City’s Kicking Out Homeless to Make Way for Buses

Mad props to StreetSense for breaking a story no one else has: D.C.’s largest shelter will likely close in the fall and become the new bus hub for WMATA, which wants out of its current locale on M Street SE before the Nats and new traffic move in.

The D.C. Village Family Emergency Shelter sits on 16 acres in Southeast and holds half of the city’s shelter beds: 358 of 716. According to the story by Charles Jackson—who confirmed this morning he wrote the story on a tip, got everyone to confirm it, and is still waiting for someone else to give a shit—there’s a typical waiting list of 200 more who need beds. But D.C.’s not planning to replace the space. Instead, Mayor Adrian Fenty gave Jackson a bunch of vague talk about finding homeless people apartments closer to city services. A smart move, since that’s worked so well in the past.

WMATA spokeswoman Joanne Ferreira says Metro’s pushing to get it done “as soon as possible. The Nationals will be going into the Navy Yard a year from now.”

Yeah, we’d hate for those buses to be inconvenienced. But don’t worry. Tommy Wells in Ward 6 is on it—at least he is since Jackson called him up and Wells got his press person to send a statement: “I’m going to continue to ask for a timeline and regular updates on the progress of the city’s efforts.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 9th, 2007 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Adrian Fenty, Bureaucracy, D.C. Council, Homelessness, Media, Metro, Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.