Fresh from its battle with Congress over the District gun laws, the D.C. City Council is facing off with another opponent: Mayor Adrian Fenty (D). Last Friday, Fenty shut down the Franklin Shelter, one of downtown’s largest homeless centers, in direct defiance of legislation passed by the Council, and without a specific plan for the displaced homeless. Fenty’s support of long-term housing for the homeless is admirable, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of short-term housing like the Franklin Shelter, which the homeless rely on.
Located downtown on K Street, the Franklin Shelter provided low-barrier nightly housing on a first-come, first-served basis. It had 300 beds and, before Fenty prematurely closed the shelter, the beds were regularly filled each night. Mayor Fenty claimed that the termination of the shelter is part of a long-term plan to provide “permanent supportive housing” for D.C.’s homeless by putting the men who formerly relied on Franklin in taxpayer-subsidized apartments. When he closed the shelter on September 26, however, only 60 men had been provided with housing. But even if Fenty had been able to find three hundred permanent homes, he still wouldn’t have compensated for the loss of the Franklin Shelter, which serviced a far greater number of people—roughly 13,000 different individuals per year used each of the city’s 1,988 shelter beds in 2007, according to the Washington Peace Center.
The homeless themselves are up in arms against Fenty’s plan, staging rallies for the re-opening of Franklin and “sleep-outs” in nearby Franklin Park, where many former occupants have taken up residence. One protester sported a sign reading “King Fenty: Dismantling the bed I sleep in didn’t make me less homeless.”
The City Council has demanded more concrete plans and greater transparency from Fenty before he takes a drastic action like shutting down one of D.C.’s most important shelters. There’s real potential in Fenty’s initiative to provide long-term housing to the homeless, but such a program will require serious planning and significant funding for it to be a tenable solution to D.C.’s homeless problem. Closing the Franklin Shelter was a mistake. Fenty needs to provide a definite plan for replacing any services he’s eliminating before he does any more damage.
