Grahamstanding Part 194
Today, news came that the Central Union Mission shelter would not be moving from 14th Street NW to Georgia Avenue NW. The shelter will be relocating to a site close to Union Station. So that makes two enormous homeless shelters within blocks of each other.
Ward One Councilmember Jim Graham participated in the news conference and posted a message on his website crowing over the news. He rejoiced:
"Good news!!! Central Union Mission is not moving to Georgia Avenue in Ward One. It is moving downtown."
It was all around bad form.
Dcist does an excellent job noting Graham's apparent happiness. It does an even better job mapping Graham's contradictions: this is the same guy that pushed to dump a bunch of displaced strip clubs to Ward 5. This DCist post is a must read!
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9:33 pm
GOOD NEWS! from a guy who was executive director of Whitman Walker in the 80s. A clinic that understands what it's like for its clients to be ostracized by community, experienced in the "not in my backyard" reaction by neighbors. Imagine being back in the mid 80s, a clinic was opening that caters to gay people, gay people living with HIV! That's not the kind of progress we want in our neighborhood, not those kind of people!
Fast forward 20 years later, and GOOD NEWS society's shunned wont be living in a shelter in Ward 1. GOOD NEWS it's not in my ward.
GOOD NEWS! A solid grass roots victory!
8:51 am
I hear you about the strip clubs in Ward 5, but it dosen't change the face that it's a bad idea to stick a mega men's homesless shelter in the middle of a developing residential community far from downtown. I would expect any Councilperson to stop it.
People toss around the NIMBY label like it's white professionals who have been throwing a fit about the shelter. Almost EVERYONE in the neighborhood opposed it. which was decided w/o consulting anyone first. It's unlikely that they would have done that with, say, GTown of Cleveland Park.
The CUM is nice group of folks but they have been doing the same thing for over 100 years. Giant men's homeless shelter ain't going to solve homelessness so I appreciate that Fenty coupled the annoucement with his new plan to actually fight the problem.
11:38 am
#1 No one said NIMBY is exclusively white. Black people own backyards too.
#2 You presume homeless people are concentrated in downtown DC, without realizing that Columbia Heights/Adams Morgan (as well as other residential neighborhoods) have a huge number of "transitional" homes for formerly homeless people.
#3 There is no discussion about why exactly people oppose the idea of organizations serving homeless clients in their neighborhoods other than the vague claim that it is not the type of development the neighborhoods want.
While I'd agree that Central Union is dated in the way they address homeless, they still play a vital city role that very few government and nongovernment leaders are willingly to address.
The elephant is the room is simply this, homeless people are modern day lepers. They are society's outcasts, and we have the preconceived notion of what a homeless person is like. A notion that's shattered if you actually befriended a person who used to live on the street.
There are actually 2 elephants. Let me get up on this rickity soapbox is say it, this is all simply unChristian behavior. No different than pushing away gay clients during the mid 80s.