Yesterday the Gray administration rolled out its plan to address the recent surge in family homelessness. The proposal includes steps to help families move from shelter to housing, including several called for by advocates and providers. However, the mayor’s plan focuses too heavily on diverting families seeking shelter — by identifying housing alternatives such as friends or relatives. While using diversion and prevention strategies can make sense, the Mayor’s diversion proposals are so aggressive that they could leave many moms, dads, and kids in harm’s way.
Rather than focusing on strict measures to keep families from entering the shelter system, Mayor Gray and the DC Council should focus on doing more to put families into housing where supportive services can help them get back on their feet. Supporting the safety and stability of homeless families is most effective strategy to reduce homelessness in DC.
Mayor’s Gray’s plan includes hiring more staff to oversee the Rapid Re-Housing program, the main tool to move families quickly out of shelter. The plan also would increase the city’s ability to find suitable housing: by adding staff, expediting housing inspections and a citywide call for help from landlords. These are important steps, but DC may need to do even more to try and identify affordable units. The success of the Mayor’s proposals should be measured by the number of families leaving shelter into permanent housing each month.
But the mayor’s plan seems to focus mostly on “provisional placement” — steps to divert families who are seeking shelter. DC would provide a family with shelter, and then have up to 14 days to look for an alternative living situation — such as with a friend or relative. If an alternative is found the family would have to leave shelter. While helping families explore all options to avoid emergency shelter makes sense, the mayor’s proposal is so aggressive in keeping people from entering shelter that it would leave many vulnerable families in unsafe and unstable situations.
- Under the mayor’s plan, the city could require a family to leave shelter, even if the housing alternative is a friend’s couch that has been promised for just a few days. And if the temperature is above 32 degrees after those two days, the city would not be obligated to take the family back into shelter. Diverting families from shelter for just a few days doesn’t address the crisis that led to homelessness.
If a family can only find very short-term housing, they should be allowed to come back into shelter if they end up with no safe place to go.
- Under the mayor’s plan, families could be bounced from place to place to place making it harder for them to gain stability needed to get back on their feet. Under the Mayor’s plan, the city could place a family somewhere for 1-2 days. Then somewhere else for a week. And then somewhere else for another 1-2 days.
A better approach would be to move families out of shelter only if the destination is likely to work for a reasonable amount of time, such as 60 days or more.
- Under the mayor’s plan, families who have appealed a housing placement proposed by the city — because the family considers it unsafe, for example — would have to leave shelter while they appeal that decision. This means that some families could be forced back into unsafe situations while trying to prove that it really needs shelter.
Instead, families should be allowed to stay in shelter while they appeal the city’s decision to place them elsewhere, as they can under current law.
Altogether, the mayor’s provisional placement plan appears primarily to be an effort to keep the shelter population down rather than an effort to help homeless families achieve stability.
There are still nearly 750 families, with more than 1,450 children, living in shelter. The District’s goal, and primary focus, should be to move as many families as possible into stable housing situations, so that we don’t start next winter with shelters still full. This means building the infrastructure needed to support Rapid Re-housing that help families find housing and supportive services, identifying and finding more affordable units, and increasing resources to help create additional affordable housing.
It also should include steps to help families find alternatives before entering shelter, but only if the focus of those steps is to ensure safety and stability for the family. Using prevention strategies to help keep families from needing to access shelter is an important piece of addressing the homelessness crisis and there are several DC can, and should, explore beyond provisional placement. But those steps must include protections to ensure that families are not left in unsafe or unstable situations.
