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To the Editor:

The Short Takes column in your March/April 2001 issue quoted a Washington Post article that claimed homelessness is increasing in Washington, DC. Simply put, the Post got that story wrong. Homelessness among adults using emergency shelters has decreased since 1996 by more than 50 percent. Street homelessness is one-third what it was in 1992. Among families the demand for emergency shelter decreased between 1996 and 1999. In 2000 the family demand started to rise but did not reach the level of 1996.

Overall the number of homeless persons we counted in our shelters and transitional housing in 2000 was about 13,000; it was over 19,500 persons in 1996 – a drop of one-third. Since the 1996 numbers were somewhat inflated by duplicate counting, we told the Post that the decrease may not have been as much as we once thought, perhaps more like one-quarter than one-third. They interpreted “less of an decrease” as an admission of an “increase.”

However, the Post missed the real story. Far from trying to gloss over the problem or hide the high prevalence of homelessness in the District, we made it plain to the reporters – and we publish it for all to see on our web page – that the District has a big problem. And the homeless system is not the real answer to that problem. Even though we have increased the size of the public homeless system by 54 percent since 1995, the problem persists.

What is really increasing is the degree to which poor people depend upon the homeless system for basic survival needs that should be delivered through mainstream public agencies. One in 13 poor people in the nation’s capital depend every day on some portion of the homeless system for their survival needs. Over the course of 2000 about one in seven poor persons needed shelter at some point. Shelters are becoming permanent substitutes for affordable housing, places where “problem people” are contained and hidden from view. For the past four years we have been calling for permanent supportive housing as a means to reverse this dangerous trend.

While poor people continue to present themselves at shelters we have to run shelters, but we must not get locked into considering them the answer to problems of deep poverty. We’ve been there, done that.

J. Stephen Cleghorn, Ph.D., Deputy Director
The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness