Not in Their Back Yard : Liberal Idealism, Political Reality of Homelessness Collide in the Capital

WASHINGTON —  They crop up like weeds, these Not In My Back Yard battles.

The neighbors don’t want that garbage dump nearby, nor the home for the retarded on the cul-de-sac. They’ll destroy property values, opponents argue; they’re dirty, dangerous, a magnet for crime and outsiders.

The District of Columbia is slugging out a vintage NIMBY. At issue is a homeless shelter that the city wants to open half a mile from Vice President Dan Quayle’s house, in a political district known as Ward 3. It’s the only ward that doesn’t have one--and the only one that is overwhelmingly white and affluent.

Most of the neighbors are fighting it with everything they have--lawsuits, political clout, angry letters to the editor. The rest of the city is smirking at infuriated liberals getting a taste of their own idealism.

For new Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon, it is an unwinnable fight that has ugly racial and political overtones. The mayor, who is African American, owes a big political debt to the white voters of Ward 3. But if she does not put a shelter somewhere in the area, she will outrage residents of other parts of this predominantly black city who live with similar facilities.

“The mayor is committed to putting a shelter there, and it has to do with more than fairness and equity,” says Vincent Gray, the commissioner in charge of homelessness and other social problems.

Another top aide is more candid: “The white big shots are going to have face this problem, too.”

Yet despite a temptation to cast the fray as white versus black, rich versus poor, selfish versus compassionate, it is more complicated.

The struggle in the capital’s back yard is about a city that seven years ago took a uniquely progressive step toward helping its homeless, estimated at 10,000 to 15,000, and failed to live up to its promise.

It’s about people who live near the shelters and whose compassion is spent and who are asking why those rooted in a neighborhood should welcome the rootless to pass through.

It’s also about the shelters’ spiraling costs, which have quadrupled since 1984, when voters approved an open-door policy for the homeless. Today those dollars buy overnight accommodations--vast, impersonal halls crammed with cots or dirty mattresses--that nobody likes, least of all the down and out who are expected to stay there.

And the struggle magnifies an uncomfortable reality: that a social problem deemed an “emergency” a decade ago has become permanent across America, including here, where policy makers are sometimes expected to set an example--even though they often don’t.

Whether they support or reject the plan for a shelter, the people of Ward 3 do agree on some things. They are uniformly disappointed that the District did not query them before proposing the site in this near-suburb just north of Georgetown. The lawyers, congressional aides and white-collar bureaucrats who make up the pristine neighborhoods also profess that they might have helped the city if it had suggested an “appropriate” setting to develop family-type quarters for the homeless, along with plenty of counseling.

Defining appropriate , however, is where the conviviality stopped.

Sophia Henry has lived in the Glover Park neighborhood in Ward 3 for 27 years. Her real estate agency is just across Wisconsin Avenue from the Guy Mason Recreation Center, where the shelter is proposed; in her view, it is not an appropriate site.

“This is the only adult center in Northwest Washington,” Henry argues. “It is used constantly by people from all over the city. Once the summer softball season starts, there is always someone on the field.”

Most of the center’s activities, like pottery and folk dancing classes and lectures for the elderly, are scheduled for late afternoon and early evening--just about when homeless men would be trooping in if the spot became an overnight shelter.

Henry says she cannot understand why the city would want to bus in about 50 men without guaranteeing that they would be bused back to where they came from. (It is unclear whether the city intends to bus homeless to the shelter, rather than let it be used exclusively by those who live along nearby commercial corridors.)

“I realize many of them are quite harmless, but some could be threatening,” Henry adds. “And what if they stay here during the day? Then they’ll want to use the public bathrooms, and they’ll end up sleeping in the park. I haven’t heard of one neighborhood in Washington that wants this.”

Henry suggests that the city bus these “poor souls” to Army camps that the Defense Department has been considering closing. She cannot say whether there is one close by.

“As citizens,” she says, “we go to battle against all kinds of things to protect our neighborhood. . . . We’re in the middle of a fight with Georgetown University over a (generating station) they want to erect on campus. And now this.”

Jeff Berman, a young attorney, was less adamant than Henry about what is “appropriate.” He has not joined the 20-lawyer team put together to fight the shelter; he has discouraged his wife from attending the raucous neighborhood rallies.

But Berman’s voice became tense when he talked about how the shelter probably will bring more panhandling to the shopping area three blocks from his house and how the park where his 2-year-old son plays might not be as safe as before.

“There’s no reason that Ward 3 should be exempt,” he says. “That serves neither the interest of the homeless nor that of the neighborhood.”

As he continues, his anxiety grows with every word: “Believe me, I have a lot wrapped up in this area. All my wealth is tied up in that house. If I thought sincerely (that) my family’s safety would be impinged or that the property value would plummet, I’d be a lot more upset than I am.”

In the meantime, more than 50 other Ward 3 residents who say they feel an obligation to the homeless have formed a committee to find a shelter site, although they are not opposed to using the recreation center. Members of the group say they don’t like the fat-cat image their neighborhood has developed around the city. And they’re determined to support the city’s desire to put a shelter in Ward 3.

“We’ve created--in this city and this country, for that matter--a world in which some people are privileged to live in a relatively clean, safe neighborhood at the expense of others,” says one member, Florence Roisman, an attorney who specializes in low-income housing.

“I live on a little street where there are eight houses,” she adds. “If one of those houses were sold to a group for homeless people, I wouldn’t mind. I’d make sure it was run well. I’d make sure it was more than a temporary solution to this overwhelming problem.”

Dorothy Brizill lives in Columbia Heights, a Northwest neighborhood in Ward 1, which seems to be one of the three lower-income areas where the District has decided to solve the homeless problem.

Once a fashionable shopping district for African Americans, Columbia Heights began deteriorating after the 1968 riots. The classy Victorian-style row houses are swamped by drugs and crime.

By flooding the area with emergency shelters, Brizill says, the city has made the situation worse.

Within 16 square blocks of Brizill’s house, there are 14 emergency shelters. When she hears liberals’ prescriptions for the homeless problem, Brizill’s response is, “Dream on.”

“Oh, it would be nice to have better-managed shelters,” she says. “Just like it would have been nice to have a city official pick up the phone and call us once in a while or take our calls. But what we’re left with is a hodgepodge of trouble.”

As she delivers this lecture, she gives a tour of the alleys and side streets of her neighborhood: Homeless men sit in chairs in the alley behind the shelter closest to her house. Women and small children hang out in front of another apartment house, which the city rents.

Brizill and her neighbors have repeatedly tried to get police to intervene in the drug trade that goes on outside these and other city-run facilities. They also have complained of streets used like open toilets because the homeless have no facilities once shelters close for the day, of prostitution and of vandalism. Frustration is unending for “the poor and powerless” residents of Columbia Heights, whose patience is gone.

“We’re city people,” says Brizill. “But we can’t tolerate this.”

After yet another shelter in Columbia Heights was expanded two years ago to accommodate 176 men, Brizill and her neighbors marshaled a campaign to get the City Council to end the policy of providing unlimited shelter to the homeless.

A new policy was approved last June that added government services for shelter residents and limited their stays to 30 days for single adults and 90 days for families. The policy was reaffirmed by a slim margin in a November referendum; Brizill was one of the key organizers.

“We had an open-door policy since 1984, but no one sat down and wrote a comprehensive plan to enforce it,” she says. “Instead, they just put up these shelters willy-nilly. There was no thought as to how many went in a neighborhood or where the homeless needed a place. The system had a chance to work, and it failed.”

The nation’s capital bled with compassion for its homeless in 1984, and voters approved Initiative 17 by a 3-to-1 margin, making Washington the only city in the United States to guarantee temporary shelter to every person who needed it. The voters did it, not the courts.

But by 1989, the bureaucrats had done little to follow up except to create 361 beds.

However, it was not as if the city wasn’t spending money on the problem. The budget went from $2 million in 1984 to $17 million in 1990, although the district wound up spending $40 million spent last year.

In the winter of 1989, the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a group founded by the late Mitch Snyder and now led by his girlfriend, Carol Fennelly, took the city to court.

Superior Court Judge Harriet Taylor decided that not only were beds required for everyone who needed them, but also that all eight wards in the city had to provide shelters--and that when they reached 95% of capacity, new ones had to be opened.

A consent decree supervised by the judge also demanded that such basic needs as soap and working toilets be provided.

People who stay in shelters, Taylor wrote at the time, “face serious imminent injury to their physical beings, including, but not limited to, beatings and other assaults, rat bites and tuberculosis and other serious infectious diseases.”

Now there are beds for 1,700 homeless singles and 600 people in families. But there still aren’t enough, and the city has racked up $4 million in fines for being in contempt of the consent decree.

Fennelly recently decided that it was time for one of the dramatic stunts Snyder had used during the early 1980s to focus the city’s emotions on the homeless. (In one instance, Snyder fasted for 51 days until the Reagan Administration agreed to turn over an old federal building to be used as a shelter.)

So, one day last month, about 50 advocates for the homeless forced their way through Ward 3’s recreation center’s front door, threw cots down and declared it a homeless shelter. Most protesters took off a few hours later, but six who refused to leave were arrested.

Fennelly declares with more than a tinge of sarcasm: “We can safely say we’ve succeeded in opening a shelter in Ward 3.”

In the next few days, Vincent Gray, the new director of the city’s Department of Human Services, expects to stand behind Mayor Dixon at a news conference when she announces her first attempt to deal with the homeless.

Part of what Dixon will announce is the creation of permanent low-income housing that comes with a large dose of support services, including alcohol treatment and job training--the kind of services people fed up with the system have been calling for.

“It’s a start,” says Gray. “This will not end the problem, but we’re hoping it will reduce the homeless population to a much more manageable number.”

According to Gray, the ticket into the housing will be for homeless people to prove they have jobs. But rather than have the city run the housing, it will be operated by private groups.

Dixon’s proposal is, however, going to throw some people back on the streets almost immediately: It also calls for reducing the number of beds for singles from 1,700 to 900, almost 50%. Gray says he expects to be bombarded by questions about which shelters are going to be closed first and whether this means that the Ward 3 shelter won’t open. The Dixon Administration hasn’t decided which shelters will go, but it is firmly sticking to its plan to open Guy Mason.

As to the NIMBY attitude in Ward 3, Gray, a clinical psychologist with a long history of advocacy for the retarded, says calmly that he knows how to handle the residents there.

“I’m not new to this type of experience,” he says. “I’ve been through these NIMBY things a hundred times before.”

Gray says he’ll organize a two-day retreat for everyone from advocates for the homeless to the angriest neighbors; he’ll open the doors to his office to anybody who wants to scream at him.

“In the end, I’m going to enlist Ward 3’s help,” Gray says. “Just you wait; you’ll see.”