet. Then for whatever reason, those folks seem to be demonized.”
“There’s enough of the renaissance for everyone,” Ms. Mullahy Fugere said.
Since her election in 2014, Mayor Muriel Bowser has made homelessness a higher priority than her more stringent predecessor did, extending the availability of shelters beyond the cold-weather months, when there is a threat of hypothermia. The survey pointed out that the Bowser administration had done especially well sheltering homeless children and veterans. In 2016, the city had the lowest percentage of unsheltered homeless among the study’s cities.
Adjacent to the suffering is prodigious wealth. Census data released in December showed four of Washington’s neighboring communities as the richest in the nation — Loudoun County, Falls Church, and Fairfax and Howard Counties — while the District of Columbia maintained a median household income of over $70,000.
The “Point in Time” numbers also exposed a generational calamity. The average age of adults in homeless families is 27 — a demographic that includes Ms. White and Ms. Kelly — half the average age of unaccompanied homeless people.
Young, homeless parents are faced with squaring their work and family lives in the most dire circumstances.
Ms. Kelly recently received a Special Police Officer license that allows her to work as a security guard. But the job offers she has received, so far, are for overnight shifts, leaving no one to care for her children at night or early in the morning.
“I want to be able to go out and be my own self, but I really don’t have a choice,” she said.
The hurdles for Ms. White are just as high. The twin opportunities she must capitalize on — the steady job on the weekends and classes on weekdays — deny her the time or income to compete for housing.
“I’m trying to do homework and at the same time make spaghetti,” she said.
A report in early December from the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, an organization that researches budgets and taxes that affect needy residents in the city, revealed that with rising rent, the poorest Washington residents faced spending more than half their income on housing. Recent census data shows median rents in Washington over $1,300, yet only a third of what the institute calls 26,000 “extremely low-income” households can afford rent above $200 per month. Only 9 percent of this group actually has housing at that rate.
This feeds the grim cycle Ms. White and Ms. Kelly know well: the abbreviated stays in shelters, the faint hope of independent housing, the evictions, the return to beds they do not own and have little interest in occupying.
“Young mothers have to wait for a child care slot anywhere from a month to a year,” said Nicole Baptiste, who has overseen Valley Place for almost nine years as program director. “Then they have to get a voucher. Before they get a voucher, they have to prove that they’re working. But they’re trying to get a slot so they can put a child in day care so they can find a job.”
This series of irreconcilable tasks means shelters across the city get used to familiar faces.
“They might not be back in my shelter, but they’ll be back in some other shelter,” Ms. Baptiste said with resignation.
Ms. White shares that bleak view while she considers leaving Valley Place and her hometown.
“I hate having to come to this building. That’s one of the hardest things, just waking up and being here,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going to go, but I want to leave D.C.”
New York Times
JAN. 1, 2017
Anita White, a lifelong resident of Washington, D.C., who is staying in transitional housing at Valley Place Family Apartments. She said she would like to leave the city. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — In the shadow of the house where Frederick Douglass spent his final 17 years, and just across the snaking Anacostia River from the trendy Washington Navy Yard neighborhood, are the Valley Place Family Apartments, a transitional housing complex for some of the most vulnerable residents of the nation’s capital.
This is where two mothers, Anita White and Jasmine Kelly, awake at dawn each day to make a life for their families.
Ms. White, 27, and Ms. Kelly, 25, live in what amounts to a parallel universe in Southeast Washington, as the city and its suburbs accumulate staggering wealth while its poorest residents grow poorer. In December, a devastating survey of 32 big cities prepared by the United States Conference of Mayors showed Washington with the highest rate of homelessness. There are 124 homeless people for every 10,000 residents here, more than twice the national average. Nationally, homelessness has shrunk 12.9 percent over the last seven years.
The survey numbers were taken from the annual “Point in Time” count distributed by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, a nonprofit that works with the local government. As of last January, according to the count, 8,350 people experienced homelessness: 318 on the street, 6,259 in emergency shelters and 1,773 in transitional housing. Outside of the homeless numbers, 17.3 percent of residents in the District of Columbia live in poverty, according to recent census data.
Those who research and confront the homeless crisis — members of the Conference of Mayors, District of Columbia officials, legal advocates, shelter providers and homeless parents — all point to one thing: the cost of urban living. Median home prices in Washington soared to record highs last year.
“There are no ‘new homeless,’” said Michael Ferrell, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, which runs 10 shelter programs in Washington, including Valley Place. “The one single thing that really has changed is the lack of affordable housing.”
“The housing that’s being created today in the District is not for working-class people,” he said.
The problems for Ms. White and Ms. Kelly, who have been at Valley Place for over a year, look familiar to many here.
Ms. White is a student in mortuary science at the University of the District of Columbia during weekdays and a sales associate at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the weekends. She has been homeless twice. Just a few years ago, she appeared to be recuperating, living in her own apartment while she worked as an assistant manager at a clothing retailer. She ended up in Valley Place with her 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when she could not afford her rent.
Before Valley Place, Ms. Kelly, who has four young boys, spent time in what she called the “torturous” D.C. General Family Shelter: the city’s largest homeless facility, which houses hundreds of families. The mayor and City Council want to close the complex and replace it with more intimate shelters spread out across Washington. The city spends around $80,000 every night on hotel rooms for homeless families.
“People underestimate the degree to which housing is out of reach for certain people,” said Laura Zeilinger, the director of the Department of Human Services in Washington. She said her department had a commitment to make sure that families were safe and able to survive custody battles and violent homes, and that they were not “living in gas stations or McDonald’s or laundromats while we try to fix the system.”
In such a desirable real estate market, landlords are circumspect, taking government subsidies for affordable housing before screening out potential tenants for qualities associated with homelessness, Ms. Zeilinger said.
Often the last line of defense for those facing this kind of discrimination is the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, where for 25 years Patty Mullahy Fugere has supervised a staff of lawyers who offer legal counsel on shelter and emergency resources to the homeless.
“There’s a bit of a double standard with the city that we’ve seen: We improve our schools, our roads. We put in bike lanes and dock parks and spent a lot of public money trying to attract outsiders,” she said. “It’s low-income residents who are drawn into the District who want to relocate here because there’s a stronger safety net to help them get back on their feet. Then for whatever reason, those folks seem to be demonized.”
“There’s enough of the renaissance for everyone,” Ms. Mullahy Fugere said.
Since her election in 2014, Mayor Muriel Bowser has made homelessness a higher priority than her more stringent predecessor did, extending the availability of shelters beyond the cold-weather months, when there is a threat of hypothermia. The survey pointed out that the Bowser administration had done especially well sheltering homeless children and veterans. In 2016, the city had the lowest percentage of unsheltered homeless among the study’s cities.
Adjacent to the suffering is prodigious wealth. Census data released in December showed four of Washington’s neighboring communities as the richest in the nation — Loudoun County, Falls Church, and Fairfax and Howard Counties — while the District of Columbia maintained a median household income of over $70,000.
The “Point in Time” numbers also exposed a generational calamity. The average age of adults in homeless families is 27 — a demographic that includes Ms. White and Ms. Kelly — half the average age of unaccompanied homeless people.
Young, homeless parents are faced with squaring their work and family lives in the most dire circumstances.
Ms. Kelly recently received a Special Police Officer license that allows her to work as a security guard. But the job offers she has received, so far, are for overnight shifts, leaving no one to care for her children at night or early in the morning.
“I want to be able to go out and be my own self, but I really don’t have a choice,” she said.
The hurdles for Ms. White are just as high. The twin opportunities she must capitalize on — the steady job on the weekends and classes on weekdays — deny her the time or income to compete for housing.
“I’m trying to do homework and at the same time make spaghetti,” she said.
A report in early December from the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, an organization that researches budgets and taxes that affect needy residents in the city, revealed that with rising rent, the poorest Washington residents faced spending more than half their income on housing. Recent census data shows median rents in Washington over $1,300, yet only a third of what the institute calls 26,000 “extremely low-income” households can afford rent above $200 per month. Only 9 percent of this group actually has housing at that rate.
This feeds the grim cycle Ms. White and Ms. Kelly know well: the abbreviated stays in shelters, the faint hope of independent housing, the evictions, the return to beds they do not own and have little interest in occupying.
“Young mothers have to wait for a child care slot anywhere from a month to a year,” said Nicole Baptiste, who has overseen Valley Place for almost nine years as program director. “Then they have to get a voucher. Before they get a voucher, they have to prove that they’re working. But they’re trying to get a slot so they can put a child in day care so they can find a job.”
This series of irreconcilable tasks means shelters across the city get used to familiar faces.
“They might not be back in my shelter, but they’ll be back in some other shelter,” Ms. Baptiste said with resignation.
Ms. White shares that bleak view while she considers leaving Valley Place and her hometown.
“I hate having to come to this building. That’s one of the hardest things, just waking up and being here,” she said. “I don’t know where I’m going to go, but I want to leave D.C.”
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