Today, we pay tribute to one of the world’s greatest advocates for peace and justice, Mahatma Gandhi, on the 143rd anniversary of his birth. His message was simple, yet his wisdom profound:
“Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
Let us honor his memory by redoubling our efforts to make this a more peaceful, just and inclusive community.
While the total won’t be finalized for several months, DC Government officials reported this morning that the District is on target to have a surplus of approximately $140 million as Fiscal Year 2012 draws to a close on Sunday.
In spite of such a strong end-of-year bottom line, DC’s Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi did not revise his revenue projections for Fiscal Year 2013, leaving “Wish List” priorities unfunded.
We therefore urge Mayor Gray to move a small portion of these surplus dollars to a non-lapsing fund to carry into Fiscal Year 2013, to:
“One City” means a city for all, and Mayor Gray now can choose to use resources in a way that will make One City possible.
A referral to Child Protective Services (“CPS”) was the last thing Mary Brown expected when she took the emotional step of walking through the doors of the city’s emergency shelter intake center for families and asking for help —for the first time in her life. While she continues to be told that there is no space for her family, more than 100 shelter units sit empty. Watch the following moving video of Ms. Brown speak at a press conference held by Councilmember Jim Graham (Ward 1) on September 17th.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cBHWI14ZvM&feature=youtu.be]
Although Ms. Brown rarely missed a day in her nearly 35 years of working, she lost her job and her housing when she developed a serious heart condition last year. She and her two daughters, ages 8 and 9, were suddenly homeless and forced to turn to their government for help. That’s when things just got worse. The city’s emergency shelter intake center for families (the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center) would not place her in shelter or housing because the Mayor has forbidden them from placing families – despite more than 100 empty shelter units. Instead, the center staff referred Ms. Brown to CPS– the wing of the District’s Child and Family Services Administration (“CFSA”) responsible for investigating suspected cases of abuse and neglect – for the sole reason that her family was homeless and had no safe place to stay.
In the last two weeks, CPS has assisted Ms. Brown twice with short-term hotel stays, but has also threatened to remove Ms. Brown’s children as the “next step” if she cannot secure herself a safe place to stay. The same government that made a policy decision not to provide emergency shelter to families in these dire circumstances through one agency is threatening to separate children from their parents through another agency. This isn’t the first time this has happened. The Washington Post covered this draconian practice in June. The DC government didn’t cause the Brown family’s homelessness, of course, but it did choose to react to the Brown family not only with striking indifference—by forbidding access to a critical and currently underutilized safety net service—but also punitively—by making the threat of removal of children the focal point of the government’s response to family homelessness.
If you think the city should help families like Ms. Brown’s rather than threaten to break them up, click HERE to send a message to the Mayor and Deputy Mayor for Human Services. Tell them to make a different choice and house or shelter families like the Browns immediately.
Thank you to everyone who responded to our email action last week demanding that Mayor Gray’s Administration immediately start serving homeless families who have nowhere to go. If you are one of the more than 300 community members who participated, you probably received a form response from the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Beatriz Otero. We imagine you found her answer to be somewhat unsatisfying, as we did. Our colleague Matt Fraidin blogged his response to her letter on the Huffington Post. We thought we’d share a little bit of ours with you here:
The Administration:
Though we share your concerns, we are not placing families into the DC General Shelter at this time for the following reasons:
Of the 271 units at the DC General Shelter, 118 are not funded for the remainder of this fiscal year or for the coming fiscal year (October 2012 through September 2013). Although we will use these additional units to meet the legal requirements during hypothermia season, operating them outside of the winter will result in an overall reduction in services/shelter. The average cost per night for a family to stay at DC General is approximately $150 per night. These funds are better invested in these same families but for supports that meet their needs more effectively.
WLCH:
It is troubling both that DHS never shared this information during the Council’s budget hearings and that the Administration failed to include the cost of this DC General expansion in the $7 million shortfall estimate. Based on information received from DHS, our estimate is that it would cost less than $200,000 to serve every family in dire circumstances in October, the one FY 2013 month that would be affected if you started serving families today. It is hard to understand how the District of Columbia could not find $200,000 (or $7.2 million, for that matter) if ensuring safety for DC homeless children were truly a priority.
The Administration:
Shelter has many shortcomings for families and especially for children. To the extent possible, resources are better used to provide prevention/diversion assistance and housing. We cannot use money for more appropriate assistance/placements if we are expending it on shelter.
WLCH:
Regarding the shortcomings of shelter, we whole-heartedly agree that shelter is not the best long term solution for families. But we trust that you would agree that shelter is better than living on the street. If the choice is between housing and shelter, then let us choose housing. But until that housing is provided, we simply cannot condone the Administration’s choice to leave more than 100 units of shelter vacant while children sleep in abandoned buildings and parks.
The Administration:
Expanding shelter utilization does not address the broader issues of affordable housing (which is what these families need) and moving families toward self-sufficiency. As DHS works to redesign and integrate its Homeless Services and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) programs, it is critical that it dedicates resources (fiscal and otherwise) to this process.
WLCH:
Regarding this being a housing issue, we join you in recognizing that an adequate supply of affordable housing is the long term solution. The Gray Administration’s actions, however, belie such recognition, in that it has prevented affordable housing resources from being fully utilized. We understand that the Administration has instructed the DC Housing Authority to hold back about 65 Local Rent Supplement Vouchers, instead of providing them to the homeless families for whom they were intended. Similarly, we understand that DCHA has been instructed not to re-issue Housing Choice Vouchers that have been paid with local dollars when those vouchers are turned back to the agency. It seems that the laudable policy goals that DHS is trying to accomplish through its integration of Homeless Services and TANF would have a greater chance of success if DC families could access stable affordable housing, as studies show families obtain and maintain employment at higher levels if they have affordable permanent housing. It is particularly puzzling that the Administration would choose to “shelve” available shelter and housing resources at a time when so many families are so desperately in need of help.
How did you respond? Outrage? Facts and figures? Disbelief? We know our blog readers are a smart and passionate group of people. Send your reply to the Deputy Mayor’s letter to nassim@legalclinic.org with the subject line “House these families NOW,” so we can share with our readers.
Councilmember Jim Graham (Ward One, Chair of Committee on Human Services) held a press conference on Monday outside the DC General family shelter to announce that he had found an extra $14 million in the 2012 budget of the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services, and to demand that the Mayor use as much of that surplus as needed to help homeless families who are being denied emergency shelter by the District until winter.
“There are beds in this building [DC General] that could be used to house homeless families,” he said. “The simple truth of the matter is that there are people who are in bus shelters, at Union Station, wandering the city going from couch to couch with their kids who could be here.”
“Today we know that the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services has now a $14 million unspent surplus,” he continued. “I am now calling upon the Mayor to commit funds from the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services to the Department of Human Services so we can fully open this facility again.”
Councilmember Michael Brown also attended the press conference to express his support for opening DC General family shelter right away to families that currently have no place to sleep, and using unspent money from the Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services to pay for any associated costs.
Following Councilmembers Graham and Brown, several mothers spoke about their struggles to find a place to stay every day. One mother talked about staying in a park in Southeast and not knowing what to tell her children each day about where they were going to sleep or how they were going to wash up for school each morning. Another mother spoke about feeling like she was going to give up because she had asked for help at Virginia Williams Family Resource Center so many times and no one was helping her. Several speakers were outraged that children are being placed at risk in the streets because Mayor Gray made the decision to keep the door to family shelter closed despite more than 100 open units at DC General. Others told stories of mothers being asked to exchange sex for a place to sleep when they are turned away from shelter.
We thank Councilmembers Graham and Brown for their concern for the families who are needlessly living in dire circumstances when plentiful resources are available, and for their helpfulness in identifying unused funds in the District’s budget that will allow the Gray Administration to serve families in crisis.
Stop with the excuses and do the right thing, Mayor Gray.
Click here to send a message to Mayor Gray asking him to start helping families today. Later this week we will tell you the story of a mother of two kids who is sleeping in a park and needs less than two weeks of shelter before her housing comes through.
Children are sleeping in bus stations, abandoned buildings, parks, laundromats, and emergency rooms because their parents cannot find affordable housing or shelter. The Gray Administration is refusing to serve any of these newly homeless families with housing or shelter, despite the fact that there are OVER 100 EMPTY SHELTER UNITS at DC General Emergency Family Shelter. In addition, 65 fully-funded Local Rent Supplement Vouchers slated for homeless families have been held back by the DC Housing Authority.
It’s time to take action! Click here to email Mayor Gray, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Otero, Department of Human Services Director Berns, and DC Housing Authority Director Todman NOW!
Tell Mayor Gray, Deputy Mayor Otero, and DHS Director Berns:
Tell DCHA Director Todman:
Everyone deserves safe housing, but that won’t happen without your help.
After sending your email, please share THIS LINK on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, your community listserves, and anywhere else!
“You made a good case, and we listened.”
(Mayor Gray to advocates on August 20th, announcing the Gray Administration’s decision to delay the next round of reductions in TANF benefits for six months)
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a lifeline for low-income families whose parents are caring for young children or children with disabilities, struggling with unemployment, or fleeing abusive relationships. This federally-funded program has been a subject of great debate ever since the “welfare reform” efforts of the mid-1990’s transformed this public assistance program for families from an “entitlement” to a time-limited benefit requiring certain work-related activities for continued eligibility, and sanctions for failing to meet those requirements.
While a relatively meager sum ($428/month for a family of three), this monthly payment can mean the difference between homelessness and living on the street, for example when a parent uses the funds to contribute towards a relative’s household expenses in exchange for the family being able to sleep on their floor. The TANF grant can also help families with housing subsidies pay for necessities that can’t be purchased with food stamps, such as toilet paper and cleaning supplies and personal care items. And it can help to cover the cost of child care while a parent is out pounding the pavement looking for work. TANF funds can be used by a parent to pay for transportation to employment training programs and job interviews, as well as for bus fare to accompany children to school, or to attend school herself.
The District of Columbia is now on a course to incrementally reduce TANF benefits for families who’ve been on TANF for 60 months during their lifetimes. This isn’t hard to do if you’re raising two children for 20 years and face periodic bouts with unemployment. Already the local government has effected a 20% reduction in benefit levels for the 60-month families. When he introduced the FY 2013 budget in the spring, Mayor Gray proposed that a second reduction be implemented beginning October 1st. In response, the DC Council ultimately approved a budget that would postpone the cuts by a year, but only if new revenues were forecast. With the prospect of such new revenue growing bleak, the community turned up the volume of our advocacy, continuing to push the Gray Administration to back off of the reductions; it’s only fair, we argued, given that the local government failed to uphold its part of the TANF reform bargain, i.e. enhancing employment training and supports—reform long sought by advocates.
Mayor Gray, Deputy Mayor BB Otero, and DHS Director Dave Berns convened a group of advocates about ten days ago to announce that the Administration had listened to the community and would postpone the second round of reductions for six months. At the same time, DHS would shore up its efforts to assess families who were at, or close to, the 60-month limit and link those families with the resources needed to overcome employment barriers.
We commend the Mayor for his change of heart—which brings him at least somewhat more closely in line with the public and the Council on the issue of balancing the budget on the backs of the District’s most vulnerable residents. We do need to keep the pressure on though. So far, the administration has refused to enact much needed hardship exemptions to the time limit cuts, exemptions that many other jurisdictions have had in place for years. Without them families caring long-term for a child with disabilities won’t be exempt from the time limit cuts. Or families nearing the time limit who become permanently disabled and unable to work will lose their benefits, even while they wait the 18-24 months for federal disability benefits to kick in.
For families like Ms. Jones’s, Ms. S’s, Ms. K’s and so many others, every TANF dollar is a precious resource needed to support the journey out of poverty and homelessness. Thank you Mayor Gray, Deputy Mayor Otero and Director Berns for assuring this journey stays on course…at least for now.
It’s a new school year for Sarah Jones’* five kids – her eldest daughter just started her senior year of high school, her son is in 11th grade, her middle daughter is in 7th grade, and her two youngest are beginning their 4th and 5th grade years – yet they start each school day at a bus station. Ms. Jones’ family is homeless, but despite more than 80 empty shelter units for families, the District government is refusing to shelter the family. Ms. Jones is very proud of her kids and it’s important to her that they not miss a day of school. Each morning, the family gets up at 5:30am and walks to a nearby McDonald’s where they wash up. Then they head out to school—imagine waking up for school at a bus station.
The Jones family has been homeless and without a safe place to sleep since May. DC has chosen to only provide shelter to families when it is legally required to do so, which in the District is only on winter days when the temperature falls below 32 degrees Fahrenheit including the wind chill.
After ten years in their apartment, the Jones family lost the only home most of the kids had ever known. Ms. Jones lost her job and could no longer pay the rent. When she couldn’t find another job, Ms. Jones and her children moved in with the children’s grandmother, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Southwest DC. They lived in these cramped conditions for several months until the grandmother had to make them leave or risk eviction herself.
Ms. Jones applied for shelter at the District’s intake site for homeless families, the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center, but was denied placement despite having no place to stay. Her Councilmember’s office told her their hands were tied. “There are no families getting shelter this summer” is a line she has heard over and over again. One Council staffer suggested that she ask Child Protective Services to place her children in foster care so they would have somewhere safe to sleep, but Ms. Jones knows that the trauma of breaking up her family would be even worse than their current struggle. “How could anyone think it a positive thing for children to be separated from their mother?” Ms. Jones asked, “I refuse to have my family torn apart when all we need is a roof over our heads.”
What’s most frustrating to Ms. Jones – as well as to community members and advocates concerned about these issues – is that as of August 29, there were 88 vacant rooms at DC’s main emergency family shelter, DC General. Families like the Jones’ family which are sleeping in unsafe situations, should get placed into housing or the units sitting vacant at DC General today. If you agree, email Mayor Gray at mayor@dc.gov and let him know that you think NO kids should be going home to a bus station at the end of the school day.
*Names have been changed because the family risks a referral to CPS by coming forward to tell their story.
Last Tuesday, members of the Interagency Council on Homelessness (“ICH”) gathered at a public meeting, as they do each year, to approve or reject the city’s Winter Plan for shelter. Legal Clinic attorney and ICH member Scott McNeilly highlighted some issues with the Winter Plan on this blog last week, and he raised some of these same issues at the vote on Tuesday. In the end, the plan was approved with three members, Scott McNeilly, Donald Brooks, and Jean Michel Giraud, the Executive Director of The Community Council for the Homeless at Friendship Place, voting against the plan.
A pre-meeting was held before the vote at which community members were given an opportunity to comment on parts of the plan and during which the Director of the Department of Human Services (“DHS”), David Berns, shared an update of the status of homeless families. He stated that there are currently 210 families at DC General shelter (which has a capacity of 271 units), with another 26 currently in motels who have pending requests not to be placed in the communal shelter due to their disabilities. Meanwhile, since DC stopped placing families in shelter in April, 200 families have been determined by the city’s contractor to have no safe place to go. While Director Berns stated that the agency could not place any of the waiting families in shelter because they need the money to start placing families in housing, it was not clear whether there are any actual or significant cost savings to keeping 61 units empty at DC General because it does not appear that the contractor has reduced staffing at the shelter.
It wasn’t all bad news at the vote. As McNeilly acknowledged at the meeting, there have been some positive changes in the winter plan this year, and DHS has been extremely responsive to concerns raised by ICH members throughout the process. This year, all families placed in shelter, including any families being sheltered at motels, will receive case management and food, something that was lacking for families who were placed in motels last winter. Families who apply for shelter this winter will also be permitted to wait at the intake site until they get transportation to their placement, another major improvement from last year when families often had to wait outside in the freezing cold for several hours to get a ride. The hypothermia alert system has also been improved, which will hopefully result in alerts being called more consistently and earlier in the day.
Still, major problems with the plan persist. Even some government members of the ICH raised concerns. Director Berns said that if the $7 million funding gap for homeless services for FY 2013 is not filled by next April, DHS will be forced to make severe cuts to services in the spring that he characterized as “virtually catastrophic” for people who are homeless. The representative from the Office of the State Superintendent of Education shared her concerns about the impact on children and their education outcomes when their families stay in motels, because transportation to school is highly unreliable and time-consuming.
Some advocates, providers, and members who are homeless raised concerns about the housing plan for families. The plan relies on the placement of approximately 500 families in housing within 5 months if DC hopes to avoid increasing shelter beds or placing families in motels. Everyone agrees that housing placements are the ideal solution, but DHS took 10 months to place 150 families last year, and it’s unclear if the agency has the resources in hand to place more than three times as many families in housing in half that time. Another distressing feature of this housing plan is that the majority of the families will be placed in a short-term subsidy “rapid re-housing”* program for which only a fraction may be eligible or appropriate, potentially setting up many families for failure if they cannot afford to pay market-rate rents on their own once their subsidy runs out.
Will DHS be able to place families in housing according to its schedule? Will the placements be appropriate for the majority of families? Will the Mayor find the $7 million necessary to stave off catastrophic shelter closures in the spring? All of this remains to be seen.
Check this blog for regular updates from us on the city’s progress, and to learn how you can help advocate to protect the rights of our neighbors who are homeless.
* Stay tuned to this blog for a more in-depth discussion of rapid re-housing in the coming days
by Scott McNeilly
Last month, one hundred and ninety-seven families came into the District of Columbia’s Virginia Williams Family Resource Center to apply for emergency shelter. Fifty seven of those families were determined to have no other temporary or safe place to stay the night they applied. None of those families received emergency shelter. Until the weather turns hypothermic, none will.
Next week, DC’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) will decide whether to approve a Winter Plan for 2012-2013 premised on the notion that it is acceptable to allow struggling families who have no home and no personal safety net to sleep in emergency rooms, bus stations, and abandoned buildings, except when the temperature falls below freezing.
The plan was developed in good faith by members of the ICH who learned at nearly the 11th hour that the resources the Department of Human Services’ (DHS) had indicated were available for families will not be available after-all. DHS only recently revealed to the ICH that it has no budget and thus no intention to maintain the full family shelter capacity on which the final draft of the plan had already relied. Instead of utilizing 271 units at DC General Family Shelter as had been discussed for months in the planning process, DHS intends to scale back DC General capacity to 153 families, hoping to make up the difference by placing families in housing.
Providing affordable housing would clearly be the ideal solution to our current crisis. But for housing placements to work as proposed in the plan, DHS would have to place families in housing at an average rate of at least 95 families per month throughout the winter. To put this in perspective, last winter DHS’s goal was to place a mere 150 families over the entire winter season into the same type of housing they plan to use this year. Because it wasn’t possible to do that in a timely way, the city ended up with over 200 families sheltered in expensive motels.
The plan’s fallback, if DHS fails to meet its housing goals, is to bring back on-line the DC General units DHS is presently trying to shut down, and if (or when) those units fill up, we’ll be back to placing families in motels.
The context of this plan is an annual homeless services budget that is grossly inadequate to meet the need. In fact, this year’s Winter Plan was probably doomed to failure when the Mayor proposed and the Council approved a budget for the upcoming fiscal year that leaves a gaping $7 million shortfall for homeless services – a budget that is leaving families, even now, literally out on the streets.
Implementation of the Winter Plan will require front-loading this budget so that the District can meet its legal obligation to provide shelter during hypothermic conditions. This will leave the city poised to shut down half of its singles shelter system (which may mean the loss of more than 1000 emergency beds for men and women), along with cuts to transportation, outreach, meal programs and more, next spring.
As a member of the ICH and a member of the Operations and Logistics Committee of the ICH which develops the language of the Winter Plan, I am more and more persuaded that the process is set up to fail. The Operations and Logistics Committee has developed formulas for anticipating need that have proven to be quite accurate for individual men and women who need shelter. We’ve struggled to develop an equally effective method for anticipating the need for family shelter, and this year may have arrived at a calculation that gets us closer. But formulas and numbers and plans on paper don’t keep people safe in freezing weather. It takes a public commitment to full funding of sufficient resources to bring in everyone from the cold. The ICH, or at least its non-government members, has no ability to command the resources necessary to meet that projected need.
I recently spoke with a woman who applied for emergency shelter in June for herself and her three young sons. She lost her security guard job in January when the company she worked for lost a contract. She was turned away from shelter because the District is working feverishly to scale back that DC General capacity. This mom has managed to persuade friends and family to put her up for a night here and there, but mostly she’s spent nights with her three sons in hospital emergency rooms. Despite that, she’s been able to secure a new part-time job (she can’t afford market rents with her part-time hours but could probably get more hours if she had a stable place to stay and could resolve child care issues). The way things are now, it’s unlikely she’ll receive shelter or any other meaningful assistance until the first night the temperature drops below 32 degrees.
This can’t be the best we can do, and as a member of the ICH, I can’t vote for a Winter Plan that allows this to happen.