Is regional collaboration a realistic way to address homelessness?
By Jeffrey Anderson
*This article is part of the Street Sense 2019 contribution to the DC Homeless Crisis Reporting Project in collaboration with other local newsrooms. You can see all of the collective work published throughout the day at DCHomelessCrisis.press and join the public Facebook group to discuss how to act on this information and add context to areas that may have been overlooked. https://dchomelesscrisis.press
Wendell Williams is not just a fifth generation son of Washington, D.C. He’s a Washingtonian with ties to Virginia and Maryland who has left and come back more than once and had at least one lifetime of experiences.
So when Williams is asked to shed light on the challenges of providing services and housing to homeless persons in a region with numerous counties and two neighboring states with porous borders, do not expect a conventional response.
The concept of “regional collaboration,” as it is applied to what social services providers say is necessary to cure seemingly intractable problems, is mostly pie-in-the-sky bullshit, Williams says; just another numbers game that misses the point of addressing what causes people to become homeless in the first place.
If you ask him to, Williams will corroborate what is apparent to social services providers throughout the region, that D.C. has lower barriers to receiving services and shelter when compared to Montgomery County, Arlington County, the City of Alexandria or Prince George’s County, among other jurisdictions.
And he knows all too well that the counties require proof of residency status before a person with no fixed address or place to stay can be admitted to an overnight shelter.
“But people in D.C. need to understand, their city is a dumping ground,” he says, pointing to an inherent racism that pervades the social order throughout the region. “White people cannot recognize that they have lower expectations for people who are homeless and black.”
Williams has both lived the life and works daily with those who still do. In his 70 years, he has seen it all:
Large family upbringing near Benning Road and 21st Street NE; broadcasting internship at Howard University; a long career that took him back and forth from D.C. to Ohio but was shortened by addiction; homeless shelters, forced hospitalizations and jail; university lectures and public speaking gigs at conferences and businesses; selling Street Sense in Del Ray but still struggling with addiction; recovery then sobriety…Today he is a Certified Peer Recovery Specialist—sober since 2012—with Phoenix House Mid-Atlantic, where he sees clients who he refers to as his “babies.”
“You don’t need a freekin’ I.D. to get a bed in D.C.,” he says, reflecting on his experiences at the Catholic Charities 801 East Men’s Shelter, for example, on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, a “low-barrier shelter” program open to any male aged 18 years and older. “Intake takes 15 minutes. Then it’s up and go. Come in by 6, leave by 6.”
He recalls a troubling scene: “I walk into the first room on the first floor and look at the first bunk and the first thing I see is a bag of dope, matches, a bottle of water and three needles laid out on a towel.” Such drug use was against the rules, but tolerated. “What’s that tell you? There is no fear of getting caught.”
This points to a flaw in the prevailing philosophy of dealing with homelessness, says Williams: A “housing first” policy does not work. Advocates and social service providers simply don’t want to face that reality, he says.
“Eighty percent of ‘em in the shelter are inebriated, drunk or high. At least 50 percent get some sort of monthly subsidy. First of the month, the shelter empties out, people are out in the street. Second day, they come back looking to trade their food stamps. Third day, they’re trying to borrow a quarter for a cigarette.”
To say that Wendell Williams is not a fan of the way social scientists and service providers deal with homelessness is an understatement. He’s a day-at-a-time guy who is doing what he does to make a difference in people’s lives with no regard to what some might call a career. He lives with a tight financial margin and like any recovered addict, he knows that one slip could be costly, and that he could lose his one-bedroom apartment with a peaceful balcony view overlooking Barnaby Run in Oxon Hills.
Housing is not a right, he says, and if you are not ready for it you’ll end up back where you started. “We are programmed to think that a change of venue is going to give you a different outcome,” he says. “If I’m an asshole and you stick me in a crate and ship me off to Italy, when I get there and step out of that crate I’m still an asshole.”
It’s what he calls an academic, elitist, nouveaux way of thinking that pisses him off. “I’ll take experience and wisdom over intellect and intelligence any day,” he says.
That, and the power of an essential human instinct: Fear.
There’s four types of fear, as far as Williams is concerned: Fear of not getting what you want; fear of not getting what you deserve; fear of something being taken away from you; and fear of having to give something away.
Actually, there’s a fifth one that he invokes with a rueful laugh: “Fear of getting what you deserve. I don’t like to talk about that one.”
Williams spoke at length with District Dig over the phone and in his apartment. You might not agree with him, but his worldview is hard-earned, and he will not be swayed. Maybe that’s why when he attends conferences, the hosts are careful to keep him away from the microphone.
He is blunt, and profane. If administrators of a shelter do not want to put out an overnight resident for breaking the rules, for fear they may get hurt or die out in the street, then guess what? “I don’t give a shit,” says Williams, explaining that working with people with substance abuse issues requires him to accept that sometimes he will lose people who did not hear the message of hope and recovery.
“We are in a body count business, and I do not have time to get melancholy when someone dies. I gotta react quickly in order to take care of the living.”
Williams might be a bit too coarse for Robin-Eve Jasper, President of the NoMa Business Improvement District, but Jasper could have been comforted to have him at her side last week, when she published an open letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser in which she disclosed the results of her organization’s study of the nightly activities in and around the K Street and L Street tunnels in Northeast.
The blowback from some sectors of the advocacy community was swift and fierce. Though couched as a safety and quality of life issue for pedestrians and bicyclists who traverse the tunnels, where homeless encampments have become a magnet for all manners of vice, often among people who aren’t even homeless, Jasper’s core message was in some ways similar to that of Williams:
“We applaud the initiatives of the District of Columbia government to increase affordable housing and improve shelter options. However, after years of engagement with scores of individuals encamped in NoMa and documentation of conditions and incidents associated with encampments, we know that the primary challenges are the result of mental health and substance-abuse disorders. Such disorders are often the issues that cause people to choose to live on the street rather than stay in their housing or accept shelter. Well-intentioned advocacy that conflates the problems experienced by encamped individuals only with housing affordability is misguided. This is not to say that housing affordability, in general, is not an issue, but that housing alone, no matter how much is built, simply will not solve the encampment issues.”
Having decompressed from the passionate dialogue her letter sparked, Jasper this week said her group has worked collaboratively for years with the D.C. Department of Social Services, Pathways to Housing DC, and HIPS—Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive.
“The city has made extraordinary efforts in affordable housing,” she says. “I wasn’t looking at it in terms of regional collaboration, but we know that Union Station is a hub for illegal activity up and down the east coast and throughout the region. And so those housing efforts are not sufficient. We need to do more in drug rehab and mental health services. Not everyone out there does not have housing. This notion that homelessness is just about housing is an impediment to the array of issues that lead to it.”
And yet, the sheer volume of data that is collected and analyzed throughout local government agencies and advocacy organizations has framed homelessness in terms that even those who are dedicated to addressing it have cause to question.
The Dig reviewed the 180-page study, Homelessness in Metropolitan Washington: Results and Analysis from the Annual Point-in-Time (PIT) Count of Persons Experiencing Homelessness, produced by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and reached out to about a dozen city and county agencies and nonprofit service providers.
The response was underwhelming. Some responded only to refer inquiries to other sources, if they responded at all. One nonprofit agency director flat out would not talk about the subject based on some vague deference to the District government agency his group collaborates with.
The first person to respond, within an hour of receiving an inquiry, was Michael Ferrell, Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless.
Talking about migration among the homeless population takes a complex topic and makes it even more complex, Ferrell says. “In hard times, people reach out to a safety net they are familiar with. Depending on how you track these things, people can be homeless in one place and find shelter in another. It’s not hard to move from Arlington to Fairfax or Alexandria to D.C.”
There has been a profound increase in homeless services in the suburbs since the 1980s, says Ferrell, which illustrates that there is in fact a regional problem. No jurisdiction wants to be a magnet, he says. “I don’t think we have enough detail on movement, but we can still talk about it in general terms. But it’s the classic dilemma: One good questions brings up 10 more.”
The annual PIT count takes place on the same night each year to minimize duplication, Ferrell says. Advocates feel as if they have come up with a fair representation of where the homeless population exists, but the core causes haven’t changed, even if the methods for studying them and implementing resources have.
Movement and migration—and thus the need to collaborate among jurisdictions—is a “small ‘c’ concern,” he says. “It’s nothing new.”
Hilary Chapman, Housing Program Manager for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, says the percentage of individuals who come from one jurisdiction into another is relatively small compared to the overall population, but the subject is politically contentious nonetheless. “It insinuates that ‘you’ are sending your homeless to ‘our’ jurisdiction, because ‘you’ don’t want to provide them with services,” she says. “The reality is much more nuanced.”
Residency requirements, access to shelter, permanent housing (a separate issue entirely), differing requirements in the entry system for families and single adults, all of these things must be factored into the discussion, she says.
“We’re not going to ignore it, but we need to engage on the level of how we are going to serve the population. We can definitely set goals such as reaching a shared agreement to end homelessness through best-practices such as housing first as soon as possible and to coordinate the entry system to prioritize the most vulnerable.”
Williams has no use for such conversations. “Everything old school is seen as inefficient,” he says. “But the old school route is that you stabilize yourself before you put yourself out there alone in a housing situation. Show me someone who was homeless and got into housing and five years later is sober and still there. You can talk about ‘placements’ all day, but give me boots on the ground.
“They keep looking for innovative approaches to a nuts-and-bolts problem. How are they going to navigate drug dealers with nefarious intent? How are they gonna recognize friend or foe? How are they gonna avoid getting taken advantage of?
“Some of us learn it in jail, some of us learn it at Yale. But when it comes to human behavior, there’s no new shit on the fuckin’ horizon.”
*This post has been updated.
