Every Saturday afternoon, Grace Episcopal Church on Wisconsin Avenue hosts a program called Grace’s Table, opening its doors to the neighborhood’s homeless population for a meal and fellowship. On Nov. 12, around 30 individuals, mostly men, crowded into one of the church’s main halls for lunch, fellowship, and an optional Bible study.
Among the men was Roberto, an immigrant from El Salvador experiencing homelessness in the Georgetown area. Roberto came to the United States in 2001, in search of a better life, but now finds himself on the streets. Roberto, like the rest of those at the lunch, was beginning to worry about the imminent drop in temperatures that marks the beginning of the long D.C. winter.
Situations like Roberto’s are all too common in Washington, D.C., a city with a homeless population of around 7,000, according to the American Council on Science and Health. In the same report, the council published that D.C.’s rate ranks as the sixth-highest city in the United States when adjusted for overall population. A number of factors, including rising housing prices, mental health issues and addiction, have left the city with an ongoing crisis in which thousands of people are left without a roof over their heads.
The Georgetown neighborhood, although somewhat geographically isolated from the rest of the city, is in no way immune to this issue. Among the million-dollar homes and lines of expensive boutique stores, there is a population of people who find themselves stuck in a cycle of poverty and often mental illness that seemingly leaves them with nowhere to go.
As temperatures begin to drop, the homeless population is faced with a new challenge: staying warm and avoiding hypothermia. Members of the Georgetown community, though, continue to work together to battle this seasonal challenge.
On campus, the HOME program, a part of the Center for Social Justice (CSJ), is a sponsor of the HOT (Hypothermia Outreach Team) team, a group of students that spends evenings monitoring the homeless for signs of hypothermia on nights with especially severe weather conditions.
Teams of four students spend about two hours walking through the neighborhood checking up on residents preparing to sleep in the streets and offering blankets and other cold-weather gear. The CSJ helps train these groups by preparing students to recognize signs of hypothermia and walking them through a variety of situations that they may face.
Their work is not without precedent. There have been multiple cases of people dying in the streets in especially harsh overnight conditions, with the most recent incident occurring in 2012, when Clark Carvelli, 25, froze to death on Canal Road right next to Georgetown’s campus. Since Carvelli’s death, multiple people have also been found in the area and hospitalized with hypothermia.
D.C. law states that, between the beginning of November and the end of March, when the temperature drops below 32 degrees, “all people who are homeless must be housed.” This means that no city shelter can turn anyone away, and police are active in searching for people who plan to stay out on the street. The city takes this very seriously, and in some cases will resort to moving those who don’t wish to stay in shelters into them, according to Pietro Bartoli (COL ’19). Bartoli is a member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a Catholic lay organization that focuses on living out Catholic social teaching. Through the community’s Street Greetings program, he helps deliver meals and interacts with the homeless population of Northwest D.C.
Sarah Hartley is the communications director for the Georgetown Ministry Center (GMC), a homeless outreach center in Georgetown.
“Most of the people we work with have untreated mental illness,” she said. “That could mean that they’re a little bit paranoid, or that they don’t like being inside very much and feeling that they’re sort of claustrophobic. They can be overwhelmed by being indoors since they spend a lot of time outside.”
In Georgetown, which doesn’t have a traditional shelter, local religious groups improvise to create winter housing for homeless people. In a program coordinated by the GMC, ten congregations in the Georgetown community each spend one week hosting ten homeless residents of the area. Under the program, which runs from November to March each year, guests are provided breakfast and dinner and are given a bed for the night.
The GMC uses a filtering process to select the group that will make the best fit for these shelters. The center’s executive director Gunther Stern and his staff of case managers lead the process, and look to find people who will be cooperative with the hosting group as well as those who are most vulnerable. The program, quite popular among the homeless, has a waiting list.
Affluent areas like Georgetown provide a unique struggle for homeless people, since it can seem as if they are forgotten around such displays of wealth. Bartoli described how, for many of the area’s homeless residents, a lack of human interaction is as much as a struggle as finding food.
“You hear over and over again, ‘Thank you for being here. Thank you for talking. Thank you for listening to my story,’”Bartoli said. “I think in a lot of affluent neighborhoods, you can think that just charity is enough.”
At the same time, the neighborhood is not without its benefits, which leads to the high number of homeless residents in Georgetown, according to Hartley. The primary one is safety. Unlike many other sections of the city, Georgetown’s streets provide a relative level of quiet and security for those not within the townhouses and dorms that make up the residences for the majority of the neighborhood’s residents.
“The reason why there are so many homeless people in Georgetown is the same reason that people from totally different walks of life want to spend time in Georgetown. That’s because it feels a lot safer, a lot nicer, more beautiful, and more quaint than a number of other areas in the city. It’s just a nice place to be,” Hartley said.
Sarah Stiles, a sociology professor at Georgetown active in homeless outreach in D.C., describes a separation between the the work of meeting the immediate needs of homeless people and the more long-term advocacy work that can be done to help them.
These immediate needs—food, warmth, sometimes medical attention—are somewhat obvious, although quite challenging to fulfill. The longer-term needs vary as well. Some of these can be as simple as finding identification. Stiles is involved with an ID ministry program at her church, helping the homeless to acquire essential documentation for job and housing applications.
There is also the issue of mental health. The GMC considers mental illness to be among the most significant factors leading to homelessness in Georgetown, and has two psychiatrists on staff to diagnose and offer treatment to guests.
A number of organizations within the community are willing to step in when it comes to hunger. The HOME program sponsors the Interfaith Sandwich Making Coalition on Tuesday nights. True to its name, the group helps feed those who are homeless in the area.
Members of the campus co-ed service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega are active in the Grace’s Table program. A small group of students help set up Saturday mornings at the church, engage with the homeless members of the programs, and clean the room after.
Within the Georgetown community, the GMC plays a large role in aiding those who find themselves without permanent housing. The center was originally opened in 1987 in response to a homeless man who froze to death in 1985, and has been a central part of the neighborhood’s outreach since. The center now serves around 900 people per year, and between 40 and 60 per day. The GMC runs a wide array of operations today, including a space for homeless people during the day to use showers, washing machines, and computers.
GMC is also involved in a street outreach program, in which executive director Gunther Stern, one of the center’s psychiatrists, and a general practitioner take to the streets to check on the neighborhood’s homeless residents. This program focuses on those people that do not usually seek shelter or medical care.
“It’s a way for us to check in on people and provide medical and psychiatric care for people who are usually pretty resistant to help, and who are often ignored by most people who pass by. We work to build trusting relationships with them and help to address the reasons why they are homeless,” Hartley said of the program.
While the center now enjoys a generally favorable standing with the various businesses and citizens of Georgetown, this was not always the case. Many were opposed to the center’s founding, Hartley noted, and they feared that the location would become an attraction and lead to more homeless people entering the neighborhood. This sentiment, while smaller, still exists in the community.
“There is some resistance to GMC existing,” Hartley said. “Neighbors sometimes complain. Business don’t like when there are homeless people panhandling outside of their building.”
With the constant focus on the immediate needs that the homeless community faces, it can be hard to look at the larger, more structural reasons for the crisis, which include mental illness and a lack of affordable housing. But efforts are being made to tackle these issues.
The Housing First approach has gained nationwide recognition as an effective method and is now being used in D.C., by both government and private operations. The approach moves chronically homeless residents—those who have been homeless for six months or longer—into housing as quickly as possible. Caseworkers can then address issues like mental illness and addiction among the newly housed.
Stiles notes that this method was not always the norm. “What we’ve said to people is ‘Hey! Straighten up your act, and once you’re straightened out, once you’re sober, then we’ll make sure you get housing.’ Well that’s very difficult to do when you don’t have a stable place,” she said.
Stiles explained that these sort of ideas have been proven effective across the United States when it comes to ending chronic homeless. They are also usually cost-effective because they lead to a decrease in the use of emergency social services, like emergency rooms, by the homeless.
The GMC has also been involved with these sorts of programs. This year, the center has helped around 50 people obtain housing vouchers, and many of them have already been placed into homes. Projects like these have allowed GMC to make huge strides in ending chronic homelessness in the neighborhood. The center noted that these kind of programs have significantly increased the amount of people that they can put in homes, rising from just three to five per year in the past.
In another attempt to fight homelessness in D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser plans to shut down the large homeless shelter at the former D.C. General Hospital, located in Southeast D.C., and replace it with smaller shelters in each of the city’s eight wards. Christopher Weaver, former head of D.C.’s Department of General Services, told DCist that the shelter is planned to be shut down by 2019.
D.C. General, a family-only shelter, can hold up to 288 families or around 1,000 people. The shelter is currently at maximum capacity, and Bowser’s administration claims that it is unclean, unsafe, and expensive to run, prompting the push to shut it down. Bowser’s plan for Ward 2, in which Georgetown is located, is the only one that doesn’t involve creating a new shelter. Instead, the city will count the new Patricia Handy Center, a shelter for women built at 810 5th St. N.W., as the ward’s shelter.
Early in her administration, Bowser met with the Georgetown Advisory Neighborhood Council (ANC) with the intent of getting support for her various anti-homelessness efforts in the city.
“During our meeting with Mayor Bowser in the weeks immediately after she took office, she made it clear that her priority was addressing homelessness across the city,” said Kendyl Clausen (SFS ’16) a former ANC commissioner.
Clausen emphasized the mayor’s call for help in the Georgetown area specifically.
In the months following this meeting, the ANC has not been involved in any specific actions regarding homelessness in Georgetown, per Clausen. However, all commissioners stressed the seriousness with which they take the issue.
The ANC cannot write policy, though; its function is to simply advise the city council. “D.C. government has to take us in great weight and our opinions in great weight,” said Mara Goldman (SFS ’19).
Goldman, ANC commissioner for single member district 4, noted that, in recent months, the ANC has dedicated time to discussing the issue of homelessness and analyzing their potential response to whichever policies might one day be considered by D.C. government.
While no concrete steps have been taken by D.C. government or the ANC to specifically tackle the issue of homelessness in Georgetown, those involved are aware of the need to address the situation.
Lisa Palmer, the newly elected commissioner for SMD 5, stressed during her campaign the need to view homeless people with dignity and respect. Palmer is now reaching out to the various parties involved: GMC, the Business Improvement District, and the Metro Police Department, all with the intent of making the ANC play a proactive role in providing services to Georgetown’s homeless population.
Neither Goldman nor Palmer had any specific policies to endorse regarding the issue, instead stressing the amount of work being done to better understand it.
“Especially as it gets colder, I want to make sure that we’re serving the people without homes as best as we can,” Palmer said.
Image Credit: The Georgetown Voice
