In 2015, Mayor Bowser and the D.C. Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH) began working on the \”Homeward DC\” initiative, and its goal of ending long-term homelessness by making it a \”rare, brief, and non-recurring experience\” in the District by 2020. A very ambitious proposition, the goal was not met, but this is not to say that no progress was made in the alleviation of the District\’s homelessness crisis. This February, the Office of the Mayor reported that since 2016, family homelessness in the city has decreased by 45% and overall homelessness by 11%.
The ICH pointed to \”prevention assistance…enhanced shelter programming, and the availability of a housing resource for every family entering a shelter\” as the cause for the decrease at their quarterly meeting in April of last year. This was likely in reference to Mayor Bowser\’s popular overhaul of the District\’s shelter system, which involved closing D.C. General Family Homelessness Shelter and enacting a plan to build new family shelters in each ward as a replacement. At the time of this writing, five of the eight planned shelters have been opened, the latest being The Aya in Ward 6, where Bowser cut the ribbon on February 21st.
Though developments continue and the numbers look promising, other numbers are not promising at all. Last year, the tally of District residents who died homeless reached a five-year high of 117. Even more frightening than this fact are advocates\’ observations that the District\’s homeless population is aging, rendering them increasingly susceptible to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that recently claimed its thousandth case and nineteenth death in the city. In the abovementioned ICH meeting, it was noted that the homeless single adult population was more vulnerable than originally thought. Their vulnerability has skyrocketed in the wake of the pandemic.
In the ICH\’s first meeting of 2020, the vulnerability of the unaccompanied homeless population was addressed in detail, but the meeting took place on January 21st, the same day that the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in the United States–there was no quarantine, no panic, no national crisis at the time. The way the mayor and the ICH go on to address the homelessness crisis should, reasonably speaking, acknowledge the additional crisis situation that has befallen the District and the world at large. Why haven\’t temporary accommodations been made to get as many homeless residents as possible off the contaminated, vacated streets of Washington? Why is the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development in possession of 92 \”transformed\” vacant properties that they have not so much as considered opening to the homeless public that was dying in record volume even before the pandemic?
The answer to these questions is unfortunate but expected: The city would prefer to sell or rent these properties rather than use them for urgent, humanitarian purposes. One might contend that the prospect of affordable housing in the fight against gentrification is urgent as well, but the DC Voice has reported before on the relativity of the term \”affordable\” in dealings with the District. As Mayor Bowser focuses on the acquisition of statehood and the wellbeing of propertied citizens and businesses during this global pandemic, the homeless cling to their lives with whatever strength they have left.