The Washington, D.C. government began the process of dissembling “Tent City” near the Union Station metro station March 10. The site was a place where several of the city’s homeless took shelter under tents. (Photo by Linda Poulson)
The removal of tents, personal belongings and debris began the morning of March 10 as Washington’s “Tent City” was dismantled to move its homeless residents to shelters.
Trucks were there to load up the homeless people’s belongings, advocates were helping to take tents down and District police officers were on standby to ensure the exodus proceeded lawfully. A parking garage directly across the street drew out some onlookers.
“Sharon,” a 50-year old whose rotten yellowed teeth stood out against her smooth dark skin, told the AFRO she had spent about two or three months at Tent City. She seemed unruffled by the loss of her temporary home.
“Don’t really matter to me, I’m good,” she said. When asked where she was going, Sharon replied, “I’m in a decisive role right now. You got to do what you got to do.”
Rachel Joseph, chief of staff to Brenda Donald, the District’s deputy mayor for Health and Human Services said while it is not illegal to sleep on the street, it is unlawful to pitch a tent.
Of the 12 homeless people at the site on March 10, not all agreed to leave. Still, “there will be no arrests,” Joseph said.
Ending homelessness in the District has always been a problem, but shelters have also posed their own problems. D.C. General, the largest family shelter in the city, is a prime example. The shelter has been plagued with issues such as drugs being sold in and outside the shelter’s complex and a lack of security. The disappearance, two years ago, of shelter resident Relisha Rudd, then-8, and the implication of a D.C. General janitor who killed his wife and then himself at Kenilworth Park in Northeast, further cast the facility in a bad light.
According to a March 9 report by the Office of the District of Columbia Auditor, the Department of Human Services mismanaged a private contract for the city’s homeless program in fiscal 2014. The audit said the department did not provide adequate oversight of the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, the main contractor that administers services to the homeless, including at D.C. General, the city’s troubled shelter. According to the audit, the city overpaid for services and didn’t monitor its contracts adequately.
But Kathy Patterson, the District’s auditor, did praise Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s administration for instituting tackling the problems and instituting the reforms recommended in the audit.
Bowser has come up with a plan to close D.C. General and has formulated a list of locations for short-term family housing facilities, with scheduled delivery dates for all eight wards. Community meetings to allow public comment and input began in February in each ward.
The plan is good news for people like Ricky Hall, 62, who said he spent two years in Tent City and has been homeless for several years.
“Well it’s been no problem for me, I take life as it is,” he said of his lack of a home.
Hall said he used to work at the Verizon Center but now does odd jobs in the street.
“Ain’t no problem now,” he told the AFRO. “I get transitional housing today.”