Making the Third Ghetto: Race and Family Homelessness in Washington, D.C., 1977–1999

A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2020

Nicole M. Gipson

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

Contents

List of Abbreviations 3 List of Maps, Figures, and Tables 4 Abstract 5 Declaration and Copyright Statement 6 Dedication 7 Acknowledgements 8

Introduction – Something Must Be Done…But What? 9

Part I – The 1980s

Chapter 1 – Making the Third Ghetto in Washington, D.C. 1977-1987 30

Chapter 2 – HOUSING WHEN? Family homelessness and the quest for 72 affordable housing in the District

Part II – The 1990s

Chapter 3 – Not in My Back Yard! Shifting Attitudes Toward the Homeless 114

Chapter 4 – Partnership, Privatisation, and Power in 145 Washington, D.C.

Conclusion – Where Do We Go From Here? 190

Bibliography 198

Word Count: 81,068

List of Abbreviations

AFDC – Aid to Families with Dependent Children ANC – Advisory Neighborhood Commission BID – Business Improvement Districts BUR – Black Urban Regime CAP – Central Atlanta Progress CCNV – Community for Creative Non-violence CoC – Continuum of Care DCHA – DC Housing Authority DHR – Department of Human Resources DHS – Department of Human Services DPAH – Department of Public and Assisted Housing EA – Emergency Assistance FEMA – Federal Emergency Management Agency HHS – Department of Health and Human Services HOPE – Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere HUD – Department of Housing and Urban Development ICH – Interagency Council on the Homeless OBRA – Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 PRWORA – Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 PPP – Public-Private Partnerships PHA – Public Housing Authority NLCHP – The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty NCH – National Coalition for the Homeless SCLC – Southern Christian Leadership Conference SNCC – Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SRO – Single room occupancy TANF – Temporary Assistance to Needy Families TCP – The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness URD – Urban Revitalization Demonstration VA – Veterans Administration

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

Map 1.1 – Washington, D.C. by Neighbourhood 35

Map 1.2 – Washington, D.C. by Quadrant 36

Map 1.3 – Between 1970 and 1990 Poverty Became More Concentrated in More Parts of the District 39

Table 1.1 – Poverty in the District of Columbia by Ward, 1970 – 1990 39

Map 2.1 – D.C. Ward Map 84

Table 2.1 – Percentage of Families with Children Headed by Single Mothers by Ward, 1970-1990 85

Figure 2.1 – Housing Now! Newsletter 102

Figure 2.2 – The second page of HUD Sec. Kemp’s Declaration of War Against Homelessness after the Housing Now! March on October 7, 1989 106

Table 3.1 – Typology of elements structuring perception of threat 131

Map 3.1 – Map of Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter 132

Map 3.2 – Site of Foggy Bottom Incident in Ward 2 137

Table 4.1 – William H. Frey’s analysis of 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses 169 data.

Map 4.1 – Persistent Racial Divisions in D.C. White/Black Concentration 1990 and 2010 169

Abstract

This research project is a historical account of the effects of neoliberal economic, social, and urban development on the making of the third ghetto in African American communities, with a particular focus on homeless families in Washington, D.C. at the end of the twentieth century. Neoliberal policies of the early 1980s and 1990s promoted the deregulation, and marketization of social assistance services, as well as the privatization and commodification of public spaces, which fostered punitive measures that exacerbated the economic and social inequality of precariously-housed communities in general and criminalised street homeless activity in particular. The lack of affordable housing, the destruction of public housing, in addition to structural challenges such as inadequate welfare outlays perpetuated poverty traps and facilitated the creation of welfare hotels – notorious for their deplorable living conditions. Zero- tolerance policing, which sought to make way for the large-scale downtown development projects of the twenty-first century in the District, pushed homeless communities out of coveted public spaces in anticipation of this “Downtown Renaissance.” Analysing the impact of neoliberal policies and practices on housing precarity sheds light on the intersections of the second and the third ghettoes. The second ghetto refers to public housing. The third ghetto pertains to all forms of emergency shelter for the homeless.

The emergency shelter system which emerged from urban areas of the mid-1970s, first as a burgeoning, shadow network of services provided by faith-based organizations and homeless advocates, then institutionalized through the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 was Washington, D.C.’s third ghetto. The history of homelessness in Washington, D.C is essentially defined by its ghettoes which were built on the central fault line of race. However, understanding the “new” visible homelessness of this period remains challenging, due to a narrow definition of the “old” homelessness which has traditionally excluded African American alley dwellers who were eventually displaced through slum clearance policies by 1970. Moreover, examining the public housing system of the second ghetto as a gendered space, historicized within the context of the policy paradigm of displacement, dispersal, and demolition, further elucidates the making of the third ghetto in the District, where homeless families were one of the fastest- growing subpopulations of the new homeless era. This study posits that redefining old homelessness along racial lines and re-examining the second ghetto of public housing in terms of race, gender, and housing precarity are essential to understanding the new homelessness of the third ghetto in Washington, D.C.

Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and she has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes.

ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made.

iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions.

iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialization of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documets.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

This thesis is dedicated to my supervisory team: Dr David Brown, Dr Eithne Quinn, and Dr Kerry Pimblott for inspiring me in the writing of it and for helping me find my own voice.

Acknowledgements I would be remiss if I did not use this platform to write to BAME students and members of other marginalised communities in their struggle to achieve in academia and in life. Being from a BAME or marginalised community requires that we face a few regrettable facts: merit alone does not guarantee success and we do not have access to the traditional networks needed to achieve it. The unlevel playing field, which deprives us of equal access to financial, institutional, digital, and social support, means that in terms of achievement we must accept the unfortunate truth that in order to be equal we must be better. This is the tragedy and opportunity of life on the margins. As I am fond of telling my students: the transformation of strong emotion experienced during adversity into critical thinking is a powerful thing indeed. I submit this thesis as proof of this assertion. Although we are not handed the privilege of access to certain networks, we can and must inspire others to help us create our own. I would like to acknowledge those people who have answered my call in this endeavour. The first living person that comes to mind is my friend and personal champion, James Shabazz. He not only invited me into his home during my second research trip in 2018 but also shared his wisdom about the District with me, as a street vendor, D.C. resident, and respected community elder. Although my father, Arthur James Gipson passed away in 2015, he remains a constant inspiration. He understood my intellectual curiosity and encouraged me to develop it, particularly in my writing. I also owe a great debt to my best friend Agnès Michel-Skorupka for helping me get well again and for being everything a friend and a big sister should be. I am also indebted to the manuscript and archival staff of the following institutions: the Special Collections Research Center at George Washington University, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Washingtoniana Collection at the D.C. Public Library, the Martin Luther King Memorial Library, the Dig DC Digital Collections, and the Anacostia Community Museum Library. I would especially like to thank Jessica Smith at the Kiplinger Research Library and the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

I would also like to thank Dr Daniel R. Kerr, Associate Director of American University’s Public History Program, for the website: Whose Downtown?: Displacement, Resistance, and the Future of the CCNV Shelter in Washington, D.C., and for his secondary source support. I would particularly like to thank him for suggesting that I read Hirsch’s Second Ghetto. I hope he enjoys this rather lengthy book report.

Finally, I would like to elaborate on why I decided to dedicate this thesis to my supervisory team. Each student has their own path and their own needs to get their research project done. I needed someone to believe in me and to create a space where I could deal with the trauma of my own bout with homelessness and my struggle to become a confident and productive researcher. In regard to the elaboration and completion of my thesis, each member of my team was called upon to make decisions which required moral and professional courage. Their ability to make these decisions demonstrated their confidence in me and created that vital space – freedom fighters the lot of them.

Introduction – Something must be done…but what?

Stacy Abney was a Texan and World War II veteran living on the streets of Washington, D.C. – out of place, out of luck, and out of time. He had come to the District of Columbia in search of justice from a Federal Washington that had none to give him.1 It was 1977, two years since his arrival in Washington, D.C. He had arrived in the District like a new “Bonus Army” of one, demanding the Veterans Administration (VA) pay him his due – a battle fought and lost with others yet to come. Through the power of protest, he asserted his right to the city, his right to those public spaces made not just for the citizens of Hometown Washington but for all Americans. Today, on October 12, 1977, the eyes of the nation were upon him gazing at his war on Federal Washington through the lens of The Washington Post. The article entitled “Stacey Abney’s World On The Capitol’s Steps” chronicled his places of protest, from Lafayette Park where he camped in front of the White House, to the space under the main steps of the Capitol Building, where he had been staying for the past twenty-seven months, with the exception of 135 days spent in the D.C. Jail for picketing the White House and loitering.2

Unable to work due to ailments stemming from injuries incurred during his military service in Europe, Abney had been unemployed since 1948. His nearly thirty-year battle to settle a dispute with the VA over disability benefits took a new turn on June 17, 1975 when he arrived in Washington, D.C. to protest the federal government’s negligence of his claim. How did he survive? Simply put, Abney relied on the local police and obliging strangers for sustenance as well as the occasional cash injection from his sister. The local YMCA was there for his weekly shower.3 Yes, Abney was just fine in his makeshift skid row, but the federal government just outside Stacy’s world was changing. The Keynesian economics favoured by Depression-era and Great Society policies had been replaced by a New Federalism that was determined to get the federal bureaucracy and its spending under control. Given this new economic reality, it was highly unlikely that the VA would give satisfaction to Abney’s claim. Yet he held out hope, remaining under the capitol steps as his dragons turned to windmills.4 If it is the fate of generals to fade away, then it is the

1 Federal Washington refers to governmental institutions like the Veteran’s Administration. Hometown Washington refers to non-governmental spaces on or off federal land as well as residential spaces. There are two spellings of Stacy Abney’s first name in the press Stacey and Stacy. Stacy is the correct spelling of Abney’s first name. 2 Joseph P. Mastrangelo, “Stacey Abney’s World On the Capitol’s Steps,” Washington Post, October 12, 1977. 3 Ibid. 4 Stacy Abney remained under the Capitol Steps, until well into the 1990s. His claim was never settled. Leon Daniel, “Stacy Abney, 73, a homeless World War II Veteran…” United Press International, January 20, 1985. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1985/01/20/Stacy-Abney-73-a-

9 folly of the eternal soldier to persist in fighting an ended war. Indeed, Stacy Abney chose to remain under the steps of the Capitol Building in protest with his powder dry and at the ready, not realizing that Federal Washington had already won.

Stacy Abney was given a service-connected physical disability allowance in 1946. The VA accessed his disability rate at twenty per cent which secured him a $162 a month stipend. However, Abney gave up his rights to this benefit when he stopped depositing his check in 1986 in protest of what in his estimation should have been a 100 per cent disability rate.5 Further examination of Abney’s predicament reveals a condition of homelessness that stretched across several classifications. According to the existing scholarship on homeless subpopulations, Abney fit the profile of the stereotypical “hobo” of the fifties and the sixties. In fact, his decision to occupy public places in proximity to some of the District’s most visible and iconic institutions throughout the late 1970s, all of the 1980s, and the early 1990s, as well as his mental health issues, and war veteran status, relegated him to the ranks of the new homeless population.

Beyond the indignant-man-goes-to-Washington trope, a broader historical context reveals that Stacy Abney was, in fact, a dangerous man, not due to who he was but for how he could be perceived. When street people such as Abney began peppering the landscape of America’s cities in the mid- to the late 1970s, little was known about them. The only groups willing to assist the destitute when homelessness began to present itself in crisis levels at this time were faith-based organizations such as church groups, Catholic activist collectives, and antiwar communities of the New Left like the Sojourner Community. Although this new visible homelessness appeared in inner cities and rural areas alike, the battle for solutions to this crisis was fought primarily in America’s urban regimes, culminating in the first federal response to homelessness: the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987.6 However, homeless policymaking was inextricably linked to the power to shape public opinion.

Key to winning the public relations and optics battle against extreme poverty during the 1980s was the ability to frame the narrative of the street homeless population: were the homeless just like us or were they like Abney – homeless by choice? For the first twelve years of this claims-

homeless-World-War-II-veteran/6150475045200/?ur3=1 accessed December 5, 2019. Tom Dunkel, “Capitol Offender: After 18 years, Why Won’t Stacy Abney Get Off The Steps?” Washington Post, August 29, 1993. 5 Dunkel, “Capitol Offender.” 6 Later renamed The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act on October 30, 2000, by President William Clinton after the death of Representative Bruce Vento.

10 making period of the homeless crisis (1977-1989), the Community for Creative Non-violence (CCNV), the leading activists of the anti-homelessness movement in Washington, D.C., were able to frame homelessness as a social, moral, and rights-and-justice problem.7 During this period, policy outcomes and claims-making about the homeless were dominated by the successes of the anti-homelessness movement and the moral foundation of the Catholic Worker movement. Conversely, the second period (1989-1999) was usurped by corporate and community activism.8 Two important phases of the neoliberalisation of poverty governance, which roughly fit into these two claimsmaking periods, merit examination. First, there was the rollback phase in public services of the 1980s which was marked by social services cuts in public housing and underfunded homeless shelter provision. It was during this period that President Reagan first denied the existence of the homeless crisis, then tried to demonize street people by casting them as the undeserving poor who were allegedly “homeless by choice.”9 In reaction to the callousness emanating from the White House, homeless activists in the District created a counter-narrative, using religious iconography and moral arguments to elicit compassion and empathy, while framing access to emergency shelters and affordable housing as human-rights imperatives. The subsequent rollout of neoliberalised homeless assistance services of the 1990s characterized the second phase of poverty governance neoliberalisation.10 However, a fundamental steppingstone to the understanding of the neoliberalisation of social service provisioning at the end of the twentieth century is the analysis of the “new” homeless crisis – a subject of academic enquiry largely ignored by urban historians.

The most significant feature of the new homelessness, which began to suddenly appear in the late 1970s in public spaces such as the streets of central business districts of major cities, was its visibility. The emergence of homelessness as societal problem in the 1980s was due to two key factors: its presence in the public spaces of urban areas of America’s largest cities and in the debates between proponents of New Left Reagonomics and the grassroots activists who fought for the recognition of street homelessness as a legitimate and major crisis. Not since the Great Depression had poverty been so visible on America’s streets. Hidden behind the veneer of

7 For the notion of “claims-making” see also: Cynthia J. Bogard, Seasons Such As These: How Homelessness Took Shape in America (New York: Aldine De Gruyter),18-19. 8 The author of this thesis dates the first phase of the claimsmaking for the homeless from 1977 to 1989 and the second phase from 1989 to 1999 in Washington, D.C. 9 Juan Williams, “Homeless Choose to Be, Reagan Says,” Washington Post, February 1, 1984. 10 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34 (2002): 380-404.

“postwar prosperity and skid row containment,” homelessness seemed to be relegated to the past – an aberration of the American public consciousness.11 Beyond the unintended consequences of deinstitutionalization of mental healthcare facilities, the new homelessness in the District of Columbia had a myriad of causes such as racial discrimination, inner-city gentrification, and displacement due to the lack of affordable housing; federal statutes that decriminalized public drunkenness and emptied local “drunk tanks” of alcoholic homeless men, educational poverty; employment dislocation and underemployment, deindustrialization, a reduction in spending on public benefits, as well as the breakdown of lower-income family support networks which no longer allowed poor families to double-up.12 Urban scholar, Don Mitchell chronicled this new iteration of homelessness in America: “[n]o longer confined to the old skid row, the homeless littered the sidewalks and parks on the everyday paths of urban residents and suburban commuters alike.”13

In historical terms, the making of visible homelessness and the subsequent homeless assistance bureaucracy arose in the wake of the quest for opportunity and a better life for all, an endeavour which remained “the great unfinished work” of American society by the mid-1970s and 1980s.14 In the vacuum of what remained undone, social inequalities continued to fill the void with: segregation, low-wage jobs, urban renewal, displacement of marginalized communities due to intermittent periods of investment and divestment in inner-city real estate, inadequate federal and local public housing policies, and ineffective wars on poverty, crime, drugs, and homelessness.15 Race, class, and gender inequalities were perpetuated in “the public city” which Dear and Wolch defined as “the spatial concentration of service-dependent populations and the agencies and facilities designated to serve them.”16 Urban renewal policies followed by the

11 Christine Marie Elwell, “From Political Protest to Bureaucratic Service: the Transformation of Homeless Advocacy in the Nation’s Capital and the Eclipse of Political Discourse,” (PhD diss., American University, 2009), 39. 12 Elwell, 40. Paul, Koegel, Audrey Burnam, and Jim Baumohl. "The Causes of Homelessness." In Homelessness in America, ed. Jim Baumohl, (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1996): 24-33.; Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1993); Brett Williams, Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.; Peter H. Rossi, Down and Out in America: The Origins of Homelessness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Anna Lou Dehavenon, "Doubling-Up and New York City's Policies for Sheltering Homeless Families," in There's No Place Like Home: Anthropological Perspectives on Housing and Homelessness in the United States, ed. Anna Lou Dehavenon (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1999). ” Source: Rossi. Down and Out in America.; Bristow Hardin, "Why the Road Off The Street Is Not Paved With Jobs," in Homelessness in America, ed. Jim Baumohl (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996); Kim Hopper and Norweeta G. Milburn, "Homelessness Among African Americans: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective," in Homelessness in America, ed. Jim Baumohl (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996). 13 Don Mitchell, "Homelessness, American Style," Urban Geography 32, no. 7 (2011): 940. 14 President Ly’s Message on Poverty to the Congress of the United States, March 16, 1964. 15 See also: Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, “The New Nadir: The Contemporary Black Racial Formation,” The Black Scholar 40, no. 1(2010): 38-58. 16 Michael J. Dear and Jennifer R. Wolch, Landscapes of Despair from Deinstitutionalization to Homelessness (Princeton, NJ, Univ. Press, 1987), 9.; See also: Douglas S. Massey, “Residential Segregation and Spatial Distribution of a Non-Labor Force Population: The Needy Elderly and Disabled.” Economic Geography56, no. 3 (1980): 190–200.; Andrew N. White, “Accessibility and Public Facility Location.” Economic Geography 55, no. 1 (1979): 18-35.; Jennifer R. Wolch, “Residential Location Of The Service-Dependent Poor∗.” Annals of the Association of

12 gentrification of the 1970s and 1980s isolated the poor in “practically invisible and relatively powerless communities” in neighbourhoods depleted of affordable housing stock.17 Conversely, the street homeless became the visible consumers of the “sites of last resort” in the neoliberal city of the emergency shelter system and bureaucratized homeless assistance services in the 1990s.18

As for public attitudes towards the homeless, through callous statements to the media and protracted public battles with homeless activists, President Reagan cultivated the same suspicion of fraudulence, laziness, and depravity applied to the welfare queen trope, to “blame the victim” with a manufactured lifestyle choice and to deny the gravity of the homeless crisis itself. In contrast to this pathologized assessment of the precariously housed, grassroots activists, a sympathetic media, and faith-based organizations adeptly manoeuvred “the politics of compassion” shaping public opinion, fostering more positive attitudes towards the poor, and offering a more structural interpretation of visible street homelessness.19 This reprieve from characterization as inhuman, invisible, derelicts, saw the homeless recast as citizens “like us” deserving of access to food, clothing, and emergency shelter services. Passage of Initiative 17 (1984) in Washington, D.C. and the bipartisan congressional vote for the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act (1987), formalized this compassion and set homeless assistance on a course for its imminent national institutionalization and the expansion of the local non-profit infrastructure. The dramatic increase in homelessness in 147 of America’s largest cities between 1981 to 1989, speaks to the inefficacy of this new federal policy at the end of the Reagan administration. In fact, homeless rates triple from a national average of 5.0 per 10,000 in 1981 to 15.0 per 10,000 by 1989. By 1989, Washington, D.C. was one of seven cities with the highest homeless rates (40 per 10,000), the other cities included Atlanta, Boston, Reno, Nevada, New York City, Eugene, Oregon, and Seattle.20

The ensuing backlash to local homelessness which occurred at the beginning of the 1990s was not just aimed at the homeless, but also at service providers and the infrastructures set up in

American Geographers 70, no. 3 (1980): 330–41.; Michael Dear, “Psychiatric Patients And The Inner City∗.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67, no. 4 (1977): 588–94. 17 Ida Susser, “The Construction of Poverty and Homelessness In Us Cities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 25, no. 1 (1996): 417. 18 Ibid. 19 Charles H. Moore, David W. Sink, and Patricia Hoban-Moore, “The Politics of Homelessness,” PS: Political Science and Politics 21, no. 1 (1988): 57–63. Wright, Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997), 27.; Charles Hoch and Robert A. Slayton, New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 20 Martha R. Burt, “Causes of the growth of homelessness during 1980s,” Housing Policy Debate 2, no. 3 (1991): 901-936.

13 several of the more affluent wards in the District. The “race to the bottom effect,” on the quality of homeless assistance, and the preservation of neighbourhood safety were the drivers of the “not in my back yard” or “NIMBY” battles particularly in Wards 2 and 3 in the District of Columbia. The influence of American individualism on local and federal policy (see self-help and personal responsibility Chapters Two and Four), the resurgence of community empowerment policing, and draconian policies on homeless access to the public square and homeless assistance services, exacerbated the increasing hostility to the homeless in the first half of the 1990s. As the nation moved further into the 1990s, compassion fatigue transformed into increasingly punitive policies. However, the criminalization of homelessness which gradually became a part of the inner-city urban landscape of the 1990s was not an end but a means of installing order and attracting suburbanites back to the city.

In the second half of the 1990s, America still faced numerous challenges in its low-income neighbourhoods and for the working poor of its inner cities. Passage of legislation by the Clinton Administration, which attempted to tackle urban crime and “to end the welfare system as we know it,” only fuelled the crisis of mass incarceration and exacerbated the cycle of poverty in welfare recipiency. These policies reflected a bipartisan commitment to neoliberal approaches to the economic and social challenges in the “New Nadir” of contemporary black racial formation in America’s urban regimes.21 Washington, D.C. was also facing its own challenges with a rising crime and murder rate, municipal corruption, fiscal mismanagement, and imminent bankruptcy. Paradoxically, while the federal government took the District of Columbia in hand, local leadership became increasingly technocratic in city governance and homeless assistance gradually became more bureaucratic and institutionalized, which speaks to the federal government’s slow reaction time to the magnitude of the crisis. However, growing federal intervention in city management did not translate into improved services for the homeless. Meanwhile, the “not in my back yard” NIMBY battles persisted in affluent residential neighbourhoods, and local policies for the homeless became increasingly draconian… but to what end? One of the aims of this thesis is to study these unfolding events through the examination of media reflections, special collections, and new poverty scholarship.

21 Cha-Jua, 38.

Although the study of homelessness in urban regimes of the 1980s and 1990s has generated a large canon of research over the past four decades, its re-examination affords an opportunity to explore “the new” in poverty governance. New Federalism increasingly shifted funding distribution from Federal Washington to the states and local government, moving away from the New Deal Keynesian model of direct government intervention.22 Neoconservatives such as President Reagan cast the homeless as the undeserving poor while created partnerships between the state and the business sector and imposing market-based solutions for the poor in the New Economy of deregulation, deindustrialization, gentrification, and privatization.

The Reagan administration’s brand of New Federalism set in motion the devolution, privatization, and elimination of government programs which had funded poverty research. A decade of poverty scholarship compiled throughout the 1970s created a solid foundation of data and gave analysts of the 1980s confidence that they could provide the solutions to the poverty issues of their time. The new poverty research industry which began in the 1980s in general and federal agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in particular were ill-prepared for the ideological shifts to come. This new research turned away from the institutional hub of poverty research and towards a “privately funded network of conservative think tanks that specialized in producing clear, uncomplicated, overtly ideological policy advice.”23 The consequence of this shift in poverty knowledge during the Reagan administration was the production of data assessed through an individualized analytical framework which produced results based on social pathologies, behavioural choices, and individual deficiencies of the poor.24 This historical transformation was part of a broader neoliberalisation which mirrored the transformation of political ideologies and policies on homelessness.

The term “homeless” first began to emerge in the mainstream media of the early 1980s, eventually replacing the more popular “street people” nomenclature.25 During the Reagan administration, research on homelessness was confined to quantifying the size of the homeless population, determining who the homeless were and whether they had exercised their free will to

22 Roger Biles, The Fate of Cities: Urban America and the Federal Government, 1945 -2000 (University Press of Kansas, 2011).; See also Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization,” Political Theory 34 (December 2006): 690- 714.; Mathew Ruben, “Suburbanization and Urban Poverty under Neoliberalism,” in New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States, eds. Judith Good and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 436. 23 O’Connor, 243. 24 Ibid. 25 Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 247-252.; The term “homeless” was also employed by researchers and politicians in the New Homeless era of the 1980s.

15 be “homeless by choice.”26 This narrow focus on the “causes, consequences and cures” of poverty had direct repercussions on the burgeoning poverty research of homelessness in the 1980s. Early scholarship prioritized the examination of social characteristics and the demographics of a “new” homeless subpopulation of homeless adults in large cities in urban areas such as New York, Phoenix, Portland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, and Baltimore.27 A large number of these reports also focused too narrowly on mental illness and alcohol abuse. Many critics argued this “medicalization” or “shift in the characterization from deviant criminal to the mentally-ill patient” was in response to the visible consequences of the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions in the Reagan/Bush eras.28 However, throughout the 1980s, as the crisis in family homelessness deepened, it progressively gained momentum in grassroots activist literature and academic scholarship.29 It is at this same period that scholars such as Ellen Baxter, Kim Hopper, Peter Marcuse, Neil Smith, and Peter Williams published their ground-breaking work on New York City, which focused on homelessness, gentrification, displacement, and the abandoned city.30

New poverty scholarship of the 1990s and into the new millennium examined the “revanchist,” neoliberal, entrepreneurial city, where the proliferation of neoliberal discourse promoting “individual responsibility, self-help and market discipline” obscured “the fundamental class inequalities created by the modern urban landscape of uneven development.”31 It is against this backdrop that my study of homelessness is set in the nation’s capital in the last two decades of the twentieth century. The central argument of this thesis is that urban governance of Washington, D.C. in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to the economic, social, institutional, and political forces that had a stake in the containment of visible homelessness and its removal from the District’s contested spaces. The precise periodization of this thesis begins in 1977 with the transformation of “night hospitality” into a government-sponsored emergency shelter system and ends in 1999 with the election of Anthony Williams as mayor of Washington, D.C., and the end

26 Gregg Barak, Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America (New York: Praeger, 1992), 5. 27 Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs. NBCI Resources. Washington, D.C.: National Acad. Pr., 1988. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218232/. Accessed January 19, 2019. 28 Kim Hopper, "More Than Passing Strange: Homelessness and Mental Illness in New York City," American Ethnologist 15, no. 1 (February 1988): 163. 29 Ellen L. Bassuk, L. Rubin, and A. Lauriat. “Characteristics of sheltered homeless families,” American Journal of Public Health 76 (September 1986.):1097-1101.; National Coalition for the Homeless, “The Reagan Years Have Hurt Nation’s Poor” Safety Network, November 1984, 2-3. 30 Kim Hopper and Baxter Ellen, Private Lives/Public Spaces: Homeless Adults on the Streets of New York City, report, ERIC document reproduction service no. ED201564 (New York, NY: Community Service Society, 1981): 41-54.; Peter Marcuse, “Gentrification, Homelessness, and the Work Process: Housing Markets and Labour Markets in the Quartered City,” Housing Studies 4, no. 3 (1989): 11-22.; Neil Smith and Peter Williams, Gentrification of the City (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986). 31 Ruben, 436, 445.; Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (New York: Routledge, 1996).; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990). New poverty scholarship refers to research contributions to poverty knowledge in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the new millennium. Key figures

16 of the New War on Homelessness.32 Night hospitality was a term used by the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) members to refer to the pickup service for the homeless on very cold nights. These homeless activists drove around during nights of extreme temperatures offering food, hot drinks, and a place to sleep at CCNV headquarters. This project builds upon a growing body of scholarship that has considered the importance of CCNVs role in the fight for the right to shelter for the homeless and for more affordable housing during the late twentieth century.

The protean historiography of the old and new homelessness is at once compelling and problematic.33 The nomenclature of “new homelessness” obfuscates salient historical developments such as the division of poverty and pauperism, which manifested in the first half of the nineteenth century, when “technocratic attempts to organize, manage, and systematize social situations,” transformed the pauper into a scientific object whose individual behaviour and place of residence came under constant scrutiny.34 Scientific philanthropy thus became a “systematic grafting of morality on to economics, the techno-discursive instrument that makes possible the conquest of pauperism and the invention of a politics of poverty.”35 Old homelessness refers to what scholars have designated as the tramping years (1865 to 1920) and the era of the hobo (1920 -1980).36 Unfortunately, what has come to be known as the “old” homeless era, mistakenly ascribes homeless subpopulations such as women and ethnic minorities to an ahistorical post-skid row genesis.37 By examining race and homelessness in Washington, D.C., this thesis provides a corrective of this misrepresentation of the old homeless era in Chapter One and in the context of second ghetto formation in Chapter Four.

Race is crucial to understanding the formation of the second and third ghettoes. Furthermore, the examination of race in the newly visible urban poverty of the mid-1970s calls into question its virtual absence in twentieth-century scholarship pertaining to the old

32 Colman McCarthy, “Night Hospitality,” Washington Post, December 21, 1977. ; The New War on Homelessness was first declared by HUD Secretary Cisneros in 1993.; See also: Henry Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep: Yetta Adams’ Story and the New War on Homelessness,” Washington Post, December 5, 1993. 33 Hoch and Slayton, New Homeless and Old.; James D. Wright, Beth A. Rubin, and Joel A. Devine, Beside the Golden Door: Policy, Politics, and the Homeless (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1998).; Alan Bloom, "Toward A History of Homelessness," Journal of Urban History 31, no. 6 (September 2005): 907-917.; Wright, Out of Place. 34 Wright, Out of Place, 16.; Elizabeth Hannold, "Comfort and Respectability": Washington's Philanthropic Housing Movement," Washington History, Fall/Winter, 4, no. 2 (1992/1993). 35 Wright, Out of Place, 16. 36 Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).; See also: De Pastino, Citizen Hobo. 37 Skid Row refers to an impoverished urban area. Kusmer notes that these areas were traditionally inhabited by “destitute men.” See Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 4. The skid row era dates from 1940 to 1970. See also: Barret A. Lee, Kimberly A. Tyler, and James D. Wright, "The New Homelessness Revisited," Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 502.

17 homelessness. This thesis posits that defining the old homelessness as typically white middle-aged men, with potential alcohol drug abuse, weak family kinship ties, and living on Skid Rows ignores other subpopulations deserving of consideration such as the alley dwellers of Washington, D.C.38 The strong kinship and social ties commonly exhibited by these alley communities should not disqualify them from consideration. Why should the extreme poverty experienced by families be recognized in the scholarship of the new homelessness and not in the housing poor populations of the old homeless era? By 1880, ninety-three per cent of alley dwellers were black. Seventy-eight per cent of the total black population lived in the alleys of the District.39 Expanding the study of homelessness to include African American communities in large urban cities like Washington, D.C to the old homeless era is essential to understanding the composition of the new homelessness of the mid-1970s and 1980s, as it elucidates the nature of postwar-World War II ghetto formation. Fortunately, by the 1990s, race and homelessness would become more frequent topics of research, particularly in the fields of psychology and sociology. 40 Whether muted under the colorblind, “housing justice for all” movement in the 1980s or experiencing the quietly corrosive effects of academic textual silence, this underrepresentation must be rectified. Therefore, the significance of race and homelessness will be addressed in terms of ghetto formation, housing precarity, and poverty governance throughout this thesis.

In studies conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, poverty scholars noted an increased diversification in the aggregate homeless population and a distinct set of geographic patterns which exposed racial concentrations of street people. The homeless population of post-1975 was characterized as: “younger, better educated, with an increasingly higher population of women and families, a significant number of veterans, and greater racial diversity.”41 Studies of inner-city socio-demographic characteristics of the homeless and street people indicate disproportionate

38 See also: Peter H. Rossi, “The Old Homeless and the New Homelessness in Historical Perspective,” American Psychologist 45, no. 8 (1990): 954-959. 39 James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850-1970. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 27. 40 Susan Gonzalez Baker, "Gender, Ethnicity, and Homelessness: Accounting for Demographic Diversity on the Streets," American Behavioral Scientist 37, no. 4 (1994): 476-504.; John R. Belcher, "Poverty, Homelessness, and Racial Exclusion.," Journal of Sociology and Social Work 19, no. 4 (1992): 14-54.; Gary L. Blasi, "And We Are Not Seen: Ideological and Political Barriers to Understanding Homelessness," American Behavioral Scientist, 4th ser., 37 (Winter 1994): 563-86.; Kim Hopper, "Margins within Margins Homelessness among African American Men," ed. Sam C. Nolutshungu, in Margins of Insecurity: Minorities and International Security (Rochester, NY: Univ. of Rochester Press, 1996).; Roberta Ann Johnson, "African Americans and Homelessness," Journal of Black Studies 40, no. 4 (2008): 585-605.; Dee Roth, Richard J. First, and Beverley G. Toomey, “Gender, Racial and Age Variations among Homeless Persons,” in Homelessness: A National Perspective, ed. Marjorie J. Robertson and Milton Greenblatt (New York: Plenum Press, 1992).; Lee, Tyler, and Wright, “The New Homelessness Revisited.” 41 Lois M. Takahashi, Homelessness, AIDS, and Stigmatization: The NIMBY Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 89.

18 representation of people of colour – particularly African Americans.42 The recession of the early 1980s had a more substantial impact on blacks due to “structural changes in the economy and the tightening of the housing market.”43 The designation “new homelessness” finds its fullest expression here when blacks became overrepresented and more visible in the homeless population. In “Homelessness among African Americans: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective”, Kim Hopper and Norweeta Milburn wrote:

Among the more distinctive features of the resurgence of American homelessness in the 1980s, was the overrepresentation of African Americans. One authoritative review of 60 studies conducted in the 1980s, for example, found that Black Americans accounted on average for 44 % of the homeless populations surveyed by the studies.44

This is a striking statistic, as blacks in the U.S. in the 1980s made up only around: 11.7% (26.5 million) of the population.45 In the 1980s, Washington, D.C. had an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 street people and blacks were 70.3%, of the total D.C. population, making homelessness in the District majority African American.46 The low-income and poor black communities in Hometown Washington would suffer severely from the depletion of federal funding formulas and the denial of the homeless crisis in the White House under the Reagan administration. My thesis explores homelessness in Washington, D.C. against this backdrop.

Current research on homelessness has begun to deepen its analysis in respect of such issues as the criminalisation of homeless activity, policymaking, and to a certain degree, race and gender.47 Scholars in the twenty-first century have begun to examine race and gender in the old homelessness.48 Understanding how these notions shaped homelessness throughout history is

42 Takahashi, Homelessness, AIDS. and Stigmatization, 89-90.; Jones, “Does Race Matter in Addressing Homelessness?”; Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness. 43 Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road, 241. 44 K. Hopper and N. Milburn, "Homelessness among African-Americans: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective," in Homelessness in America, ed. Jim Baumohl (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1996), 123.; Frank D. Brown, “Homelessness Among Blacks Now Epidemic,” The New York Amsterdam News, December 26, 1981. 45 U.S. Census Bureau, "Decennial Census by Decades," Online posting, Population Distribution by Race: 1940-2010, Population Distribution by Race: 1940-2010, https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/1940census/CSPAN_1940slides.pdf accessed June 20, 2018. 46 An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 homeless in DC in 1980. see Bob Gettlin, “Street People Die Cold and Lonely,” Washington Star, December 27, 1980.; U.S. Census Bureau, "Decennial Census by Decades," Online posting, Population Distribution by Race: 1940-2010, Population Distribution by Race: 1940-2010, accessed June 20, 2018. 47 Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).; Forrest Stuart, Down, out, and under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row (The University of Chicago Press, 2018).; C. Herring, Dilara Yarbrough and Lisa Marie Alatorre. “Pervasive Penality: How the Criminalization of Poverty Perpetuates Homelessness,” Social Problems 67 (2019): 131-149.;Thomas J. Main, Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to De Blasio (New York : New York University, 2017).; Philip Webb, Homeless Lives in American Cities: Interrogating Myth and Locating Community (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 48 Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road.; Johnson, “African Americans, and Homelessness.”; Marian Moser Jones, "Does Race Matter in Addressing Homelessness? A Review of the Literature," World Medical & Health Policy 8, no. 2 (2016): 139-156.

19 essential to historicizing the typifications of new homelessness populations. Indeed, beginning in the mid-seventies, the homeless population in America contained a fast-growing and disproportionally large percentage of women, children, families and African Americans.49 Yet the factor of race and gender in the first decade of this “new” homelessness “remained invisible in both academic and public discourse.”50 This thesis will fill these gaps in the literature by re- examining the old homelessness through the wider lens of African American homelessness and the new homelessness with a particular focus on gender and family homelessness. However, the larger scope of this thesis observes how the new homeless population was affected by the structural changes in the economy and weakening public institutions, as well as how grassroots activists, local and federal government officials sought solutions to the homeless crisis through public policy. Unfortunately, urban scholars are not sufficiently acquainted with nor do they sufficiently document who these targeted populations were, particularly in terms of housing and homelessness in the African American low-income and extremely poor communities at the end of the twentieth century. One of the aims of this thesis is to rectify this deficit by revisiting the use of D.C. welfare hotels as a manifestation of the neoliberalisation of the “homeless business.”51 The infamous “welfare hotel” or single-room-occupancy facilities (most frequently occupied by African American, single, female-headed households collecting AFDC benefits) were “usually known for their squalid, overcrowded conditions and wasteful costs.”52 The examination of this iteration of the neoliberalisation of homeless assistance services for homeless families exposes the forces of corruption operating in D.C. local government which abetted private real estate developers to leverage public funds for personal profit in the sheltering industry at the expense of the homeless – the newest members of the nation’s “underclass.”53

Although current poverty scholarship has definitively turned the page on the use of the term “underclass,” the obsolescence of this once ubiquitous parlance does not diminish the impact

49 Wright, Out of Place, 20. See also Kim Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); and James D. Wright, Beth A. Rubin, and Joel A. Devine, Beside the Golden Door: Policy, Politics, and the Homeless (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1998).; See also: James D. Wright, Beth A. Rubin, and Joel A. Devine, Beside the Golden Door: Policy, Politics, and the Homeless (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1998).; Rossi, “The Old Homeless and the New Homelessness.”; Hoch and Slayton, New Homeless and Old.; Rossi, Down and out in America.; Mary Stefl, "The New Homeless: A National Perspective," ed. Richard D. Bingham, Roy E. Green, and Sammis B. White, in The Homeless in Contemporary Society (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Pub., 1978). 50 Wright, Out of Place, 20. 51 Homeless business is a term used to refer to the for-profit system of homeless assistance services. 52AFDC stands for Aid to Families with Dependent Children.; Ralph Da Costa Nunez, The New Poverty: Homeless Families in America (New York: Plenum Press, 1996), 60. 53 Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 153-154.

20 of the underclass debate itself, particularly in regards to its connection to the notion of the “undeserving poor,” housing precarity, and homelessness.54 Beyond “the explosive discrepancy between aspiration and opportunity” which characterized the failure of the War on Poverty – one of the major policy initiatives which preceded the underclass debate – lies the more pernicious and lasting realities of the failure of the institutions it created and the policies which targeted certain marginalized communities. The War on Poverty was lost due to a “crisis of legitimacy” through federal government bureaucracy, underfunded programs, resistance to reform, and fumbling attempts to exert community control.55 Yet at the heart of its policies, which were originally designed to assist the poor were old nineteenth-century dichotomies of the deserving and undeserving poor, female single-parent household propaganda, and targeted young black youth, all of which ultimately exacerbated the problems the Wars on Poverty, Drugs, and Crime set out to resolve. Additionally, underclass rhetoric disseminated through the myth of intergenerational poverty, cultural pathology , and the criminalisation of black bodies which found their way into the national social agenda and public policy, validated the basic premises of the culture of poverty and the fear of public disorder from a menacing “underclass.”56 The repercussions of the War on Poverty was its failure to provide adequate sources of support. Federal and state assistance programs such as welfare, which are akin to modern-day outdoor relief, were and remain “tiny, restrictive, and inadequate.”57 In the 1980s and 1990s, the structural challenges which marked urban regimes across the country such as high levels of unemployment and the lack of affordable housing can be easily linked to the growth of homelessness, hunger, and crisis-levels of shelter use (the new poorhouses of the late twentieth century).58

Interpretive breakthroughs in the literature on the wars on welfare, drugs, and crime have exposed how the state has targeted poor African American communities with a particular focus on single-female-head-of-household poverty traps and black juvenile men, systematized by an

54 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1990).; See also: Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City: From Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York: Routledge, 2011), 86-87.; Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky, The New Poverty Studies: Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2001), 12-13.; Alice O’Connor, “Giving Birth to a “Culture of Poverty:” Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioral Science Culture and Ideology,” in Poverty: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 99-123.; Michael B. Katz, The 'Underclass' Debate: Views from History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 55 Katz, The 'Underclass' Debate,’ 473-477. 56 Adolph Reed, “The Underclass As Myth and Symbol: The Poverty of Discourse About Poverty,” Radical America 24 (Jan.- March 1990): 21- 40. 57 Michael B. Katz, Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the ‘Underclass,’ and Urban Schools as History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 59. 58 Katz, Improving Poor People, 59.; See also: Dennis P. Culhane, “The Quandaries of Shelter Reform: An Appraisal of Efforts to Manage’ Homelessness,” Social Service Review 66, no.3 ( September 1992): 428-40.

21 egregious operation of human rights violations which fed the machine of mass incarceration.59 This thesis contributes to scholarship interested in the critical understanding of the “wars on” historiography, through the examination of the New War on Homelessness declared and concluded in the Clinton Administration.60 This thesis posits that this war was declared as a pretext to initiate the neoliberal roll out phase of homeless assistance services in Washington, D.C. through the D.C. Initiative – a model demonstration program created in 1993 through the collaboration between the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Henry Cisneros and D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly. In an élan of supply-side optimism, the city appointed The Community Partnership (TCP), an “entrepreneurial and customer-service driven” private entity with the mission to “consolidate and streamline housing development and services for homeless individuals and families.”61 However, the New War on Homelessness officially ended on March 31, 1999, with the expiration of the HUD-initiative and decidedly lacklustre results.62 In an editorial published the day after the demonstration project’s end, The Washington Post asked: “Is the District any better equipped to meet this continuing human challenge?” This project explores how federal and local institutions not only fail to meet the challenge of ending homelessness but also facilitate its place as a permanent fixture of the American urban landscape.

Initiating a discussion of African American homelessness in the context of the late- twentieth-century should begin from within the larger context of ever-changing cities. Qualitative changes in homelessness involved: persistent homelessness irrespective of economic recession or prosperity, spatial relocation of the homeless to “existing or expanding ghettos,” exclusionary policies, and homelessness which was “heavily concentrated among blacks.”63 This thesis places Washington, D. C. within the spatial organization of three distinct ghettos to confront this new genre of homelessness. A spatial analysis of urban struggles to solve housing precarity at the end of the twentieth century raises questions about the practices and policies that displace, disperse,

59 Michelle Alexander, New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).; Elizabeth K. Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017). 60 “Wars On” historiography is a term invented by the author to describe the literature pertaining to the Wars on Poverty, Drugs, and Crime. The first War on Homelessness was declared by HUD Secretary Jack Kemp under the Bush administration: see Chapter Two of this thesis. 61 I. Michael Greenberger, Elizabeth M. Brown, and Anne R. Bowden, “D.C. HUD- Initiative,” Cold Harsh ad Unending Resistance: The District of Columbia Government’s Hidden War Against Its Poor and Its Homeless (Washington, D.C.: Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, 1993), 322. 62 Editorial, “Homeless Initiative Sunset,” Washington Post, April 1, 1999. 63 Ibid., 191-192.

22 and criminalise homeless communities in residential and public spaces within urban regimes of expanding social inequality.

Poverty scholars, such as Brett Williams and Derek Hyra have defended the linkages between the loss of housing and its connection to broader issues of corporate downsizing, dispossession, redevelopment, and national housing policy.64 Marcuse finds himself among scholars who by the second half of the 1980s, began to draw connections between homelessness, equal access to labour and the exclusionary challenges of land-use.65 Of particular interest to this study is Marcuse’s notion of spatial organization in the post-Fordist city, where the homeless were removed from coveted neighbourhoods and “locations of mainstream businesses” and then heavily concentrated in “existing and expanding ghettoes” where African Americans were particularly susceptible to becoming homeless. 66 This thesis applies his notions of post-industrial, spatial organization to housing precarity and homelessness in Washington, D.C. at the end of the twentieth century.

Housing poverty in Washington, D.C. conveys a history of ghettos. Observation of one of the first ghettos of housing precarity in the District brings to light, the “mini” or “proto-ghettos” of the alley dwellers in the first ghettoes that peppered the nation’s capital.67 Conversely, postwar housing solutions for the poor instigated the displacement of low-income families into the public housing projects of the second ghetto and the more concentrated and persistent pockets of poverty and inner-city segregation. During the Reagan administration, as the homeless crisis moved further up the list on the nation’s antipoverty agenda, containment and stabilization defined new federal policy goals. Low-barrier/emergency shelters and welfare hotels became stopgap solutions. My thesis argues for the existence of a third ghetto which first developed as local and faith-based networks of emergency shelters that were then institutionalized with the passage of the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987.

64 Derek Hyra, "Commentary: Causes and Consequences of Gentrification and the Future of Equitable Development Policy," Cityscape 18, no. 3 (2016): 169-77. https://manchester.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://searchproquest.com.manchester.idm.oclc.org/docview/1856560391?accountid=12253; Brett Williams, "Beyond Gentrification: Investment and Abandonment on the Waterfront," in Capital Dilemma Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C, ed. Derek Hyra and Sabiyha Prince (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 227-37. 65 Peter Marcuse, "Neutralizing Homelessness," Socialist Review 18, no. 1 (1988): 69-96.; Marcuse, “Gentrification, Homelessness, and the Work Process.”; Wright, Out of Place 29; Kim Hopper, Ezra Susser, and Sarah Conover, "Economies of Makeshift: Deindustrialization and Homelessness in New York City," Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 14, no. 1/3 (1985): 183-236.; Michael Fabricant, “The political economy of homelessness,” Catalyst 6, no. 1 (1987): 11-28.; Dear, Landscapes of Despair. 66 Marcuse, “Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City,” 192. 67 Borchert, Alley Life in Washington 2, 237.

The conceptualization of the third ghetto is built on a close reading of Arnold Hirsch’s work: Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.68 Hirsch’s central argument rests on the notion that the high-rise public housing projects of post-World War II Chicago were largely built subsequent to the destruction of the “decaying neighborhoods” of the first ghetto, as the “rehoused refugees” of urban renewal projects were displaced into the “vertical ghettoes” of the second ghetto.69 The foundations upon which the first ghetto was built, were repurposed for “middle-class housing and institutional expansion.”70 The development of Hirsch’s second ghetto thesis into a third ghetto is not a new endeavour.71 However, these conceptualizations of third ghetto are all connected to some form of public housing and make no direct connections to homelessness or the emergency shelter system. This thesis argues that the third ghetto is rather the emergency shelter system designed to assist the homeless. Furthermore, while conserving the crux of Hirsch premises concerning the second ghetto, this thesis introduces several revisions and additions to Hirsch’s work.

The first and most obvious is the location of this research project. The District of Columbia is the location for my analysis not only of the first and second ghettoes but also for the onset of the third ghetto in the late 1970s of the new homeless era to the end of the twentieth century. Additionally, my examination of the issue of race in the third ghetto focuses on African American poverty, demographics, and the structural factors which contributed to the disproportionate amount of blacks in the homeless subpopulations of Washington, D.C. My analysis of the first and second ghettoes follows the patterns of poverty concentration and ghetto development that were endemic of important trends in inner-city poverty of the late 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to Hirsch’s second ghetto thesis relative to the first ghetto, my interpretation of the third ghetto does not “rest physically atop the demolished” public housing of the second ghetto.72 However, my thesis does

68 Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 69 Ibid., 10. 70 Ibid. 71 Carl H. Nightingale, “A Tale of Three Global Ghettos: How Arnold Hirsch Helps Us Internationalize U.S. Urban History,” Journal of Urban History, 29, no. 3 (March, 2003): 257-71, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144202250383.; Joseph Seliga, “Gautreaux a Generation Later: remedying the Second Ghetto or Creating the Third?” Northwestern University Law Review 94 (2000): 1049-198.; Amy T. Khare, “The Making of the Third Ghetto?: Community Organizations and the Politics of Neighborhood Redevelopment,” (Society for Social Work and Research, January 17, 2016), https://sswr.confex.com/sswr/2016/webprogram/Paper25669.html; Andrew Greenlee, “Changing Disadvantage; Creating Space for Chicago’s Third Ghetto?” (International Sociological Association, July 2014), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268108549_Changing_Disadvantage_Creating_Space_for_Chicago's_Third_Ghetto.; “Making the Third Ghetto?” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 1999, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-04-26-9904260111-story.html.; Andrew Greenlee, “The Making and Remaking of Chicago’s “Third Ghetto”- The Politics of Race, Poverty, and Residential Mobility,” Zube Lecture, (University of Massachusetts, September 5, 2018), https://www.umass.edu/sbs/calendar/event/zube-lecture-making-and-remaking-chicago’s- “third-ghetto”-politics-race-poverty-and. 72 Amanda I. Seligman, “What Is The Second Ghetto?” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 3 (March 2003): 274. 24 argue that one of the contributing factors to the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto, was the tragic denouement of failed public housing policies that were originally designed to assist the inhabitants of the second ghetto.

Finally, my development of the third ghetto enriches the legacy of the Second Ghetto by revisiting Hirsch’s exploration of power and black powerlessness. The application of Hirsch’s notions of “positive” and “negative” power to the dynamic of private interests and public power in the neoliberal city of the 1980s (positive power) and the community activists who exploited negative public attitudes towards the homeless, to influence the marginalization and criminalisation of homeless activity during the Bush and Clinton administrations (negative power) serve as a solid foundation on which to build the notion of spatial power and the fight for contested spaces in Washington, D.C. Whereas, according to Hirsch, the objectification of blacks in postwar urban construction contributed to powerlessness in the second ghetto, this thesis posits that black flight from the District, community activism, and the use of police power to enforce the criminalisation of homeless activity reinforced the powerlessness of marginalized homeless communities at the end of the twentieth century.73

In order to understand the role of power in the neoliberal policies and practices of the 1980s and 1990s, my thesis addresses a series of questions: Why is a spatial interpretation of the first and second ghettoes essential to understanding the making of the third ghetto in Washington, D.C.? Why is race important to the study of homelessness in the District of Columbia? What role did local activists play in the making of the third ghetto? How can the impact of the “1989 National

March for Housing Now!” be gauged and what role did it play in developing the narrative concerning housing and homelessness?74 How were the changing attitudes towards the homeless reflected in local policing policy? What role did the state play in the alienation of urban spaces and the commodification of downtown D.C.? What was the place of the third ghetto in the neoliberal city at the end of the twentieth century? In regards to the development of the third ghetto other questions must be answered, specifically: what were the historical forces that propelled the growth of homelessness in this period; how did activists, service providers, local leadership, and

73 Hirsch, 215. 74 The National March for Housing Now! was a national march for: the restoration of federal housing programs, the creation of funding for affordable housing, and the end of homelessness which took place in Washington, D.C. on October 7, 1989. See Chapter Two of this thesis. 25 policymakers respond to the growth of homelessness across this period and to what ends; and what were the major intellectual currents that guided these policymaking decisions?

An important feature of this thesis is the selection of Washington, D.C. as the site of my case study. Its status as the seat of the federal government and nation’s capital render it both a unique and non-representational of certain national norms. Why then choose Washington, D.C.? From a policymaking perspective, it is a logical choice, as proximity to the institutions of Federal Washington allowed D.C. activists living in Hometown Washington to put more frequent and more efficacious pressure on the local and federal government. The result was the creation of policies that would have an impact not only locally but nationally – the most obvious being the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. As the drivers of major local and federal legislation, CCNV were the clear leading claims-makers of the first ten years of homeless policy evolution. Their rise and fall will be a major leitmotif of this study. By the end of the twentieth century, CCNV’s failure to fill the vacuum of national leadership gradually consigned them to political irrelevance while their local defeats were one of the contributing factors to ascendant hostility towards the homeless.

Offering night hospitality to the street homeless was not unique to CCNV but practised by such charismatic figures as Dorothy Day, one of the founders of The Catholic Worker newspaper in New York City, who gradually become a central figure of the Catholic Worker movement.75 Across America “from Boston to Los Angeles, dozens of urban “house[s] of hospitality” in urban as well as rural centres began opening their doors to provide comfort to the poor – frustrated by the empty promises of local politicians.76 Inspired by the self-abnegation, dedication to the dispossessed, and pacificism practised in the living spiritual life of Ms Day and the Catholic movement she enriched, Ed Guinan, a Paulist priest, founded CCNV in Washington, D.C. in 1970.

By the mid-1970s Mitch Snyder, Carol Fennelly, and other like-minded CCNV members in favour of a more confrontational approach to the homeless crisis moved into a second headquarters at the Euclid House on 1345 Euclid St. N.W. in Columbia Heights – one of the neighbourhoods severely devastated by the 1968 uprising. The level of decimation there was as visible as the disproportionally high amount of vacant buildings and the hundreds of men and

75 The Catholic Worker was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin. 76 Colman McCarthy, “The poor’s best friend” Washington Post, November 9, 1977. These houses of hospitality would eventually become a part of the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto. 26 dozens of women wandering about the neighbourhood in abject poverty and homelessness. In the 1970s, the forces of destruction and decay which had taken hold of Columbia Heights did not destroy the neighbourhood’s strong activist tradition nor provoke the departure of radical groups already established there. Pride Inc., an employment-centred corporation founded by Marion Barry (SNCC's first national chairman) in 1967, still owned a gas station at 14th and Euclid Street.77 The D.C. Alliance of Active Black Businessmen based their headquarters at the historic gathering place of Civil Rights leaders –The Pitts Motor Hotel – at 1451 Belmont St., N.W. SNCC-alumni ran the Spear Bookstore at 1371 Fairmont St. N.W. Additionally, other predominantly white New Left groups besides CCNV migrated to the neighbourhood to assist the needy such as the Sojourners Community: a non-violent Christian collective and the Columbia Heights Community Ownership Project: an anti-gentrification organization.78 Certain members of the local black leadership which emerged from the ashes of the 1968 uprising most notably Marion Barry and Walter Fauntroy, as well as New Left groups like Sojourners and CCNV would be on the frontlines of the new homeless crisis at the end of the 1970s in Washington, D.C.

This thesis is about homelessness and race – two issues that have rarely been considered together. It stands on the shoulders of the prolific scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s when “new” homelessness was still relatively new. However, Daniel Kerr rightly notes that: “homelessness as a topic of scholarly study has largely been relegated to the warehouse districts of academia.”79 Although the study of homelessness is no longer new, the structural causes and policy cures of late twentieth-century literature stand foundational to a story that has not yet been completely told.

The field of urban studies which has largely overlooked the issue of homelessness and its role in the city can serve as a catalyst for a fresh perspective on the new homeless era. While sociologists contributed to poverty knowledge on the causes and cures of homelessness, historians of the New Left such as Gilbert Osofsky, his student Arnold Hirsch, Kenneth Jackson, and Thomas Sugrue set their sights on the understanding of post-World War II urban areas.80 The urban studies scholars of this orientation were avid critics of New Deal liberalism’s tendency to focus on private

77 SNCC stands for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee which was a civil rights organisation founded in 1960. 78 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017): 391. 79 Daniel R. Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011),10. 80 Kerr, 10.

27 property and postwar government agencies, complicit in racist labour and housing practices which became the bedrock of American institutions and “agents of white supremacy.”81 In an analysis of the Second Ghetto, Nathan Connolly argues that: “Hirsch repeatedly invoked some variation of “the black colony” or “occupied provinces,” in describing Chicagoan black enclaves of the South and West sides of the city.82 Additionally, Connolly rightly posits that: “Hirsch’s Chicago is [the] Jim Crow North” where “brick and mortar solutions to white anxiety” are “needed to keep black communities hemmed in.”83 My conceptualization of the third ghetto, which kept homeless communities hemmed into the emergency shelter system in Washington, D.C. at the end of the twentieth century, highlights the fear of inner-city disorder and pathogen threats to residential quality-of-life and the businesses in its affluent urban core – on both sides of the racial divide. Furthermore, this thesis asserts that in the first, second, and third ghettos, African Americans should not be viewed as merely “colonized,” but as both active perpetrators and unfortunate victims of institutional racism which contributed to the various permutations of housing insecurity in the District.

This thesis explores the making of the third ghetto against the backdrop of the ideological shifts in how the general public, activists, think tanks, policymakers, and local leadership conceptualised homelessness as well as the neoliberal policies and practices that were generated to manage homelessness during the 1980 and 1990s in Washington, D.C. Chapter One is a discussion of the historical processes that contributed to the making of the third ghetto and follows the first decade of its institutionalization (1977-1987). It also recounts the legacy of D.C. social activism on behalf of the homeless which was crucial to the development of the third ghetto. Through legal advocacy, activists helped to raise awareness of the new visible homeless crisis, shaped public opinion by engaging public compassion, and forced a gradual, albeit limited, local and federal response. The observation of these responses can most profitably be directed towards the passage of two key pieces of legislation. First, the passage of the District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984 (Initiative 17) was significant within the context of local, political, and social struggles for solutions to the emerging homeless crisis in Washington, D.C.84

81 Nathan D.B. Connolly, “The Southern Side of Chicago: Arnold R. Hirsch and the Renewal of Southern Urban History (unpublished manuscript, 2019), typescript, 5.; see also Jerold S. Auerbach, “New Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left historiography,” Journal of Southern History 35, no. 1 (Feb. 1969): 18 -30. 82 Connolly, 5. 83 Connolly, 5-6. 84 D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative, 5-146 (1984).

Second, the passage of the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, the first national federal response to homelessness, ushered in the institutionalization of homeless poverty governance and the third ghetto in Washington, D.C.

As for the remaining chapters, Chapter Two chronicles the Housing Now! March during the Bush administration, and the fight for affordable housing on a national scale (1988-1989). This chapter argues that the lack of national leadership and the failure to produce a national housing movement helped open the gates to the lesser angle of negative community pushback from the business and neighbourhood communities of the 1990s. This chapter also addresses the importance of gender and family homelessness in the affordable housing crisis. Chapter Three examines the beginnings of homeless fatigue syndrome and resident and business community rebuke of the homeless and service providers against the backdrop of homeless advocacy disempowerment (1990-1992). Finally, Chapter Four revisits the third ghetto, analyses its connections to the second ghetto in the neoliberal city of the 1990s, and follows the institutionalization of homeless assistance services in the New War On Homelessness in the District through the D.C. Initiative under the Clinton administration (1992-1999). Chapter Four also examines the displacement and criminalisation of targeted public housing residents and the homeless. First, by observing Hope VI and its role in displacing both public housing residents and homeless squatters through the use of public-private partnerships. Second, by historicizing zero-tolerance policing in the District of Columbia and its connection to increasingly punitive policies toward the homeless in the scope of public space, privatization, power, and its connection to the neoliberal development model.

Chapter 1 – Making the Third Ghetto in Washington, D.C. 1977- 1987 The emergency shelter system which emerged as a solution to the new homeless crisis of the mid-1970s, first as an informal network of faith-based and local government-run shelters and then institutionalized through federal assistance in 1987 was the District of Columbia’s third ghetto.1 This fledging shelter system did not benefit from massive postwar expansion as did the housing projects of public housing but was born from both the iterative effects of Great Society programs and the domestic budget austerity of New Federalist policies impacting Hometown as well as Federal Washington. Although the homeless experienced the same structural barriers as the precariously housed, their predicament seemed more intractable and their visibility more contentious. Additionally, homelessness did not emerge from the ashes of the nation’s “commodity riots” of 1968 but was the dénouement of the quieter riot of a failing Welfare State and public housing system.2 Its chronological justification was not postwar, but rather forged in the deleterious consequences of deinstitutionalization, deindustrialization, gentrification, shifting demographic battlefronts in the War on Poverty, and the subsequent neoliberalisation of public assistant services and poverty governance in urban regimes.3 The process of neoliberalisation and the “creative destruction” it engendered, not only impacted established “institutional frameworks, and powers” but also the “divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions…ways of life and thought …attachment to the land....”4 Indeed, the neoliberal project of free market capitalism created economic policies which contributed to the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of public services, exacerbating the precarity of low-income and poor communities.

Leading claimsmakers who were instrumental in forging the third ghetto, particularly the burgeoning homeless activist group known as the Community for Creative Non-violence (CCNV), helped direct public compassion and frame the homeless crisis as a moral and human rights issue.

1 The third ghetto is based on a close reading of Hirsch’s, Making the Second Ghetto.; The initial phase of the third ghetto dates from 1977 to 1989 which recognizes the impact of both Reagan administrations. The second phase commences with the end of the Reagan administration: 1989 to 1993. 1993 to 2001, the third phase, corresponds to the beginning of the institutionalization phase of homeless assistance services with the DC launch of the Continuum of Care program (CoC) in 1993. The fourth and final phase –2001 to present – marks the beginning of the Housing First model in Washington, D.C.” quoted from Nicole Gipson, “Making the Third Ghetto: Race and Homelessness in Washington, D.C. 1977-1989,” February 1, 2020 (unpublished). 2 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 3; Fred R. Harris and Roger W. Wilkins. Quiet Riots: and Poverty in the United States (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 3 As mentioned in the Introduction, “neoliberalisation” refers to the roll back and roll out phases of privatization, devolution, streamlining, and elimination of certain public services as well as the public-private partnerships between public entities and private businesses in Washington, D.C during the 1980s and 1990s. These notions will be further developed in Chapter Four. 4 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3.

The legacy of the first ten years of the District of Columbia’s claims-making activity (1977-1987) was its ability to engage not only public compassion but also provoke a gradual – albeit limited – federal response. During the Reagan administration, as the homeless crisis moved up the list on the nation’s antipoverty agenda, which was more focused on the construction of “a welfare consensus,” containment and stabilization defined new federal policy goals. Low- barrier/emergency shelters and welfare hotels became stopgap solutions.5 However, the funding required to implement these solutions came into direct conflict with other ameliorative policies which required local and state budgets. The District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984 (Initiative 17), placed the District squarely in the crosshairs of this conundrum.6 Key to the passage of Initiative 17 and the McKinney Act was the ability to cast the homeless as citizens deserving of the right to vote and to shelter on-demand in Hometown Washington and the right to a national response to the homeless crisis from Federal Washington.

This chapter follows the making of third ghetto in Washington, D.C. and its institutionalization through the passage of the District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984 (Initiative 17) from the early years of its inception through to a brief examination of the passage of the nation’s first formal legislative response – the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Act of 1987. Although Initiative 17 passed with overwhelming popular support, it immediately encountered strong opposition from the Mayor, the City Council, and homeless advocacy groups like the Coalition for the Homeless. Conversely, proponents approached the homeless crisis by defending the “right to adequate overnight shelter,” local leadership prioritized the needs of their neighbourhoods and the budgetary constraints of the District. In the wake of the 1981-82 recession, there was a strong momentum to aid the growing homeless population and to improve and expand the quality of that assistance, leaving one lingering question: at what cost? This dynamic led to a multi-vocal debate between those who continued to support Initiative 17, and those against simply “warehousing” the homeless and the unmanageable fiscal burden it created – hence the need for a larger federal response. This chapter argues that the passage of

5 Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2001), 256. Welfare consensus refers to an agreement to include welfare dependency and personal responsibility as two major issues in the debate over welfare reform. 6 D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative, 5-146 (1984).

Initiative 17 and the McKinney Act should be re-examined not only through the lens of social justice, but also in its role in the making of the third ghetto of the emergency shelter system.7

Analysis of D.C. homelessness in the 1980s can most profitably be directed towards four objectives. The first section examines the making of the third ghetto through the analysis of the alley dwellers of the first ghetto and briefly tracing the genesis of black neighbourhood formation in the District. The second section examines how the emergency shelter system (the third ghetto) was constructed and subsequently shaped by local policy (Initiative 17) within the political and social struggles for solutions to the emerging homeless crisis in Washington, D.C. Section three observes the political fallout caused by the passage of Initiative 17 and Mayor Marion Barry’s fight to represent all the “voiceless citizens” of Hometown Washington.8 Finally, section four chronicles the District’s response to the homeless crisis within the broader national context of Federal Washington’s passage of the McKinney Act.

The Making the Third Ghetto in the District of Columbia The third ghetto of the emergency shelter system and the second ghettoes of the public housing projects in urban regimes find their roots within the first ghettoes of Washington, D.C.’s alley dwellings of the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1850-1970).9 What would become Washington, D.C.’s alley community once comprised large dwellings featuring large rear lots designated for stables, kitchens, or animals. Post-Civil War African American migration reversed the racial make-up of alley inhabitants from white to black, such that by 1871, eighty-one per cent of reported heads of household in the District’s alleys were black.10 Historically, what scholars refer to as the old homelessness has primarily focused on white male “hobos” of the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, to the exclusion of other housing poor communities. Ample evidence exists to support the contention that Washingtonian alley dwellers experiencing an equivalent or even more dire degree of housing insecurity must also factor into this classification. While the destruction of cheap hotel districts spelt the end of “hobohemia,” poor Black communities of the alley dwellings

7 The “third ghetto,” as it is conceptualized in this thesis, is Nicole Gipson’s unique historiographical intervention. To date it has not been used by other scholars as a representation of the emergency shelter system. 8 Marion Barry and Omar Tyree, Mayor for Life: The Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. (New York: Strebor Books, 2014), 222. 9 Borchert, Alley Life in Washington. 10 Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 41.; Nina Tristani, “History: Capitol Hill Alley Dwellings.” Hill Rag, March 8, 2018. https://hillrag.com/2018/03/08/capitol-hill-alley-dwellings/# 32 saw their homes destroyed and were dispersed and displaced to neighbourhoods primarily in the southeastern quadrant.11

The slum clearance policies that decimated housing provision for African American alley dwellers and impacted the configuration of public housing projects and segregated black enclaves of the 1950s and 1960s are of equal relevance.12 The migratory patterns of African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South which forged the first and second ghettos were antithetical to the black and white flights of abandoned inner cities which isolated the poor and homeless of the third ghetto within the urban centres of Americas largest cities. The predominantly black homeless population of the District’s third ghetto would be trapped within the ring of white suburbanization and tethered to local support services.13 Therefore, the examination of the factors that contributed to the formation of the first and second ghettoes is essential to understanding the third.

Discussion of the “secret city” of extreme housing poverty at the end of the nineteenth and the better half of the twentieth century is salient because to cite James Borchert, author of the definitive opus on D.C. alley dwellers: “while the enclaves were the immediate forerunners of the massive ghettoes of the twentieth century, the alley “mini-ghettoes”… are closer to the origins of the ghetto itself.”14 Displacement of this “first ghetto” of alley dwellers into more concentrated and segregated black communities of the southeast and the second ghettoes of public housing in Washington D.C. are more readily comprehensible when viewed through the prism of postwar segregation, slum clearance, urban renewal, gentrification, and “hyperghettoization.”15 Historian Kenneth Kusmer rightly asserts that “the high level ghettoization that existed of by the 1960s must primarily be understood as a product of a long-standing pattern of white hostility to residential integration combined with new structural factors that reinforced the trend of increasing segregation.”16 Gentrification was one of the more significant driving forces of “the demographic transition of racial and ethnic composition” of Washingtonian neighbourhoods.17 The first wave

11 Between 1950 to 1970, forty-one skid row districts lost fifty-eight per cent of their aggregate population. See also: DePastino,228.; By 1970, the remaining alley dwellings of Washington, D.C. became prime real estate for high-end market. See also Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 54-55. 12 Hannold, “Comfort and Respectability”. 13 Derek S. Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 14 Borchert, Alley Life in Washington, 15. 15 Hyperghettoization “is defined as “an acute social and economic marginalization triggered by dramatic proportions of joblessness and economic exclusion” as defined in Loïc J.D. Wacquant, and William Julius Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City.” The Ghetto Underclass: Social Science Perspectives 501 (January 1989): 9. 16 Kenneth L. Kusmer, "African Americans in the City Since World War II," Journal of Urban History 21, no. 4 (1995): 461-462. 17 Kilolo, Kijakazi, Rachel M. Brooks Atkins, Mark Paul, Anne Price, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr. “The Color of Wealth in the Nation's Capital.” Rep. Inequality and Mobility. (Washington, D.C.: A Joint Publication of the Urban Institute, Duke University, The New School and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 2016), 34.; Washington, D.C. had the largest U.S. urban concentration of blacks

33 came to Georgetown in the 1920s, as working-class Irish and black residents of rooming houses and alley dwellings were forced out by the private investment of well-to-do new occupants and restrictive covenants. Expansion of the federal government during World War I and the New Deal brought new federal workers to the District, where a tight housing market enticed whites to Georgetown. These residents bought homes, renovated houses, and created homeowner’s associations to establish control over the neighbourhood.18

The social construction of the urban apartheid which defined the second ghetto in America’s inner cities was defined by the public housing programs of the 1940s. These programs reinforced racial segregation and fostered the institutional racism of Federal Housing Administration loan policies and practices even before World War II. Scholar Robert Manning argued that public policy created the “chocolate-cities/vanilla-suburbs’ phenomenon that underlies the contemporary urban crisis.”19 By the 1940s, the foundations of “the second ghetto” in most major northern cities were firmly in place and its expansion promulgated by government sanctions and programs.20 Hard colour lines were reinforced by intermittent waves of violence, which further separated blacks from whites “in employment, education, and especially housing.”21 These same hardlines not only segregated but isolated, creating black ghettos in cities such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In the District, the second wave of gentrification, “blacks moved to an area from Foggy Bottom to [the] Southwest” (see Map 1.1).22

until WWI. See also: Robert D. Manning, “Multicultural Washington, DC: the Changing Social and Economic Landscape of a Post-Industrial Metropolis,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 328. 18 Ibid.,35. 19 Manning, “Multicultural Washington, DC,” 335-336.; Although racial segregation has been on the decline for the last fifty years in large metropolitan areas, the nation’s capital remains on of the exceptions to the rule. See also: The Manhattan Institute, 2012. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/03/24/segregation-and-concentrated-poverty-in-the-nations-capital/ 20 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto:. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 30-31. 22 Kijakazi et. al., 35

Map 1.1 Washington, D.C. by Neighbourhood. Alamy site.23

There are two significant dynamics of this second wave. The first was “spurred by the influx of young federal workers who came to the District during World War II and stayed.”24 The second saw whites still moving to Georgetown, as well as other segregated neighbourhoods around both the inner-city and Greater Washington (Prince George’s, Montgomery, and Arlington Counties).25

In terms of race relations, Kusmer argued that as early as the mid-1950s, African Americans in the inner city were limited in political power. The source of this limitation was most

23 The District of Columbia by Neighbourhood Ingo Menhard/Alamy Stock Vector, https://www.alamy.com/default.aspx?log=no_order. Royalty paid April 27, 2020. 24 Kijakazi et. al., 35. 25 Ibid.

35 certainly the lack of political representation and the inaccessibility of institutional power. The consequence of this impotence was diminishing economic opportunities, the lack of access to basic city services, and poor quality schools and housing conditions.26 Indeed, the vicissitudes of social policy did play a role in the condition of African American inner-city life but it did not function in isolation from the factors of employment, commerce, and power as Thomas Sugrue’s history of Detroit demonstrates.27

Map 1.2. Washington, D.C. by Quadrant.28

In the District of Columbia between 1954 and 1965, a large-scale urban renewal project in the Southwest displaced 23,000 residents, of which only 12.3 per cent remained in the Southwest, 45.5 per cent went to the Southeast, 25.1 per cent went to the Northeast quadrants, which transformed the Southwestern demographic from seventy per cent black in 1950 to seventy per cent white by 1970, in a city that was 71.1 per cent black.29 This ‘urban removal’ in the Southwest,

26 Kusmer, “African Americans in the City Since World War II,” 466. 27 Thomas J. Sugrue, “The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in the Three Periods of American History,” in The 'Underclass' Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85-117. 28 D.C. is divided into four quadrants under the rotunda of the Capitol Building. Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, https://wikivisually.com/wiki/File:DC_satellite_image.jpg accessed October 24, 2019. 29 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 342-350; Bureau of the Census, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States, Regions, Divisions, and States, Working Paper No. 56 (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). See Map 1.2.

36 contributed substantially to increasingly over-crowded housing conditions and to precipitating the diminishing, decaying affordable housing stock and essential services in the surging apartheid of Washingtonian black ghettoes.

The habitation of postwar downtown areas in large American cities was driven along racial lines. William Holland argues “[t]he demographic and racial transition that Atlanta was undergoing in the post-war period placed particular stress on the downtown area. Many white residents fled the inner city for the developing suburban ring.”30 The same dynamic of white flight existed in the District of Columbia. White suburbanization patterns of the 1950s transformed Washington, D.C. into a “Chocolate City.”31 White middle-class flight caused a decline in the population of 800,000 in the 1950s to 760,000 in 1960s.32 White “vanilla” suburban enclaves in Fairfax County, Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland, created a white ring around Washington, D.C., pinning in poor black populations who did not have the means to leave.33 The Shaw/U Street neighbourhood serves as a perfect example of the trajectory of postwar urban transformation of black communities in the District of Columbia. Between 1960 and 1980 Shaw/U Street experienced a period of decline provoked by an emerging black middle class who fled to the suburbs of Prince George’s County following the 1968 uprising and the increase in drugs, crime, and poverty which took over parts of the neighbourhood.

The uprisings of the 1960s which hit black communities in highly populated cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C would have a profound impact on the inner-city poor.34 Analysis of the 1968 uprising in the District of Columbia is crucial to this thesis for several reasons.35 First, the uprising underscores some of the fundamental connections between the 1968 rebellions, concentrated and persistent inner-city poverty, and the lack of affordable housing.36 Second, the containment, control, and self-determination, which marked the post-uprising community

30 William Wyatt Holland, “Who is my Neighbor? : Framing Atlanta’s Movement to End Homelessness,1900-2005,” (PhD diss., Georgia State University Press, 2009), Accessed February 4, 2020, https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/sociology_diss/43/, 92. 31 George Clinton, "Chocolate City," in Chocolate City, Parliament, George Clinton, 1975, vinyl recording. This song was originally written about Washington, D. C. 32 Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, 29.; Brett Williams, "Deadly Inequalities: Race, Illness, and Poverty in Washington, D.C. since 1945," in African American Urban History since World War II, eds. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 142-159. 33 Ibid., 152. 34 Also known as “commodity” or “consumer riots” for their commerce targeted destruction.; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto,3; Morris Janowitz, “Patterns of Collective Racial Violence,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives Volume 2. (New York: American Library, 1969): 317-339.; Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965). 35 C.W. Rolark, “Let’s Talk,” Washington Informer, April 17, 1968. 36 Report of City Council on the Rebuilding of Washington, D.C. from the Civil Disturbances of April 1968, report (Washington, D.C.: Government of the District of Columbia City Council, 1969), 19-20.

37 response, would become key factors in the making of Black Washingtonian community and local government leadership that helped put the emergency homeless shelter system in place during the 1980s. Walter E. Washington, Mayor-Commissioner of Washington, D. C. and Rev. Walter Fauntroy – head of the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) – emerged as leaders, due to their efforts to contain the arsonists, control the level of violence, and to coordinate police efforts.37 Third, accounts in the press give us a glimpse at how residential communities – beyond the main business corridors of 14th, U, and 7th Streets, N.W. and H street NE –managed the hundreds of “burned out” or homeless populations. At the local level, churches and the Urban Coalition provided first response assistance. Area churches worked together to donate: “temporary shelter,” “tons of food and clothing,” and the Urban Coalition “mobilized public, business, civic, and individual resources […] to provide emergency food, housing, financial assistance, and employment guidance.”38 Finally, the uprising showcased the elected and indigenous black leadership that would eventually work on the front lines of the homeless crisis in the 1980s, such as Marion Barry.

A former leader of the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as Pride Inc., and as the second mayor of Washington, D.C. in 1978, Barry was amongst the wave of “black civil rights mayors” elected to office following the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Others included Carl Stokes of Cleveland, Ohio (1967), Richard Hatcher of Gary Indiana (1967), Kenneth Gibson of Newark, New Jersey (1969), and Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, Coleman Young of Detroit, Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, and Walter Washington of Washington, D.C all elected in 1973. The unfortunate legacy of these first wave civil rights mayors was that after their mandates, their respective communities were still mired in “intense racial conflict.”39 This conflict was mirrored in the racial configuration of the District.40

37 Walter Fauntroy would later become the city’s first non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1971 to 1991. See also Walter E. Fauntroy, An Assessment of Where We Are, report, Major Papers in The State of Black America (New York: National Urban League, 1982). Found in Walter Fauntroy Papers Box 195A Folder 22. 38 Editorial, “The City’s First Response,” Evening Star, April 9, 1968. 39 J. Phillip Thompson III, Double Trouble Black Mayors, Black Communities, and the Fall for a Deep Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4-5. 40 Washington, D.C. is arranged by Wards.; See Map 1.2. 38

Table 1.1 Poverty in the District of Columbia by Ward, 1970 – 1990.41

Map 1.3: Between 1970 and 1990 Poverty Became More Concentrated in More Parts of the District.42

Although rent control, a moratorium on rent conversion, the crack epidemic, and urban core violence slowed down the dynamic of displacement, the third wave of gentrification took place in the 1970s and 1980s in response to young professionals’ disaffection with the suburbs and to attraction to inner cities. They moved into Logan Circle, Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant,

41 Carol J. De Vita, Carlos A. Manjarrez, and Eric Twombly, “Poverty in the District of Columbia — Then and Now,” rep. (The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C. February 2000):15. Table 1.1 was compiled by Urban Institute, based on decennial census data. The numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred. 42 De Vita, et. al, 16.

Columbia Heights, Capitol Hill, Hill East, DuPont Circle, and LeDroit Park.43 Conversely, the “persistent white-black racial divide,” in the District of Columbia and concentrated poverty created “few opportunities for economic mobility.”44 Throughout this period, “an active group of researchers documented the movement of middle – and upper – income households into lower- income neighborhoods” in the District, “labelled a “hotbed” of gentrification.”45 The nation’s capital became the centre of neighbourhood revitalization research.46 Urban poverty scholar John Kasarda found that between 1970-1990 poverty was becoming “more concentrated and more segregated” and the battlefront of poverty was shifting progressively east of the Anacostia River (see Table 1.1 and Map 1.3 above).47 Although these pockets of poverty appear relatively stable over time, many of them became deeper in the District.48 According to an Urban Institute study: “[t]hese deep pockets of poverty can sometimes erode the support systems and resources that are available to a neighbourhood, making it more difficult for individuals and families to escape the cycle of poverty.”49 During this period the percentage of the poor living in the inner city increased significantly with African Americans comprising “the highest concentration of the poor in these areas.”50 As shown in Map 1.3 above, Washington, D.C. followed this trend. This map shows that in 1970, one third of the areas of concentrated poverty of consensus tracks were located in Wards 6, 7 and 8 (predominantly African American populations). By 1970, highly-concentrated black isolation was a fait accompli not only in Washington, D.C. but in five other cities (Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Memphis and Miami) where indices which exceeded eighty per cent ensured that blacks were highly unlikely to share neighbourhoods with whites or other ethnic groups. According to urban scholars Massey and Denton, these data represented a complete reversal of late-nineteenth century patterns when “residential contact” with whites was commonplace.51 By 1990, seventy per cent of the high poverty areas were located in these wards. This data is significant in a city which became predominantly African American by 1960 and remained so

43 Kijakazi et. al., 35. 44 The Manhattan Institute, 2012., https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/03/24/segregation-and-concentrated-poverty-in- the-nations-capital/. 45 Jonathan Jackson, “The Consequences of Gentrification for Racial Change in Washington, DC.” Housing Policy Debate 25, no. 2 (2014): 353. 46 Ibid. 47 John D. Kasarda, “Inner‐City Concentrated Poverty and Neighborhood Distress: 1970 to 1990.” Housing Policy Debate 4, no. 3 (1993): 253– 302.; Massey, and Denton. American Apartheid. 48 De Vita et al., 17. 49 De Vita et al, 17. 50 Hopper, Kim, Marsha Martin, Jacquie Lawing, Mark Gordon, Jack Underhill, and Eric Lindblom, “ Priority Home! The Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness.” rep. Priority Home! The Federal Plan to Break the Cycle of Homelessness. Interagency Council on the Homeless, 1993: 26. 51 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 48-49.

40 between 1970 to 1990 (roughly sixty per cent).52 Therefore the battlefronts of poverty in the District were defined by race and place.

Race not only defined what neighbourhood poor African Americans would live in the District at the end of the twentieth century but it also determined access to basic amenities, education, housing, and healthcare. Discussion of racial inequalities in the District is significant, as it was the social inequalities African Americans experienced in accessing the institutions and services of the second ghetto which created many of the structural barriers for the poor and marginalized groups who would fill the reservoir of the new homelessness in the District. As mentioned in the Introduction, the new homeless population “have been characterized as younger, better educated, more often consisting of women and families, having significant proportions of veterans, and …greater numbers of racial minorities than in the past.”53 Yet it was the label of the so-called “underclass” which became more closely associated with the inhabitants of emergency shelter system of the third ghetto in America’s urban cores. These new homeless had even more fragile ties to the state apparatus than their second-ghetto predecessors. Writing about the construction of homelessness in American cities, the renowned anthropologist, Ida Susser argued: “Almost by definition members of the underclass [were] in direct conflict with public institutions, either through substance abuse, the criminal justice system, mental institutions, foster care, vagrancy and homelessness, or at the very least in their need for public assistance.”54 Deinstitutionalization of the District’s mental health apparatus had dire consequences on the city’s homeless population.

The coupling of community treatment philosophy and governmental cost-cutting measures led to national policies of deinstitutionalization by the late 1960s and early 1970s, which occurred without adequate preparation in the communities most affected by those policies. Massive mental health bureaucracies were to be replaced by a community-based service system.55 Deinstitutionalization in the District came in two phases: with the passage of the Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1964 and the Dixon Decree by the Federal District Court in 1975 which discharged 900 patients from Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital. Although the Dixon Decree was

52 De Vita et al., 6.; Williams, “Deadly Inequalities,”148. 53 Lois M. Takahashi, “A Decade of Understanding Homelessness in the USA from Characterization to Representation,” Progress in Human Geography 20, no. 3 (1996): 292. 54 Susser, 412. 55 Wolch and Dear Malign Neglect, 65.

41 meant to assure the right to appropriate mental health treatment and services for the mentally ill, it created a mental health service shortfall by not providing adequate local infrastructures to treat its deinstitutionalized mentally ill people.56 An unintended consequence of this service gap was that many of these 900 former patients were left no alternative but to join ranks of the new homeless population. By the late 1970s, the central debate for early responders was what to do about them.

By the 1980s, homelessness came to embody many of the contradictions of the postwar inner city. The black migration that fed the industrial complex of northern cities, did not pass on a legacy of prosperity to African Americans precariously housed and homeless populations.57 Instead, these marginalized communities incurred measures which exacerbated their exclusion, isolation, and poverty. A succession of setbacks such as deindustrialisation, deinstitutionalisation of the mental institutions, under and unemployment, gentrification, and urban renewal broke down fragile kinship relationships that permitted black families to “double up” and double down in times of need. A demographic development to suit the new configuration of downtown centers to attract a stronger tax base back to the inner city, would lead to the land grabs that reshaped abandoned and deteriorating neighbourhoods. Despite the recovery from a national economic recession during the Reagan Era, the rising tide of market-based solutions did not lift all boats. Many of the working poor could not earn a living wage and the most destitute were left to eke out an existence in train stations, on benches, or on steamed grates. The remedy proposed to the crisis levels of homelessness in the 1980s – the emergency shelter – offered no better argument than a shield against the elements with – if funding permitted –a few uncoordinated, stopgap, wraparound services. Federal legislation such as the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, merely formalized the emergency shelter complex into a shadow institution of the welfare state.58 This belated public policy intervention transformed what was a temporary solution to the new homeless crisis into the permanent institution of the third ghetto.

56 The Dixon Decree issued on December 23, 1975, was based the Dixon v. Weinberger case.; See also: Sara Fitzgerald Carroll, “Administering the Dixon Decree from 1975 to 1997,” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1999). 57 Although Washington, D.C. is not considered a northern city, beginning with the April 1962 emancipation of 3,100 African American slaves owned by District residents coupled with the availability of semi-skilled and skilled labour and to a far lesser degree, federal job opportunities made it a popular destination for African American southerners in the late nineteenth century. See also: Constance M. Green, The Secret City. A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 59, 117. 58 Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, H.R. 558, P.L. 100-77 (1987).

Street people are “just like us”: the rise of homeless advocacy. Concomitant with the de-escalation of the United States military forces in Vietnam, CCNV anti-war activists engaged their sentiments elsewhere. As their quest for domestic social justice replaced the anti-war movement, activists focused their energies on a wide range of progressive causes from environmental activism to anti-nuclear proliferation. Ed Guinan, a Paulist priest followed such a path. Inspired by the teaching of the Catholic Worker Movement and the example set by one of its most prominent members, Dorothy Day, he abandoned his life as a stock trader and came to Washington, D.C. to study for the priesthood. In 1970, he founded CCNV, which based its headquarters in the Euclid House at N. Street N.W., west of Thomas Circle.59 By 1972, the opening of Zacchaeus Community Kitchen in Shaw marked CCNV’s transition beyond an anti- war agenda to its focus on the scourge of extreme poverty in the District. Guinan’s fiery and charismatic leadership attracted dedicated activists from all over the country such as Mitch Snyder, a Brooklyn Jew, ex-convict, and radical, anti-war Catholic convert who quickly became a leader in his own right. By the mid-1970s, Snyder’s “strident rhetoric, brazen protests, and combative style,” which were at odds with Guinan’s reserved demeanour and simple objective to live among the District’s most destitute, had created an untenable situation.60 In order to avoid irreparable division within the community, CCNV opened a second location, where Snyder and other community members would live, known as the Euclid House in Columbia Heights.

Columbia Heights became a vibrant black middle-class enclave after the Supreme Court declared restrictive covenants unconstitutional. However, the process of urban decay set in when White property owners began renting housing, which had already fallen into disrepair, to African Americans thereby “turning gorgeous buildings with commanding vistas into slums.”61 Additionally, the 1968 uprisings left the fourteenth street corridor of Columbia Heights riddled with burned-out businesses and apartment buildings, which contributed to an on-going process of urban decay. As drug dealers, moved into the neighbourhood, creating one of the largest heroin markets in the District, many middle-class homeowners moved out, selling to speculators who

59 Victoria Rader, Signal Through the Flames: Mitch Snyder and America’s Homeless. (Sheed &Ward, 1986): 49-65.; Asch and Musgrove, 390. 60 Asch and Musgrove, 390. 61 Ibid.

43 hoped to capitalize on the development boom in Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan neighbourhoods. However, this real estate development did not reach Columbia Heights.62

By the time Euclid House opened at 1345 Euclid Street, it rapidly became a halfway house for Lorton penitentiary ex-convicts, and the mentally ill. However, Black Power organisations, facilities such as Pride Inc. which owned a gas station on Euclid St., the D.C. Alliance of Active black businessmen (at the Pitts Motor Hotel), and the Drum and Spear Bookstore owned by SNCC alumni (at 1371 Fairmont St.) who had set up their offices in this same neighbourhood in the 1960s were still there in the 1970s. Researchers Asch and Musgrove argue that the same forces of urban decay that motivated these black radical groups to stay, enticed “white New Left communities” to move in such as Sojourners, an anti-war Christian collective focused on local organising; the Columbia Heights Community Ownership Project, an anti-gentrification organisation; and CCNV.63

The level of destitution CCNV activists lived with at their Euclid House premises and saw in other parts of the city, had a profound impact on their efforts to help the homeless such that giving refuge to an average of forty homeless people each night seemed insufficient. In 1977, as he had done the previous year, Snyder wrote over a thousand letters to churches, temples, and synagogues entreating them to get involved. Luther Place Memorial at Thomas Circle responded the first year (1976), offering around forty to fifty beds. St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, at 1525 Newton St. N.W., were also among the first responders to answer Snyder’s call. Under pressure from the media attention received concerning these two faith-based organizations’ night hospitality programs, the eleven reported hypothermia deaths the previous winter, as well as three more recent hypothermia deaths, Albert P. Russo Director of the Department of Human Resources (DHR) met with sponsors of both urban hospices and volunteers from CCNV. The dialogue between these first responders and the city was productive. As a temporary solution, a vacant city-owned building located at 456 C Street N.W. was brought up to standard, equipped, and converted into a night shelter. Fourteen DHR employees were enlisted to run the shelter from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. The city supplied a small fleet of three vans to be deployed nightly with the mission to bring in consenting street people. DHR also unveiled a “long-range plan” to open a shelter in

62 Ibid. 63 Ibid.

44 each quadrant of the city by the following winter.64 However, the District’s history with succouring the poor pre-dates CCNV’s involvement.

Since the late 1960s, faith-based crisis-driven service provision outliers which served the District’s most destitute were congregational ministries such as Capitol Hill Group Ministries, Community Family Life Services, and Loaves and Fishes. During this same period, newly arriving immigrants could turn to the Archdiocese who founded the Spanish Catholic Center. Additionally, Monsignor John Kuhn and several other clergymen opened a day program for the mentally ill.65 At the beginning of the 1970s, century-old missions which provided minimal shelter services and a few mental health centres tended to the mentally ill, filling the service gap left by city agencies. For example, Father Horace McKenna, a progressive parish priest, and Veronica Maz, a sociologist from Georgetown University, founded So Others Might Eat (SOME) in 1970. Luther Place – the aforementioned faith-based shelter operator located at Thomas Circle and 14th streets –had been created a few years earlier by John and Erna Steinbruck. This list of providers is by no means exhaustive. However, of this list of early responders to the homeless crisis, my focus will be on CCNV who as Cynthia Bogard argues “had little local competition for “ownership” of this social problem.”66

In 1975, when the first manifestations of more diverse homelessness were becoming increasingly visible on the streets of the District, there were only two city-managed emergency shelters operating with the assistance of faith-based private service providers such as the Salvation Army. By 1980, several large city-run shelters opened their doors with more specialized shelter services such as Blair Shelter at 6th and I Streets, NE and Pierce Shelter at 14th and G Streets, NE, which were exclusively for homeless men. House of Ruth at 10th and G Streets, NE ran a women's shelter under city contract, and there was a family shelter at Hartford Street, SE. Catholic Charities shifted its focus from childcare, refugee and parish assistance, to homeless service provision under a recently appointed Archbishop Hickey.67 In 1981, the District’s commitment had increased to

64 Editorial, “Night Shelter for the Homeless,” Washington Post, January 29, 1978. 65Elwell, 45. 66 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 34. 67 Elwell, 63, 64, 90. 45 fifteen shelters, with a 600-bed a night capacity and temporary voucher outlays in hotel and motel rooms for 200 families. 68

In the early eighties in the District of Columbia, communities were outraged by the sheer volume of homeless on the streets, and reports of an average of a dozen hypothermia deaths each winter. Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy acknowledged Mayor Marion Barry’s minimal efforts to open a few city buildings to the homeless, yet exposed his political machinations citing: “Barry…toured the heat grates, telling the media that he offered aid but that most men on top of the grates don’t want to come in from the cold.”69 McCarthy went on to uncover city officials’ efforts to close the shelters under the pretext of a budget crisis. Indeed, the results of a full examination of the city’s finances under the Barry administration exposed “a deficit of $115 million, a long-term debt of more than $300 million, and an unfunded pension liability of nearly $740 million.”70 In order to rectify the financial shortfalls of what Barry called the “stumbling, bumbling” bureaucracy of the previous administration, he instituted austerity measures that “called for tax hikes, reduced city services, [induced] layoffs, and pay freezes” which disproportionately impacted “the poor, the elderly, and the homeless.”71 As the homeless crisis grew, D.C.’s local government would often resort to this justification for its inadequate assistance measures all the while dissimulating its financial mismanagement of the city budget. McCarthy’s article is significant, as it highlights Mayor Barry’s ambivalence towards the homeless population and the carefully crafted persona of a politician determined to at least appear to be doing something about the homeless crisis.

Barry embodied many of the contradictions of black power, black politics, and black governance in the black urban regimes (BURs). These BURs which Adolph Reed Jr. defined as local governments composed of a black mayor and a black majority-run city council which were products of the civil rights struggles that eventually desegregated city institutions and gave African Americans access to political power.72 This first generation of post-Jim Crow black leadership were beholden to their “black electoral constituencies and the increasingly hegemonic logic of

68 Henry Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doors: Yetta Adams’ Story and the New War On Homelessness,” Washington Post, December 5, 1993. 69 Coleman McCarthy, “Shelter for the Poor We Cannot See,” Washington Post, January 10, 1981. 70 Asch and Musgrove, 396. 71 Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 127.; Asch and Musgrove, 396. 72 Cedric Johnson, “The Half-Life of the Black Urban Regime,” Labor Studies Journal 41, no. 3 (2016): 249-250. See also Adolph L. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

46 urban entrepreneurialism produced by industrialization and capital flight and declining federal aid from the seventies onward.”73 Unfortunately, the concerns of the homeless were lost in the political machinations of the Washingtonian BURs of the seventies and the eighties. The denial and/or neglect of the homeless crisis and lack of proper care for the homeless in the first ten years of the new homeless era in the District, underscored the fact that homelessness did not take precedence over other more pressing matters such as black middle class employment.

Professor Cynthia Bogard, sociologist and author of Seasons Such As These: How Homelessness Took Shape in America which focuses on New York and Washington, D.C., asserts that race is a nonsalient factor in the construction of homelessness for several reasons. Her first argument was that no claimsmakers of the 1980s applied a racial perspective to the issue of homeless.74 However, this reasoning does not account for Jesse Jackson’s open recognition of the homeless crisis as a national issue in his 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, his participation in the Atlanta March for the homeless in 1988, and his participation in the Housing Now! March in 1989.75 Second, Bogard asserts that because few local black newspapers such as the Washington Afro-American only occasionally covered homelessness during the 1980s and focused more on issues such as African American civil and legal rights, that homelessness was at best a peripheral issue. Here, Bogard treats African American homelessness, and black human, civil, and legal rights as mutually exclusive issues. Conversely, it is the aim of this thesis to demonstrate their connection through the common struggles around housing precarity in general and public housing and homelessness in particular.

Finally, Bogard posits that the press of the 1980s tended to focus on American homelessness in racist, white-washed human interest stories such as the one in Newsweek in 1984.76 She asserts that the press offered a racist, white-washed version of poverty, cast in images such as the migrant mother and focused on two-parent family precarity which reflected a more palpable “deserving poor” rendition of poverty for its readership. The existence of this tendency,

73 Johnson, “The Half-Life of the Black Urban Regime,” 250. Black community leaders in D.C. such as Nadine Winter and Walter Fauntroy were also working on issues concerning the homeless. 74 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 201. 75 Jim Baumohl, ed., Homeless in America (Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 1996), xv.; Brian J. Williams, “Housing Now!: The Newsletter,” The Affordable Housing Coalition 1, no. 1 (November 1989):1 MS2153 Series 7 Box 14 Folder 4, Carol Fennelly Papers, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University.; See also: Michael E. Eidenmuller, American Rhetoric: Jesse Jackson’s Speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention Speech (“The Rainbow Coalition), accessed April 9, 2020, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jessejackson1984dnc.htm 76 See the cover of Jonathan Alter’s, "Homeless in America," Newsweek, January 2, 1984, 20-33

Bogard suggests, silenced the recognition of race as a contributing factor to homelessness.77 Unfortunately, Bogard’s, book which relies almost exclusively on primary sources from the press, is limited to the perspectives of the punditry of the 1970s and 1980s. This thesis does not contest the reliability of these sources but recognizes the limitations of their scope. A brief consultation of the George Washington Special Collections of the Nadine Winter Papers (Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner of Ward 6) or the Walter Fauntroy Papers (District SCLC leader and non-voting delegate of the House of Representatives) demonstrates their respective commitments to the issues of African American public housing issues, homelessness, and poverty as well as their efforts during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to resolve them.78

In the early 1980s, both politically and in statements to the press, Mayor Barry would often use the recession as a scapegoat for reneging on commitments to help the homeless.79 As a “black Democrat party mayor,” Barry clearly saw himself as an adversary to the conservative Reagan administration.80 In his autobiography, Barry recognized that this opposition had to be navigated with finesse as a public official beholden to the federal government to pass its budgets.81 He saw his connection to the White House as one of professional necessity and not at all ideological. Irrespective of the veracity of this self-assessment, Barry’s choice to participate in giving real estate developers lucrative contracts to run welfare hotels made him complicit in the creation of public-private relationships that were tantamount to sweet-heart deals made at the expense of the homeless (see Chapter Two).82 Given Barry’s sharp political instincts which were clearly on display through his participation in the District’s recovery from the 1968 uprising, one would have wished for that level of political and logistical astuteness vis-à-vis the homeless in the 1980s.83

As a staunch advocate of downtown development, which was in line with the aims of downtown developers who contributed to his campaign for mayor, Barry’s priorities were far from the best interests of some of Washington, D.C.’s poorest residents such as the homeless.84 Yet if

77 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 202. 78 MS2188 Nadine P. Winter D.C. City Council papers, Special Collections Research Center George Washington University.; MS2310 Walter Fauntroy Papers, Special Collections Research Center George Washington University. 79 Allen Bonner, “The Drifters’ Endless Odyssey: The Homeless Roam in City Powerless to Help,” Washington Post, October 23, 1981. 80 Marion Barry and Omar Tyree, Mayor for Life: the Incredible Story of Marion Barry, Jr. (New York: Strebor Books, 2019), 166. 81 Even with the passage of the Home Rule Act of 1973, Congress retained its line-item control over the District’s budget.; See also: Michael K. Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule: Congress and the Erosion of Local Governance in the District of Columbia (Dallas: Univ. Press of America, 2003), 35. 82 Jaffe and Sherwood, 153- 155. 83 George R. Roderick, Director, “Operation Bandaid One, April 4-April 12, 1968,” Government of the District Of Columbia Office of Civil Defense, TS Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 37, 59, 77.; Jaffe and Sherwood, 78-79. 84 Jaffe and Sherwood,156.

Mayor Barry squandered the opportunity to establish himself as a leader on the issue of homelessness in the District, and to expose its merit as a national issue, local grassroots activists would intercede to fill the gap.85 Nationally, local governments and congressmen were also beginning to address the homeless problem. On December 15, 1982, Mayor Ted Wilson of Salt Lake City gave this testimonial on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors before Congress:

As we go into the Winter of our national discontent and as we approach the Christmas season, we must search our hearts and find a place for the homeless. They are us, people like us, searching for basic work, searching for a new lease on life, searching for someone who will care. Unfortunately, their children often go with them and, in the process, learn lessons about the real quality of our society. Will we teach those children [that] we are people who care, or will we sit idly by our own hearths casting pity but doing nothing?86 The purpose of the fifty-five-page study he presented was to “testify about the problems confronting local communities resulting from the dramatic increase in the number of homeless people in America.”87 During the Reagan administration, research of the new homelessness was confined to quantifying the size of the homeless population, determining who the homeless were, and whether they had exercised their free will to be “homeless by choice.”88

In the early 1980s, public perception of the homeless crisis in Washington, D.C. was often shaped by media portrayals which attempted to introduce this newly visible urban poverty to a sympathetic readership. The anti-homelessness movement in Washington, D.C. drew attention to the needs of the “passive” yet “deserving” poor, in its “glamour offensive” through the media by attempting to frame homelessness as a problem of social justice.89 Unfortunately, media coverage reduced the homeless activist narrative to a series of sensationalized local confrontations with the Reagan administration and failed to convey the diversity of local leadership in social and legal activism in Washington, D.C. In fact, the local press often sensationalised the inroads of homeless legal advocacy by disproportionately focusing on a few homeless activist groups such as CCNV.

85 Foley, 267. 86 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America: hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 97th Cong., 2nd Session, (December 15, 1982): 172. 87U.S. Congress. Homeless in America, 164.; Adam A. Dobrin, “Large Poor Families Face Critical Shortage of Public Housing,” Washington Post, October 6, 1982.; Howard Kurtz, “Cities Stager Under Needs of ‘Newly Poor,’ ” Washington Post, October 14, 1982. 88 Barak, 5. 89 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 188-189. The glamour offensive refers to the act of glamorizing poverty through Hollywood spotlight and media attention.

Snyder in particular was far too focused on the media spotlight and legal advocacy, as opposed to local and national “broad-based coalition building.”90 However, the passage of local and federal homeless legislation was not only due to the efforts of grassroots and celebrity mobilisation but also the culmination of congressional hearings, mayoral conference reports, expert testimony, and bipartisan congressional effort. For example, there were many politicians in the District who held Reagan responsible for exacerbating the impoverishment of certain African American communities and fought to curtail urban poverty. Walter Fauntroy, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus (1981 to 1983) and a non-voting delegate to Congress for the District of Columbia, was one of them.

Fauntroy believed that the Reagan administration was directly responsible for the nation’s economic recession which had a direct impact on poor, black, Washingtonian communities.91 In a report published in The State of Black America 1982, Fauntroy cited Reagan’s decision to fight against inflation by inflating the cost of credit, as responsible for 50,000 small business failures, 1.2 million people thrown out of work and a near 8.9 per cent unemployment rate, which he wrote: “…in the black community [was] even more severe: with 16.1 per cent unemployment among black adults; 40 to 60 per cent unemployment among black youth; and a total of 288,000 blacks thrown out of work during the Reagan administration’s first full year in office.”92 Fauntroy also contended that the $750 million in tax cuts for the rich planned over the next five years coupled with an increase in its defence spending “to a record $1.6 trillion, caused “record cuts in the “so- called ‘safety net’ programs…” in 1981.93 Furthermore, a newly inaugurated President and a conservative majority in Congress gave the administration free reign to execute substantial social spending cuts in favour of military spending which would have dire consequences on state and local social services.94 Consequently, private non-profits created homeless service networks and a ‘shadow industry’ to fill the void left by federal and local budget cuts. 95

90 Elwell, 12. 91 Walter Fauntroy was also a prominent civil rights leader who was in charge of the D.C. Bureau of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and helped coordinate the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Fauntroy also founded and led the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO) in 1971. 92 Walter E. Fauntroy, “An Assessment of Where We Are,” Report. Major Papers in The State of Black America (National Urban League, 1982. Walter Fauntroy Papers, Folder 22, Box 195A. 93 Ibid. 94 James T. Paterson, “Morning Again in America,” in Restless Giant: the United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press), 159-160. 95 Christine M. Elwell,76.

By 1983, the District was providing food and shelter to over 10,000 homeless – a seventy- seven per cent increase from just one year earlier.96 The explosion of the homeless crisis was thought to be tied to the recession and a residual effect of a temporary economic downturn. In this same year, recognizing that homelessness was becoming a national problem, Congress provided a stopgap solution by appropriating $140 million in federal funds for emergency food and shelter.97 The connection between the Reagan administration’s housing policy, the reduction of federal housing aid, the persistent lack of affordable housing, and their impact on homelessness become subjects of intense debate in the late 1980s. The two terms of the Reagan administration saw the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget reduced by fifty percent with a legacy of scandal in which governmental officials and businessmen enrichment themselves from its coffers at the expense of the urban poor.98

The homeless population count wars which were particularly heated during the first half of the 1980s, offered homeless headcounts ranging from the HUD’s 250,000 to 350,000 nationwide figure to the count of up to 3 million touted by homeless advocates and the anti-homelessness movement.99 This discrepancy was endemic of the Reagan administration’s propensity to ignore the need for affordable housing and underestimate the magnitude of the national homeless crisis, as well as the anti-homelessness movement’s tendency to promulgate unsubstantiated data.100 Reagan’s own view of the public housing initiatives in the War on Poverty as an abject failure set the tone for HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce’s focus on tax breaks for property landlords rather than the amelioration of outcomes for the precariously-housed.101 It was evident that America was confronted with the glaring contradiction that despite signs of economic recovery from the recession, the homeless crisis continued to worsen. However, despite this colossal challenge, advocates and researchers were determined to capture the day-to-day lives of the homeless and to defend their civil and human rights.

96 June B. Kress, “Homeless Fatigue Syndrome: The Backlash against the Crime of Homelessness in the 1990s.” Social Justice 57th ser., 21, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 87. 97 Maria Foscarinis, "The Federal Response: Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act," ed. Jim Baumohl, in Homelessness in America (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996), 161. 98 Biles, 251. 99 Mary Ellen Hombs, American Homelessness: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1990), 12,19.; This numbers controversy also played out in the press. See also: Dwight Cunningham, “HUD Study Defining Homeless Problem,” Washington Times, January 12. 100 Homeless advocates were also taken to task for the lack of scientifically based numbers and were accused of exaggeration. See also: Thomas Main, “The Number of the Homeless’ Has Been Exaggerated,” USA Today, December 31, 1983. 101 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 114, 121.

Poverty scholars and social activists capitalized on their positions as outliers to frame the resolution of the homeless crisis as an imperative of social justice. Scholars and activists such as Kim Hopper and Ellen Baxter, Robert Hayes of the Coalition for the Homeless in New York, and Mary Ellen Hombs and Mitch Snyder of CCNV helped raise public awareness of the homeless crisis, by speaking on behalf of the faceless, nameless homeless persons living on the nation’s streets, and defending the basic human right to the assistance they deserved.102 Advocates worked to shift the “non-citizen” status of the homeless to an inclusive rights-and-justice framework where the homeless deserved equal treatment under the law. This focus on basic human rights gave activists a temporary reprieve from challenging the negative prevailing public attitudes concerning the individual pathologies of addiction and mental illness generally associated with homeless people.103 In contrast, early portrayals of street people from elected leaders such as Mayor Marion Barry, cast the local homeless population as service-resistant, exemplified by his claim that “most of the men on top of the grates don’t want to come in from the cold.”104 His attitude was in line with the general view that the homeless were making a voluntarily lifestyle choice to live on the street and were unwilling to change this so-called “socially deviant” behaviour.105 However, when Washingtonians voted for the “the right to adequate overnight shelter” in 1984, they were formalizing a surging wave of compassion for the homeless which typified an ascendant public sympathy for the homeless. Passage of Initiative 17 in Washington, D.C. and the bipartisan congressional plebiscite for the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 led to the expansion of the local non-profit infrastructure of the sheltering industry and set the emergency shelter system on a course for its imminent national institutionalization.

Initiative 17

On January 25, 1984, members of Congress held a one-day hearing: “Homeless in America-II.” It was a follow-up to the December 1982 proceedings and took place in the basement

102 U.S. Congress. Homeless in America.; Attorney, Robert Hayes filed this landmark right-to-overnight case in New York City: Callahan v. Carey N.Y.L.J. (Dec. 11, 1979) al 10, col. 4 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., Dec. 5, 1979) and many other homeless-related legal actions.; Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, Private Lives/Public Spaces: Homeless Adults on the Streets of New York City., report, ERIC document reproduction service no. ED201564 (New York, NY: Community Service Society, 1981): 41-54.; Mary Ellen Hombs and Mitch Snyder, Homelessness in America: A Forced March to Nowhere (Washington, D.C.: Community for Creative Non-Violence, 1982). 103 Cynthia J. Bogard, "Claimsmakers and Contexts in Early Constructions of Homelessness: A Comparison of New York City and Washington, D.C.," Symbolic Interaction 24, no. 4 (November 01, 2001): 446. Michael Rowe et al., "Homelessness, Mental Illness and Citizenship," Social Policy & Administration 35, no. 1 (March 2001): 15. 104 McCarthy, “Shelter for the Poor We Cannot See.” 105 Bogard, Seasons Such As These, 35. This mentality was particularly prevalent in the human interest stories in the media between 1977 – 1981.

52 of the CCNV operated shelter.106 The significance of these proceedings to the present study lies in the shift in focus from homeless awareness to homeless rights in the testimonials of two important homeless activists who had spoken at the previous hearing: researcher Kim Hopper who spoke on behalf of Robert Hayes then Counsel for the National Coalition for the Homeless and Mitch Snyder, by then the undisputed leader of CCNV. In New York in the 1970s, homeless advocates such as Robert Hayes laid the groundwork for the right to shelter through the legal precedent established by the Callahan v. Carey court case which compelled New York City to provide shelter for homeless single men.107 In Hopper’s statement to Congress, he testified that despite the nation’s economic recovery, those suffering from the most extreme poverty were not receiving the benefits of it. He added that the federal government, albeit less in denial of the homeless crisis than two years earlier, still had the moral imperative to do more to help the homeless. In one of Hopper’s proposals concerning the national right to shelter, he cited a British legal precedent set in 1977 and challenged the committee to debate and measure the cost of an American right-to-shelter law against the potential lives at stake.108 Mitch Snyder also weighed in stating:

I ask the committee to act with a proportionate sense of urgency to initiate legislation that will establish in law the right of every American to adequate and accessible overnight shelter offered in an atmosphere of reasonable dignity. All Federal agencies, but especially the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, [….] should be directed to act to ensure the fullest use of their resources and to provide immediate relief to our Nation’s homeless.109 Snyder was clearly laying the groundwork for a ballot initiative later that year for the right to shelter in Washington, D.C. Since 1977, CCNV maintained a productive albeit litigious and conflictual relationship with the city government in their struggle to aid the homeless. Yet they set the agenda for homeless rights issues through direct action tactics that helped obtain abandoned local buildings and funding for renovation to house the city’s most destitute inhabitants. By the end of the 1980s, their “all or nothing” intransigent advocacy strategies and inability to form lasting

106 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America-II: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 98th Cong., 2nd Session, (January 25, 1984): 192-194. He cited the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977 which guaranteed the right to shelter to some of Britain’s homeless as a salient legal precedent. See also: N. J. Crowson, "Revisiting the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act: Westminster, Whitehall, and the Homelessness Lobby," Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 3 (2012). 107 Callahan v. Carey N.Y.L.J. (Dec. 11, 1979) al 10, col. 4 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., Dec. 5, 1979). The case was decided in August 1981; For single women Eldredge v. Koch December 1982 (469 NYS2d 744), for homeless families MacCaine v. Koch May 1986 (523 NYS2d 112). See also: Ella Howard, Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).; Baxter and Hopper, Private Lives/Public Spaces. 108 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America-II: hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 99th Cong., Washington, D.C., 2nd Session, (January 25, 1984), 192- 194. 109 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America-II, 179.

53 coalitions with city government, local service providers, and even other activists, gradually eroded their status and legitimacy.110 However, in 1984, CCNV had their finger on the pulse of the basic needs of the homeless and was determined to realize its vision of how they should be assisted.

In the two months before the second hearing, Snyder admitted that he was often approached with one important question which captured the shifting attitudes towards the homeless and the potential for real change: “Why now? Why at precisely this moment in time has the problem of homelessness burst into national consciousness?”111 Snyder attributed this fascination to seeing the increasing amounts of poverty on the streets. This thesis argues that this new-found compassion was the cumulative effect of a national economic recovery, grassroots activism, and the impact of human interest stories which frequently cropped up in opinion-making newspapers and magazines in the first half of the 1980s on public opinion.112 Some of these pieces took a broader view of homelessness, to sensitize its readership to the magnitude of the crisis and debunk those who were still in denial of its existence beyond its local manifestations. Other columnists took the “urban plunge,” becoming “paupers for a day” with a commitment to understanding and reporting on the “down and out.”

One such article, which indicated the significant features of the homeless population, appeared the same month as the 1984 hearings. Jonathan Alter’s broad analysis of the state of homelessness in America, placed homelessness squarely on the national agenda and within a liberal framework, by contextualizing the crisis through the “structuralist models” of economic recovery. He also exposed such issues as low-income housing scarcity, inadequate emergency shelter capacity, SRO housing destruction, gentrification, the deinstitutionalization of mental institutions, and the imperative of a mandate for “good government” to work with private entities as opposed to conservative “individualistic models” of poverty reduction.113 Alter’s article was also significant in that it presented the grim reality of family homelessness and painted a rather bleak picture of housing capabilities for homeless families in the early 1980s in America. For example, Philadelphia had 15,000 emergency family housing recipients which represented a five

110 Elwell, “From Political Protest to Bureaucratic Service.”; Bogard, Seasons Such as These.; Marjorie Hyer, “One Man’s Battle to Build a Shelter for the Homeless,” Washington Post June 2, 1978 111 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America, 176. 112 Laurie Johnson, “A Journey in the City’s Netherworld,” New York Times, March 11, 1981; John R. Coleman, “Diary of a Homeless Man,” New York Magazine February 21, 1983.; Editorial, “Letters,” New York Magazine March 14, 1983, 6. Colman McCarthy, “Homeless and Headed for a Jail Cell,” Washington Post February 6, 1983). 113 Alter, “Homeless in America,” 20-33; Barak, 54. Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1997), 27.

54 five-fold increase between 1981 to 1983. According to U.S. census figures, two million Americans were living in substandard housing and “hundreds of thousands on mind-numbing waiting lists for public housing: twenty years in Miami, twelve in New York, [and] four in Savannah, [Georgia].”114 Families doubling-up in living spaces surged to fifty-eight per cent in 1982, an increase not seen since 1950. Additionally, fire hazards were no longer the most direct cause of family homelessness. The new trend put eviction not only by landlords but increasingly by friends and family members as a more frequent cause. In New York, homeless families had gone from 900 to 2,300 in 1983. These families were often housed in rat-infested welfare hotels at a cost to the city of $1,400 per month per family. In the same year in Seattle, a city which according to Alter was supposedly known more for its compassionate attitudes towards the homeless, had to turn away 4,000 families in need of temporary quarters.115

William Raspberry, a columnist for The Washington Post, tackled homelessness as a political issue by contextualizing the shift in public opinion both nationally and locally in Washington, D.C. Are street people: “Homeless by Choice?” Raspberry masterfully re-opened the debate begun by the infamous, bigoted assertion in an ABC-TV interview made by President Reagan, by presenting the choices street people faced when forced to choose between steam grates and city-run shelters. Although Raspberry mistakenly characterized the homeless as predominantly mental patients, he accurately articulated a potential rationale for their choice to sleep in alternative facilities or on steam grates citing “some of these same people used to avoid city-run shelters, ostensibly because they didn’t like the “red tape” but more likely because their experience with officialdom, in mental institutions and elsewhere made them distrustful.”116 Raspberry’s article articulated the perspective of the more sympathetic nation America had become. It expressed a desire to reckon with the mistakes of the past, to empathize with the plight of the homelessness, and made a plea for more beds and better services than the mere 2,000 beds in city-run facilities and alternative shelters run by “groups like CCNV.”117 For those who cared about the plight of the homeless, 1984 was a time for action.

In conjunction with the D.C. Presidential primary, CCNV sponsors and group leader Stephen O’Neil managed the drive which dispatched volunteers to polling places to garner the

114 Alter, 24. 115 Ibid., 25. 116 William Raspberry, “Homeless by Choice,” Washington Post, February 3, 1984. 117 Ibid.

55 necessary 21,000 signatures to get Initiative 17 on the November 6 ballot.118 New York was “the first American city to issue a judicial declaration” for the right to shelter.119 However, the proposed D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative would be the first to affirm that “all persons” within city limits “shall have the right to adequate overnight shelter [...which...] protects, and supports human health, is accessible, safe, and sanitary, and has an atmosphere of reasonable dignity.”120 Initiative claimsmakers were brought one step closer to its passage in June 1984 when the District’s estimated 5,000 to 10,000 the homeless were granted the right to vote. The DC Board of Election ruled that living in the street did not prevent the homeless from declaring a fixed place of residence.121 Apart from being able to exercise their fundament rights as D.C. residents, the political interest in allowing the homeless access to political citizenship was evident. Advocates were also successful in meeting the official August 6 deadline, by collecting more than 32,000 signatures.122 Despite this overwhelming support, major procedural gaps raised a fundamental question as to how the Initiative got on the ballot: had the advocates done enough to inform themselves and the public as to the nature and the consequences of passing the Initiative? Answering this question would stimulate a sustained political debate in the scramble to find solutions to the homeless crisis in the District. On October 3, 1984, D.C. Mayor Barry appeared before Congress, on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, to present the conclusions from a January 1984 survey of twenty cities entitled: “Task Force on Joblessness and Hunger” and to reveal the results of a ten-city case study entitled “Homelessness in America’s Cities.” The survey reported increases in emergency shelter demand in 1983 and that this need increased during 1984 in seventy per cent of the cities surveyed, despite an improvement in unemployment figures. The demand for shelter alone had increased by eighty-nine per cent in the cities surveyed. Over fifty per cent of these cities were unable to keep pace with this demand. The case study revealed a significant increase in emergency shelter demand over the previous few years, irrespective of the recent nationwide decrease in unemployment. All the cities reported a diverse homeless population and a considerable amount of mentally ill homeless persons. Seven of the cities reported a rising number of women and families with

118 The primary was on May 1, 1984. 119 Editorial. “Briefing,” New York Times, May 1, 1984. 120 District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984. D.C. Law 5-146: Section 2;. See also Display Ad. “Initiative No. 17 Summary Statement,” Washington Post, August 16, 1984.; Due to public concern about the potential influx of the homeless into the District, section six was added which excluded the homeless from neighboring states from accessing D.C. shelter on demand.; See also: Sarah H. Strauss and Andrew E. Tomback, “Homelessness: Halting the Race to the Bottom.” Yale Law & Policy Review 3, no. 2 (1985): 558 -560. 121 Alma Guillermoprieto, “Street People Savor Decision Allowing Them Right to Vote,” Washington Post, June 6, 1984. 122 Ed Bruske, “Shelter Issues To Stay on D.C. Ballot,” Washington Post, October 16, 1984.

56 children. Six cities cited unemployment as a component of homelessness. Five cities indicated that many of their homeless respondents were evicted due to inability to pay their rent. Five cities reported that their homeless population included a high percentage of alcohol and drug abusers.123 In all the twenty cities surveyed by the Task Force on Joblessness and Hunger, the primary causes of homelessness cited were a lack of affordable low-income housing, high unemployment, a high cost of living, deinstitutionalization of mental health facilities, a stricter federal benefits program, eligibility regulations, and insufficient benefit levels.124 Barry also informed the Subcommittee, that an estimated fifty-seven per cent of demands for emergency services went unmet and “despite tremendous community responses and an indication of national recovery” from an inflationary period, the problem of homelessness continued to deteriorate in America’s cities.125 In the case study of ten cities published in June 1984, Mayor Barry further testified that “although most of the cities had tight budgets,” all ten used local revenue streams for shelter provisioning and other wraparound services for their homeless populations – a statement he made sure to repeat. 126 He went on to report that all the cities in this case study were using federal funds in the form of community development block grants and emergency food and shelter funds through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to fund these services. Four of the cities in the study – New York City, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and San Francisco – “have a policy of sheltering all who request it and that homelessness…can still be found on the streets of these cities notwithstanding that policy.”127 The other six cities reported that they were “unable to shelter all who request or [were]..in need of shelter.”128 He went on to add that: “All ten cities indicated that [although] they have money locally from public and private resources… they cannot meet the need [of the homeless] with local resources alone, and that additional funds and Federal intervention are needed.”129 Mayor Barry’s testimony served two additional ends: to demonstrate that cities were not averse to using block grant funding as opposed to categorical grants (entitlement) as a means of financial assistance for the homeless and to expose the fact that a right-to-shelter policy was not a panacea for the homeless problem. It took a great deal of political savvy for Barry to support a

123 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. The Federal Response to the Homeless Crisis: hearings before the Subcommittee on Government Operations, 98th Cong., 2nd Session, October 3, 1984, 4. Washington, D.C. was not one of the cities surveyed. 124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid, 5. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid.

57 traditionally conservative block grant funding policy and to position himself against the Right to Shelter Initiative without appearing to be against the homeless. Accomplishing this goal meant creating strong coalitions with local political activists or defending the City Council position that was staunchly in favour of optimizing federal assistance funding and services. However, Mayor Barry would side with the City Council against Initiative 17 in a series of legal battles he later described as “good against good.”130 Should the District ‘require’ shelter for the homeless? It was never a question of whether to help the homeless but to what degree, at what cost, and how. The right to overnight shelter was a very polarizing, politicized, and publicized issue. The reasoning on both sides of the argument betrayed paternalistic, narrow views of street people, embedded in diverging visions of the response to the homeless crisis. In the months preceding the November vote, this debate was chronicled in the public forum of local newspapers. In the October 14 editorial page of The Washington Post, each side laid out the main arguments of its position. Marie Nahikian, on the Board of Directors of the Coalition for the Homeless, a local advocacy network of shelter providers, churches, local organizations and concerned citizens was against the Initiative. Snyder, who by then had become the face of homeless advocacy, argued in favour of it.131

Nahikian asserted that the Initiative was brought to the ballot by a small group of activists at the expense of the uninformed, local inhabitants, who would have to pay the estimated $20 million in running cost. A vote for “shelter on demand” would set in motion a public policy that “warehoused” the homeless, whereas voting against it would allow the city to provide adequate “comprehensive support services” and overnight shelter within the city’s budgetary means. For Nahikian, not providing essential wraparound services just opened a revolving door, ensnaring the homeless in a perpetual poverty trap. She argued that the estimated seventy per cent of the homeless population who suffer from some form of mental illness required specialized services. Automatic overnight shelter services should only be used in case of emergency and in response to a specific crisis such as extreme temperature. Furthermore, making the Initiative 17 a long-term solution would only absolve the federal government from sharing the financial burden. The Reagan administration which she held responsible for increasing the homeless population by more than thirty per cent in the District, should be investing more in rectifying the consequences of its

130 Katherine, Boo, “Home Economics.” Washington City Paper, September 29, 1989: 25. 131 “Close To Home: Yes/No,” Washington Post, October 14, 1984.

58 policies. Finally, she called for a more comprehensive approach to the problem by creating partnerships with “business, labor, religious and government leaders, and individual residents.” She cited the McKenna House (SRO), a Catholic Charities sponsored service provider, as the perfect model of public services for the homeless.132 Nahikian’s collaborative standard was upheld in the tenets of Catholic Charities’ mission statement which to this day aims to “strengthen [its service provision] through partnerships with other providers, government agencies, foundations, businesses, individuals, schools and churches, especially … [their] Catholic parishes.”133

Snyder’s position was supported by his conviction that Initiative 17 had to be decided by the will of the people and that its passage would not absolve the federal government from its responsibility of helping the poor. Although he recognized that “warehousing” was an issue, the provision of psychiatric care, medical assistance, and employment and housing services had to be integral to getting the homeless off the streets. He also argued that four years earlier New York City declared the legal right to shelter without any clear instances of the homeless migrating to the city to take advantage of the law. In terms of cost, Snyder took the city government to task for the estimated $20 million figure which he found implausible, due to the number of homeless being difficult to pin down. Whatever the cost, Snyder claimed that the cost would not exceed the amount taxpayers were already paying for the “overinstitutionnalization” of the homeless.134 It was the lack of shelter that was driving the homeless to seek hospital beds when no shelter beds were available. He concluded by presenting his position with his signature appeal to morality: “Even if the passage of Initiative 17 were to cost millions of dollars a year, it wouldn’t really matter. What matters most is that it is the just and necessary thing to do.”135

Each argument contained its pitfalls and degrees of naivety. Nahikian’s service-centred argument appeared ignorant of or blind to street people’s potential aversion to faith-based shelters, which required its guests to pray for their supper, and to overly bureaucratic city-run shelters. Moreover, the statistics she cited concerning the proportion of mentally ill in the homeless population were grossly inflated – a monolithic yet common typification of homelessness in the 1980s. Tragically, the medicalization of street people would become a key feature of federal public

132 Marie S. Nahikian, “Close To Home: No,” Washington Post, October 14, 1984. 133 “Our Mission,” Catholic Charities DC, September 27, 2018, https://www.catholiccharitiesdc.org/aboutus/our-mission/. 134 Mitch Snyder, “Close To Home: Yes,” Washington Post, October 14, 1984. 135 Ibid. 59 policy and service provision, as the emergency shelter system metastasized into a national institution. 136 The most glaring weakness in Snyder’s reasoning was the absence of hard statistics to support his cost projections. His definition of “the people” he hoped would vote for the Initiative, did not consider the complex network of institutions and services D.C. inhabitants depended on and paid for. In the end, winning the argument came down to who had the best strategy.

On October 29, 1984, D.C Superior Court Judge Nicholas S. Nunzio ruled to let the Initiative remain on the November 6 ballot thwarting city officials’ strategy to remove it.137 In contrast, proponents’ eleventh-hour information campaign which involved CCNV members, shelter residents, and more than 200 volunteers handing out sample ballots and speaking to voters about Initiative 17, paid off.138 The enactment of the D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative of 1984 passed by seventy-two per cent of the voters.139 Passing the Initiative meant voting for: “…the public policy of the District of Columbia to provide adequate overnight shelter to all homeless persons in the District of Columbia requesting such shelter and willing to abide by reasonable regulations governing the operation of shelter facilities.”140 However, there were severe financial consequences for the local taxpayer. City government financial outlays for shelter construction and homeless assistance went through the roof.141 When Washingtonians voted for the “the right to adequate overnight shelter” it was saying “no to grates and shopping carts” and “yes to beds and sheets.”142 Yet for activists, service providers, city officials, community leaders, concerned citizens, and anyone who attempted to provide a substantive response to the homeless crisis in Washington, D.C., many hard lessons were to come.

Charitable reform and legal advocacy had gained momentum in the two years since the first “Homelessness in America” hearing. Local grassroots activism and a steady stream of favourable media coverage, harnessed its vindications through the “politics of entitlement” to

136 Bogard, "Claimsmakers and Contexts in Early Constructions of Homelessness,” 446.; Wright, Out of Place, 20, 21. 137 Sandra G. Boodman, “D.C. Sues to Bar Shelter Initiative,” Washington Post, October 12, 1984.; Ed Burke, “Shelter Issue to Stay on D.C. Ballot,” Washington Post, October 30, 1984. 138 Rader, 231.; See also: Voting Rights, 1984, MS2018 series 2 Box 6 Folder 9, Mitch Snyder Papers, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University. 139 “D.C. Backs Homeless Shelter; Hundreds of Issues on Ballots,” Baltimore Sun November 7, 1984; Certified results: For: 114,698 Against: 43,966. Source: Government of the District of Columbia, Board of Elections and Ethics, Certification of Results of the Election on Initiative Measure No. 17, by Edward W. Norton, Valerie K. Burden, and Shirley Wyatt Mundle (City of Washington, November 20, 1984), 1. Nadine Winter Papers: Box 29 Folder 11. 140 D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative, 5-146 (1984):2. The Nadine Winter Papers: Box 86, file 8. 141 By 1989, “the District was sheltering more than 11,000 single adults and 2,400 families at an annual cost of $40 million.” (Cisneros, 1993). 142 Boo, 20.

60 further embed the crisis on the national agenda.143 However, the legislative victory represented by the passage of the D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Act of 1984 would eventually be checked by controversy and consequences as “the politics of compassion” which framed the homeless as “passive victims deserving of charity” put them squarely in the fray of counting and funding wars, ideological clashes, and political manoeuvring.144

The Beginning of the End of Initiative 17 The service provider community in the District of Columbia provide[s] a broad spectrum of services to the homeless This community is striving every day to form lasting networks among themselves, with the D.C. government, religious entities, and the private sector. By doing so, they have developed a foundation upon which to build. Their message is one of cooperation and understanding in addressing the needs of the homeless while forging programs aimed at ensuring that the homeless are not homeless forever. A renovated “model” shelter or should I say warehouse, at 425 would send a clear and unmistakable message to the homeless: this is it! This is your life! It’s ok to live like this! It’s what society has condemned you to!145 This public hearing statement given by Boyd Smith, president of Community Action Incorporated, in favour of the closure of CCNV-run Federal College emergency shelter, located in Ward 6 at 425 Second and D Street. N.W. is relevant for two reasons. First, it brings into sharp relief, the arguments against the emergency shelter model over a comprehensive service-based model found in the debate over the passage of Initiative 17. Second, the hearing is evidence that the local debate for the dominant narrative in homeless assistance had crystallized into the clearly drawn lines of a classic ‘Not In My Back Yard’ (NIMBY) battle (discussed in Chapter Three). The “kicking the bums out” rhetoric, typical of this type of locational conflict, was replaced (or veiled) by “public concern;” tied to the political interests in the renovation or closure of the shelter; and debated in the congressional public forum.146

The first stage of the conflict with the shelter appeared shortly after it officially opened its doors on January 16, 1984. A building manager in the neighbouring Judiciary Square Building wrote: “the constant loitering, panhandling trash, muggings thefts, and even the one murder last

143 Coleman McCarthy, “Homeless and Hungry and Headed for a Jail Cell,” Washington Post, February 6, 1983; Michael Kernan, “Snyder, the Wayward Shepherd.” Washington Post, January 11, 1984; Hock and Slayton New Homeless and Old; Wright, Out of Place. 144 Hock and Slayton, New Homeless and Old.; Wright, Out of Place, 27; Thomas J. Main, "New York City's Lure to the 'Homeless'." Wall Street Journal, Sep 12, 1983. 145 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Subcommittee on the Public Buildings and Grounds, To Provide A Shelter For The Homeless At 425 Second Street, NW, August 1, 1985, 243. 146 Michael Dear, "Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome," Journal of the American Planning Association 58, no. 3 (1992): 290. “Kicking the Bums Out” rhetoric refers to hostile attitudes towards the homeless which will be addressed in Chapter Three.

61 month, have all contributed to a general shabbiness that has frightened people away from the neighborhood and depressed business.”147 NIMBY sentiments such as these, which had become socially unacceptable as public attitudes shifted in the District and the nation, would eventually be redirected towards a more acceptable target of the shelter and the quality of its homeless services. The controversy around the potential closure of the shelter mobilized reactions both locally and nationally. CCNV used a network of supporters to garner the support of famous actors, public officials in other cities, Congressmen and most significantly, support from the Anacostia community. Local support for the renovation may be explained by the fact that the alternative solution to the renovation of the Federal City Shelter, was the relocation of 600 homeless persons in the shelter to 1900 Anacostia Drive S.E. – a neighbourhood then seventy per cent black. On October 31, 1985, the following letter was delivered to Margaret Heckler, then-Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, from Nadine Winter Councilmember of Ward 6 on behalf of the residents of Anacostia:

The Anacostia community, residential and business alike, has already more than its share of community-based residential facilities, unemployed, underemployed coupled with numerous other social and economic perils. At present, the Anacostia community is overburdened. I do not think it would be wise to tip the scale much further.148

CCNV eventually won its legal battle to obtain the necessary funds to renovate the shelter receiving $6.5 million in appropriations from Congress in 1986.149 This conflict was significant in that it helped to shift the debate from a political issue to an urban space inside Ward 6 and bring the respective positions on homeless assistance to the public congressional level, further defining the conflict for future NIMBY battles. However, shelter placement was not the only concern of District residents.

The financial strain that passage of the Right to Overnight Shelter Initiative put on the city was a key factor in its overturn. Renowned sociologist, John Arena examines the contradictions in the fact that although the class inequalities determined by “wealth, income, and power” expanded dramatically in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in BURs, the textual silence in academia concerning

147 U.S. Congress House of Representatives. Subcommittee on the Public Buildings and Grounds, To Provide A Shelter For The Homeless At 425 Second Street, NW, “Letter from Paul Szymanski to Judiciary Square Building Manager” July 17, 1984:, 43. 148 Nadine Winter, “Letter to Margaret Heckler.” October 31, 1985. Nadine Winter Papers: Box 86 File 5. 149 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 162.

62 marginalized working class and poor communities persisted.150 This silence has also left a dearth in research in the academy of historians concerning housing poverty and homelessness at the end of the twentieth century in terms of class. These research outcomes are significant, as they expose the inherent contradictions between the respective housing needs of the black middle class, the nearly homeless, and the street homeless in urban regimes.

Returning to the District, the main grievances the City Council members and Mayor Barry had with the right to overnight shelter law were linked to the financial well-being of the city. For example, there were no income caps on homeless assistance eligibility, the initiative would require the city to pay the legal fees for a homeless person who sued for shelter. Most importantly, Barry admitted in an interview to The Washington Post, that: “The Home Rule Act prohibits the use of initiatives for budgetary purposes...we intend to be very vigorous in our efforts to be compassionate and to offer comprehensive services to the homeless.”151 He vehemently protested this initiative as supporting it would “seriously undermine” the Mayor and the City Council’s policy-making power.152

By the mid-1980’s, the Barry administration then in its second term, had expanded the Washingtonian black middle class, through employment that swelled government staff. The legacy of getting tough on crime from the Nixon administration also left the city with a bloated budget for city police. Both these factors weighed heavily on the city’s deficit.153 Barry commented in retrospect:

There was this never-ending feeling that we had to tighten things up. Our responsibilities kept growing: the city’s healthcare, property taxes, licensing, transportation, hospital needs, housing and the homeless, city recreation, educational budgets, the private sector; it all never stopped.154

Balancing the budget was paramount for a city that still had to prove that it could manage its financial affairs, which meant breaking promises to expand assistance for the homeless. Therefore, the District’s relationship with its non-profit shelter providers was severely strained

150 John Arena, “Brining in the Black Working Class: The Black Urban Regime Strategy” Science & Society 75, no. 2 (2011): 173. 151 Eric Pianin, “City Forms Unit to Aid Homeless,” Washington Post, November 17, 1984.; The District of Columbia Home Rule Act, Public Law 93-198; 87 Stat. 777; D.C. Code § 1-201 passim. Approved December 24, 1973.; “Democracy or Distrust? Restoring Home Rule for the District of Columbia in the Post-Control Board Era," Harvard Law Review 111, no. 7 (1998): 2045-062. 152 Pianin, “City Forms Unit to Aid Homeless.” 153 Barry and Tyree, Mayor for Life, 140,152. 154 Ibid., 175. 63 under the ever-increasing growth in the homeless population. Indeed between 1980 and 1984, the District was spending an average of $4 million and supplying 500 shelter beds annually.155 By 1985, spending on homeless services was up to $9.2 million.156 However, just a month before the initiative was passed, a fifty-bed facility was closed in Georgetown amid an onslaught of community pressure. Additionally, even after Barry’s commitment to open a 24-hour intake centre at adult services and social service provisioning by twenty-seven professionals and fifteen additional caseworkers, in 1985 the city spent only $2 million more on the homeless than the year before and had only made a 100-bed contribution to the District’s emergency shelter stock. “The effects of […] Initiative17 were barely detectable.”157

Providing homeless infrastructure that would not just warehouse the homeless but offer comprehensive services, protect the city from potential civil suits from homeless activists, prevent fiscal haemorrhage, and balance a congressionally imposed budget, forced members of local government into a defence of budgetary and political turf, from an initiative that was not living up to expectations. The city clearly required more federal assistance than the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) national cash injection of the $70 million in appropriations in 1984 which extended funding through the fiscal year 1985. The subsequent federal response came in 1986.

First, the response that year came in the form of The Homeless Eligibility Clarification Act which lifted permanent address requirements and facilitated additional services for the homeless already participating in existing programs such as Supplementary Security Income, AFDC, Veterans benefits, food stamps, and Medicaid. Second, the Homeless Housing Act created two small funding programs: An Emergency Shelter Grants (ESG) Program and a transitional housing demonstration program funded at $10 million and $5 million respectively.158 Finally, after a prolonged and unsuccessful battle to overturn Initiative 17, the District eventually fell back on its federal protectorate status to repackage the homeless crisis as a federal problem. Social activists, the city council, the mayor, and concerned members of Congress forged a temporary alliance and successfully fought for more federal aid, infrastructures, and services.159 The result created the

155 Boo, 20. 156 Linda Wheeler, “A Test of D.C.’s Policy on the Homeless,” Washington Post, November 1990. 157 Boo, 20. 158 Foscarinis, 161-62. 159 Desda Moss, “Shelters Count on More Federal Aid,” USA Today, March 3, 1987.

64 nation’s first piece of major homeless legislation, the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 (H.R. 558 100th Congress). Although advocates had pushed for a federal policy that would build more affordable housing, the actual legislation focused on extending emergency assistance to the homeless and the expansion of the emergency shelter system.160 Discussion of this bill is significant as it marks the beginning of the institutionalization of shelter provisioning in the third ghetto.

The McKinney Homeless Assistance Act

Passage of the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act 1987 was a measure that resulted in congressional cooptation of shelter provision which institutionalized the third ghetto, decimated CCNV’s (particularly Mitch Snyder’s) image as political outsiders, and brought the issue of helping the homeless into the mainstream of the political debate on poverty solutions.161 However, having reached the apex of their capacity to provoke local substantive legislative change in 1984 with the passage of Initiative 17, CCNV’s political influence was approaching its nadir. The passage of the McKinney Act represented the federal government’s attempted to respond to the central question of the homeless crisis: what should be done about the homeless? Consequently, this new federal legislation created a surrogate for national leadership by deflating homelessness as a moral issue; shifting the narrative of the homeless crisis by reshaping the crisis as a political problem; and transforming CCNV’s pedigree of local leadership into the diminished status of paper tigers.

A major contributing factor to the passage of the McKinney Act was the combined claimsmaking actions of legal advocates in New York City and the direct action tactics of local grassroots activists in Washington, D.C. One of the earliest proposed pieces of legislation to address homelessness as a federal issue came from the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), a New York-based network of advocates, community-based, and faith-based providers. The Homeless Persons’ Survival Act of 1986, which NCH proposed, targeted the crisis in three ways. First, it recognized that homelessness was not just a local issue and that the homeless crisis had grown beyond the reach of local government’s ability to contain it. Second, it included a provision

160 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 175-180. Foscarinis, 160-71.; Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, H.R. 558, P.L. 100-77 (1987 161 Karlyn Barker and Eric Pianin, “The Grate Society: Actors and Lawmakers Stage ‘Sleep-Out’ for the Homeless,” Washington Post, March 4, 1987.

65 that targeted at-risk populations through temporary aid. Finally, it emphasized the importance of addressing the lack of affordable housing.162 Some of its measures were absorbed into an anti-drug bill which passed at the eleventh hour of the ninety-ninth Congress. These provisions allowed the homeless to collect food stamps without proof of address and homeless veterans to collect Social Security Disability, Supplemental Security Income, welfare benefits, and Medicaid.163

Locally, CCNV put pressure on Congress to pass federal legislation by placing a nativity statue on Capitol Hill, receiving high-profile visits at the Federal City Shelter from House Speaker Jim Wright; sending letters to supporters of an eventual federal bill, contacting their legislators; and participating in highly publicized direct-action events such as the “Grate American Sleep Out” held on the eve of the House vote.164 The combined efforts of local and national advocacy, bipartisan congressional support, and constituent activism would eventually produce results. Originally introduced to Congress as the “Foley-McKinney Urgent Relief for the Homeless Act,” which later became the Stewart B. McKinney Act (H.R. 558), passed with large majorities in the House in January 1987 (296-79) and shortly after in the Senate (77-6). It was hailed as a bipartisan victory made complete when Ronald Reagan capitulated on July 22, 1987, signing the McKinney Act with a decided “lack of enthusiasm.”165

Although the federal government’s entrant response to provide support directly to emergency shelters came first with the Emergency Food and Shelter Program (authorized in 1983), it was the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act which not only formalized but also consolidated federal assistance to the homeless. Its ambitious array of wraparound services included: alcohol and various drug abuse services, mental health care, primary health care, homeless veterans’ assistance, adult and children educational programs, community service and job training. Its emergency shelter and transitional and permanent housing included: Emergency Shelter Grants, Transitional and Permanent Housing, Supplemental Assistance, and SROs. The bill provided $500 million in federal aid to be dispersed in the following way:

$100 million for Section 8 rental housing subsidies targeted solely for homeless families. $75 million for a new grant program to meet both the physical and mental

162 Bogard, Seasons Such as These 171.; http://nationalhomeless.org/about-us/who-we-are 163 Ibid., 171-172. 164 James Earl Reid, "Third World America: A Contemporary Nativity," James Earl Reid, accessed August 28, 2018, http://www.traditionliveson.com/reid.html. 165 Robert Pear, “President Signs $1 Billion Bill in Homeless Aid,” New York Times, July 24, 1987.; J. Fuerbringer, "Aid for Homeless Passed by House," New York Times, March 6, 1987.

health needs of the homeless. $75 million for a new grant program to convert surplus government property into facilities for the homeless. $50 million for the Community Service Block Grant Program for the homeless. $30 million for HUD’s Transitional Housing Demonstration Program. $25 million for construction of permanent housing for handicapped homeless persons. $20 million for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program.166 Burt and Cohen contended that: “[t]aking into account all five McKinney shelter-related programs together, federal funding for 1989 ($171.5 million) represented a thirty-two per cent reduction from the same funding for 1987-1988 ($253 million).”167 This meant that although Congress authorized $617 million in 1988 for the hungry and homeless, only $253 million were appropriated for the McKinney Act programs, which represented a fifty-seven per cent cut from 1987.168 Burt and Cohen also posited that: “if this is a trend, it does not leave the states feeling confident that the Congress and the President will increase federal investment in programs for the homeless.”169 This sign of congressional ambivalence towards homeless assistance beyond the initial overtures of emergency relief leads us to question how the McKinney Act was passed in the first place. In fact, there was an overwhelmingly high Congressional support for the act in both houses. Liberal Democrats such as Ted and Joseph Kennedy, Henry Waxman, Alan Cranston, and Mary Rose Oakar despised Reagan’s infamous callousness toward the poor, his penchant for misrepresentation of female heads of welfare households, and his draconian welfare policy cuts. Moderate Republicans like Chalmers Wylie, Mark Hatfield, Pete Domenici and Orrin Hatch, voted for bipartisan antipoverty legislation nascent from legal precedents set in the War on Poverty in the 1960s and 1970s.170

Although the passage of the McKinney Act was considered “a positive first step,” the subsequent program cuts and the aforementioned budget cuts, led the Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness to conclude that the nation had “taken one step forward and two steps back.”171 Furthermore, the lack of coordination between its aggregate homeless programs created a limited institution of poverty management with insufficient interservice coordination with the welfare

166 Joanne M. Piper, “The Policy Implications of Homelessness,” (Master’s diss., University of Michigan-Flint, 1996), 2.; see also Congressional Record, Vol. 133, No. 34 Thursday, March 5, 1987, page III007. 167 Burt and Cohen, “Who is Helping the Homeless,” 116. 168 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America –1988: hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 100th Cong., 2nd Session, January 26, 1988, 121. 169 Burt and Cohen, “Who is Helping the Homeless,” 116. 170 Katz, The Undeserving Poor. 171 Pear, “President Signs $1 Billion Bill in Homeless Aid.”; U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America –1988, 121.

67 system.172 Yet this legislation is significant because it formalized emergency shelter system of the third ghetto and set in motion a new bureaucratic normalization of assistance albeit with insufficient focus on the assisted.

The bill’s implementation in the District proved problematic for several reasons. There was a lack of coordination between federal and local government entities. Worst still, the emergency grant program’s fund-matching schemes were consistently left unmet, leaving large amounts of unappropriated funds. The House Committee exercised its control over the D.C. budget and systematically underfunded its basic wraparound services. The District government was unable to capitalize on the common ground between homeless and welfare programs. Finally, the lack of oversight as to how and to whom the federal funds would be distributed, invited mismanagement which depleted the city’s resources for other poverty initiatives.173 For example, the promise “to take the boards off” and to renovate a thousand units for public housing, which helped launch Barry’s political career in 1979, was never fulfilled.

By 1987 in Washington, D.C., a six-year-old “modernization” plan left nineteen per cent of the city’s public housing stock “boarded up and unused except by squatters, vagrants, and drug addicts.”174 In his journey up from black subjugation in Nashville, to black power, to “black civil rights mayor,” Barry had become powerless to curb the inertia that plagued many first wave, black mayors, during the 1980s. He witnessed the District of Columbia fall deeper into “high levels of violent crime, drug abuse, homelessness, school failure, and job loss.”175 From the support of real estate investors that helped pave his way to power, to the drugs that impaired his judgment, he became a part of the dynamic which exacerbated the homeless crisis.176 In his autobiography, Barry weighed in on his political legacy:

You do a million good things for the community, and they [the government] try to wipe it all out with the bad things. The media liked to talk about all of the things that we continue to work on instead of the things that we’ve already solved. They liked to talk about the things that are torn down instead of the things that we build up.177

172 Margaret Engel, “Homeless Women’s ‘Revolving Door,’” Washington Post, December 25, 1984. 173 Nunez, 20-25.; Ruth Marcus, “ ‘The New Homeless’: Growing Number of Families Crowd Suburban Shelters.” February 18, 1985. 174 Jaffe and Sherwood, 188. 175 Thompson, Double Trouble, 6. 176 Nelson F. Kofie, Race, Class, and the Struggle for Neighborhood in Washington, D.C. (New York: Garland, 1999).; See also: Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City.; Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 177 Barry and Tyree, Mayor for Life, 221.

As a representative of the “voiceless citizens” in the black community in Washington, D.C. for more than four decades, one would have expected more accountability.178 Indeed, his self- proclaimed “gift of standing up and fighting for the people and a broader vision of empowerment” made him a formidable politician, but not necessarily a man of his word.179 From the plush lawns of the White House Ronald Reagan declared in 1987: “In the sixties, we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.”180 Indeed, the end of the Reagan administration found low-income blacks worse off since the 1968 D.C. uprising, an underfunded, burgeoning homeless shelter system filled to capacity, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development a bastion of influence peddling and mismanagement for ethically challenged officials. Although homeless activists and anti-poverty advocates successfully harnessed congressional compassion to create several major legislative measures, their federated legal advocacy succeeded only in institutionalizing homelessness and not eradicating it.

Conclusion The central focus of this chapter was to bring homeless policymaking into a larger discussion of federal capital district homeless assistance during the Reagan administration, by asserting the existence of a third ghetto. Understanding the racial component of the third ghetto is a long-awaited addition to our knowledge of homeless policy and brings the first and second ghettoes in the District into sharp relief. Contextualizing the third ghetto within the framework of federal and local policy clarifies the genesis of the emergency shelter system as a burgeoning institution whose existence is owed to the efforts of homeless advocacy and a belated federal response.

For marginalized communities such as the homeless, access to some of the institutions of political and social citizenship is not the guarantor of full citizenship, nor does it foster political agency. However, citizenship does matter, both in how we exercise it in the present and apply its framework to the past.181 In the first decade of the new homeless era, activists were a vital force

178 Ibid., 222. 179 Ibid., 238. 180 Nicholas Lemann, “The Unfinished War,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1988. 181 Irene Bloemraad, "Theorising the Power of Citizenship as Claims-making," Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 1 (2017).; Florencia Peyrou, "Citizenship and History: Historiographic Approaches to Citizenship," eds. Steven G. Ellis, Guðmundur Hálfdanarson, and Ann Katherine Isaacs, In Citizenship in Historical Perspective ( Edizioni Plus/Pisa Univ. Press, 2006), https://www.academia.edu/990973/Citizenship_and_History_Historiographic_Approaches_to_Citizenship.; Kathleen R. Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity: The Uncanniness of Late Modernity (SUNY Series in National Identities) (State University of New York Press, 2004).

69 in shaping the narrative of the homeless as “just like us” and through an adept use of direct action and legal advocacy were able to not only help formalize the third ghetto as an institution but also to defend the basic rights of the homeless who lived in these ghettoes such as the right to vote and the right to adequate shelter.

In terms of sheltering solutions, early overtures to solve the District’s homeless crisis consisted in throwing local and federal funds at the problem. Although service providers concluded that the homeless should not be warehoused, the solutions provided in the 1980s relied on a limited understanding of the various subgroups in homeless communities. Once the city government had finally taken the helm of homeless service provisioning, the challenge of providing adaptable solutions for affordable housing and wraparound services remained unmet. The trope of the recalcitrant, service resistant street person in the first wave of “new homelessness” (1977 to 1989) had clearly been recast as warehoused victims of the service-poor emergency shelter complex following the second wave of this new poverty (1989-1999). Early claimsmakers like CCNV in remaining relentless and intransigent in their efforts, helped direct public compassion, and frame the homeless crisis as a moral issue and rights-and-justice issue. However, their inability to adapt to the changing responses to homelessness and to build lasting broad-based coalitions, eroded their status and legitimacy, blocking the opportunity to help construct viable solutions for the District and the Nation.

By the end of the 1980s, the passage of the D.C. Right to Overnight Shelter Act of 1984 and the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 fortified the shelter system in Washington, D.C., and fostered the institutionalization of the third ghetto of the emergency shelter system by warehousing the homeless in “open penitentiaries.”182 Marcuse’s theory of “advanced homelessness” in its recognition of the racial component of modern homelessness is salient.183 However, it does not account for the placement of the “temporary” homeless shelters not only in “the abandoned residential” and “residual” cities, but also in “the luxury housing spots,” in the “the residential city,” in the “places of big decisions,” and in “the city of advanced services, and direct production” of beachhead areas in affluent neighbourhoods such as Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, and the West End in the District of Columbia.184 It is the confrontation

182 Kerr, 200.; See also Bogard, Seasons Such as These,197. 183 Marcuse, “Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City. 184 Marcuse, “Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City,” 196-197; In some less affluent neighbourhoods East of the Anacostian watershed, residents fought the construction of shelters in their communities believing that they were already “dumping grounds” for other elements of urban

70 between these components of the “residential city” and “economic city,” which set the stage for the NIMBY battles waged throughout the nineties in Washington, D.C.185 However, before addressing this confrontation, the connections between the second ghetto, the War on Drugs, and the third ghetto as well as the impact of the Housing Now! March in the District must be examined as constituent parts of the changing attitudes towards the homeless at the end of the 1980s.

decay: Ed Bruske, “Moving of Homeless to Anacostia Protested,” Washington Post, October 1, 1985.; Patrice Gaines-Carter, “Anacostians Complain About Stepchild Status,” Washington Post, October 6, 1985. 185 Linda Wheeler, “005 Felled By Voters In Ward 3: Homeless Issue Won In Most of District,” Washington Post, November 15, 1990; Linda Wheeler, “A Test of D.C.'s Policy on the Homeless: Advocates Seek Voter Support to Continue Initiative Guaranteeing Right to Shelter Series: Campaign ’90,” Washington Post, November 4, 1990. 71

Chapter 2 – HOUSING WHEN? Family homelessness and the quest for affordable housing in the District

A decent and affordable home is but a distant dream for many of our people. For millions, home is a box, a street corner, or a cot. These are our nation’s homeless. They live, suffer, and die in our midst. For millions of others, home is a place that costs too much, is too crowded, or is unsafe. We are far from meeting our national commitment to decent homes for all.1 These first lines of a call to action for “Housing Now!” conveyed the purpose and foreshadowed the destiny of a protest of principle, which did not become the movement of consequence it aspired to be. Why did not the National March for Housing Now! move the needle on the public housing and homeless crisis in Washington, D.C.? E.P. Thompson once posited that “most social movements have a life cycle of about six years” and that unless they make “decisive political impact” within that “window of opportunity” they will have “little effect on the larger political structures they hope to transform.”2 Washington, D.C.’s anti-homelessness movement (active since 1977) was irrevocably tethered to the legacy of Initiative 17 and the McKinney Act. Consequently, by 1989 the year of the Housing Now! March, its days of making large-scale inroads in the homeless crisis on the local and national level were already behind them. This chapter argues that the Housing Now! March did not have a lasting impact on the homeless crisis, due to the coalition’s ill-adapted strategy to the complexities of affordable housing, and the changing dynamic between the politics of compassion, and the larger scope of urban poverty governance.3

The Housing Now! March was not an impromptu demand for social justice from a group of ragtag dissidents coming to the nation’s capital for yet another protest. It was a carefully programmed three-day event, with pilgrimages of more than sixty organizations from New York City, Roanoke, Virginia, and the West Coast to campsites all around D.C. to be occupied for two days before the scheduled march on Saturday, October 7, 1989. Its rallies, community outreach

1 “Letter for From the Housing Now! Coalition: ‘A Call to Action Housing Now!” Washington, D.C., 1989: 1. MS2153 Series 7 Box 14 Folder 2, Carol Fennelly Papers, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University. 2 Cited in Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “ Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 75 (Dec. 1988): 811. Found in Joel Sipress, “A Narrowing of Vision: Hardy L. Brian and the Fate of Louisiana Populism,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 7, no.1, (Jan. 2008): 66. 3 The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that the Housing Now! March led to the passage of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act 1990 but provides no evidence. See: https://nationalhomeless.org/campaigns/housing-now-2020/.

72 events, fundraising, press conferences, celebrity auction, interfaith service, and Housing Now! educational materials (grades four to twelve) were meticulously planned and produced.4 On the “Lobby Days,” The Housing Now! Coalition sent constituents to meet their Congressman, and to convince Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Sec. Jack Kemp to support its essential creed: affordable housing for all.5 The Housing Now! March’s call to action – this article of confederation – revealed the inherent contradictions of the endeavour. Although housing poverty and homelessness shared some of the same structural barriers to housing, education, and employment, they did not necessarily share the same solutions. Whereas the Housing Now! Coalition’s appeal to public compassion played to empathic impulses, demanding that the poor be given affordable housing was counterintuitive to the individualistic value the notion of home represented and still represents in America. Furthermore, the demand for affordable housing from Federal Washington the seat of the nation’s government was insufficient given the trajectory of housing poverty and homelessness particular to Hometown Washington – the city’s residents.

The Housing Now! coalition’s call to action stated: “[as] a compassionate and concerned people we must bring to government an emphatic message to reverse the housing crisis.”6 However, should the priorities of that compassion have been placed with the collective condition of the poor or the economic sovereignty of the individual? This schematic manner of viewing the remedy to the nation’s housing problems is reductive but it delineated the bipartisan divide on solutions to inner-city poverty at the end of the 1980s. Complexity was to be found in the realities of Hometown Washington notably, in the multivocal debates as to how to deal simultaneously with the financial and logistical challenges of Initiative 17, the public housing and homeless crises, and the War on Drugs. Whereas the Cassandras warning of the pressing need for affordable housing were largely ignored and compassion for the homeless began to wane, conservative think tanks and policymakers viewed housing poverty and homelessness as a problem of housing market availability and homeownership.7

4 Carol Fennelly papers, Box 15 File 1/File: Housing Now! Meetings Feb.- August 1989.; “National Educators To Announce Support for Housing Education Week and Housing and Homelessness Curriculum.” Washington, D.C.: September 7, 1989. Housing Now!. Carol Fennelly papers, Series 1 Box 14 Folder 9. 5 The Housing Now! coalition was composed of 175 national organizations and hundreds of local groups including homeless and housing advocates, labour unions, religious organizations, and foundations.; Matt Lait, “Homeless People, Advocates Heading to District for ‘Housing Now’ Rally,” Washington Post, October 1, 1989.; “Housing Now! Lobby Days - October 5 & 6, 1989 – Washington, D.C.” Housing Now! (1989). Carol Fennelly papers Box 14 Folder 3. 6 “A Call to Action: Housing Now!” 1. Carol Fennelly papers, Box 14 Folder 2. 7 Cassandra here and throughout this thesis refers to the mythological figure gifted with the ability to pronounce true prophecies but cursed never to be believed. 73

In Federal Washington, Sec. Kemp had a mission to “drain the swamp” of former HUD Sec. Pierce’s scandal-ridden administration. He also had a plan to win the war against poverty through homeownership for “underclass” tenants of inner-city housing projects. The Republican philosophy of “self-sufficiency, entrepreneurship, and bureaucratic deregulation,” would be tried and tested on the nation’s public housing projects.8 The District of Columbia was one of the laboratories of these housing pilot programs, as the “tough love” of self-sufficiency gradually supplanted the politics of compassion in the second and third ghettoes.

Self-reliance is fundamental and sacred to the American ethos.9 Throughout history, the unfortunate anti-thesis of this core value has fostered the stigma of laziness, fraudulence, and dependency on an “undeserving” subpopulation of the poor. How did the nation speak of and care for those who were not only unable to “help themselves” but also appeared impervious to outside assistance? This is an important question to consider in the larger narrative of poverty knowledge at the end of the twentieth century as popular, political, and social scientific discourse on these members of the “underclass” took a conservative turn that directly impacted the “new consensus on welfare reform” and homeless policy in the 1980s.10 Answering this question also provides an opportunity to historicize the modalities of the intersecting powers of the welfare state and the homeless assistance apparatus to think about how the state works rather than what the state is.

This chapter exposes how dependency talk and self-help rhetoric shaped, restricted, and even impeded full access to the right to housing for single-parent homeless families in Washington, D.C. in the last two years of the 1980s.11 Section one observes family homelessness as pertains to African American single female heads of household during the Reagan/Bush administrations. Section two analyses one of the iterations of the third ghetto – homeless families – living in the District’s welfare hotels. Section three unpacks Jack Kemp’s war against poverty and examines the unravelling of Initiative 17. Finally, section four gauges the impact of the Housing Now! March on the homeless crisis. Existing scholarship on the Housing Now! March contextualizes the event

8 Milloy Courtland, “The Republic Approach,” Washington Post, October 25, 1988. 9 Gareth, Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism ( Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996). 10 O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge U.S.,256 - 59. 11 Dependency talk is a term developed by the author of this thesis to refer to the discourse around welfare dependency and homeless assistance in public and political discourse as well as poverty scholarship. In this discursive logic, either the recipient is blamed for his/her dependency or the service provider is blamed for enabling this dependency. A development of “sick talk, sin talk, and system talk” developed by Teresa Gowan, “The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration in Two American Cities.” Ethnography 3, no. 4 (January 2002): 500–534.; see also Peter Somerville, "Understanding Homelessness," Housing, Theory and Society 30, no. 4 (2013).

74 within a larger discussion of local homeless movements, prominent homeless activists, and the role of political protest in the 1980s.12 However, this section focuses on one of the key demands of the Housing Now! March – the lack of affordable housing. It also examines housing availability’s connection to homelessness.

Family Homelessness From the Nation to the Nation’s Capital

Manifestations of a visible “new homelessness” emerged in the 1970s, in a subpopulation of the poor that was becoming younger, more female, and racially segregated in urban America. They were some of the faces of “long-standing gender and racial inequities in the postwar economy and the welfare state.”13 Questions of gender and race in postwar poverty were well-documented by scholars of the “feminization of poverty” a term invented by Diana Pearce in 1978.14 Although the majority of its scholarship was written during the 1980s and 1990s and the term is rarely applied in the twenty-first century, it offers urban scholars a glimpse at how changing trends in inner-city familial poverty was viewed at the end of the twentieth century outside of the underclass debate. Until the 1960s the majority of poor families were either headed by husbands or other males. However, between 1969 and 1978 a dramatic shift occurred. The number of poor male- headed families dropped significantly from 3.2 million to 2.6 million. Conversely, the number of poor families with minor children increased from 1.8 to 2.7 million a trend that continued into the 1980s.15 Emily Northrop postulated that these reversals occurred in two waves -the first in 1974 - 1975 and the second from 1979 to 1983.16 Scholarship on the feminization of poverty was essentially concerned with three areas: changes in family structure such as increasing rates of divorce and non-marital births and child support challenges; participation, segregation, and discrimination in the labour market for women; and the efficacy and impact welfare programs.17

An important point of consensus of the scholarship on the feminization of poverty was the observation that as drastic as the shifts in the composition of poor families were during the 1970s

12 Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness, 178-179.; Michael S. Foley, Front Porch Politics: the Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s (New York: Macmillan, 2013), 269, 278. 13 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 243.; Charles H. Moore, David W. Sink, and Patricia Hoban-Moore. “The Politics of Homelessness.” PS: Political Science and Politics 21, no. 1 (1988): 57–63.; Katz, The Undeserving Poor. 14 Diana Pearce, "The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work, and Welfare." Urban and Social Change Review 11 (February 1978): 28-36. 15 Arthur Blaustein, The American Promise. (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), 8.; see also Janice Peterson, “The Feminization of Poverty” Journal of Economic Issues 21, no.1 (1987):329. 16 Emily M. Northrop, “The Feminization of Poverty: The Demographic Factor and The Composition of Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic Issues 24, no.1 (1990):146. 17 Peterson, 330.

75 and 1980s, these trends were even more severe in the African American community: “[d]uring the 1970s, the number of black families in poverty who were maintained by men declined by thirty- five per cent, while the number maintained by women increased by sixty-two per cent. In the course of one decade, black female-headed families increased from one-half to three-fourths of all poor black families.”18 Was it a question of the feminization of poverty or the disappearance of men? Susser attempted to answer this question by addressing male exclusion “from employment and public assistance” and their disappearance from society due to “incarceration or death.”19 Liberal discourse on the study of how limited inner-city resources should be invested to best aid the African American family was focused on two areas: the reintegration of African American men into the labour market as a means of fortifying black families and the effect of the economy on single female heads of household.20 Conversely, conservatives attributed the increases “in the welfare rolls and the changes in family structure among African Americans to liberal welfare policies that created disincentives for work.”21 Reagan’s “Great American Comeback” which relied on free-market solutions and economic growth was proposed as the solutions to reduce poverty – the rising tide that would lift all boats. However, studies conducted during the Reagan administration concluded that economic growth alone was not the solution to eradicating poverty.22

Although the Reagan administration could not be held accountable for the new poverty which began to plague urban cities as early as the 1970s, it was responsible for exacerbating inner- city poverty through “Reagan reforms” such as the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 (OBRA). This measure severely impacted poor working women through AFDC program cuts which occurred primarily by raising the tax rate on earned income of welfare recipients and putting in place more restrictive gross income limits.23 OBRA also affected lower-income and poor residents of large inner cities, particularly due to cuts in AFDC benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid. Reagan administration Defense Department military outlays meant the elimination of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act job program as well as substantial cuts in Social Security, Medicare, public housing, veterans’ hospitals, college student loans, and other social programs. Additionally, the former HUD budget prepared by the Carter administration of $30.9

18 Diana Pearce, "The Feminization of Ghetto Poverty," Society 21 (November/ December 1983): 70. 19 Susser, 420-422. 20 Donna L. Franklin, “Feminization of Poverty and African-American Families: Illusions and Realities,” Affilia 7, no. 2 (1992): 151. 21 Ibid., 148 22 Peterson, 336. 23 Ibid., 335.

76 billion for 260,000 units fell to $18.2 billion for public housing and Section 8 vouchers for approximately 153,000 units.24 Drastic budget cuts in low-income housing and other federal programs led to public outcry and predictions of substantial tears in the “social safety net” for the poor. U.S. Representative Cardiss Collins of Chicago, chairwoman of the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Manpower and Housing, “contended that the projected increase in rent for public housing tenants, as specified in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 would surely lead to more homelessness in urban America.”25

Dorothy Wickenden wrote that the ranks of the hundreds of thousands of homeless who entered the city shelters, welfare hotels, churches, and synagogues were being filled by “growing numbers… of unemployed people with their entire families.”26 In 1982, in the District of Columbia, the “welfare hotel” system underwent an expansion when the fifty-one-room Pitts Hotel obtained exclusive rights to shelter families for the sum of $1.3 million a year.27 To manage the crisis, Washington, D.C. resorted increasingly to the “open market system” where families were shuffled through the revolving door of one squalid welfare hotel to the next.28 Wickenden reported: Homeless families must go each day to the aptly named Pitts Hotel…for the night. If the Pitts is full, they are given bus fare and sent to one of two other dismal hotels on the outskirts of the city, or to the Greentree Shelter in Bethesda, Maryland. The next day they return to the Pitts and begin the process again. Many families shuttle among the hotels for months as they search frantically for an apartment they can afford.29 Examining housing instability for low-income and poor families underscores the convergence of the welfare state and an emerging homeless crisis. The lack of federal funds to increase affordable housing, doubling up with family, insufficient AFDC benefits, and long waiting lists for public housing made the threat of homelessness for many single-parent families in Washington, D.C., a looming and imminent possibility. In a LIFE Magazine special issue: “The Dream Then and Now,”

24 Section 8 housing: is a program which allows very low-income families to receive monthly housing assistance indexed on the difference between the payment standard for the area (not the actual rent) and 30% of the families monthly income. This assistance is distributed through housing vouchers. These vouchers permit families to rent units beyond fair market rents and have a wider selection of rental units. Source: Programs of HUD. Washington: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Developments, 1988-1989: 40. 25 Biles, 255-256. 26 Dorothy Wickenden, "Abandoned Americans What Ronald Reagan Could Learn from Charles Dickens," The New Republic, March 18, 1985, 20. Found in Magazine articles, 1981-1986, MS2025 Series 6 Box 2, Folder 9, Mary Ellen Hombs Papers, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University. Wickenden was an editor at Newsweek (1993-1995). Before that, she was managing and then executive editor at The New Republic for fifteen years. She has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. 27 The National Coalition for the Homeless. “Precious Resources: Government-Owned Housing and the Needs of the Homeless A Survey of 32 Cities.” September 1988, 143. 28 Wickenden, 21.; Margaret Engel, Homeless Women’s ‘Revolving Door,’ Washington Post, December 25, 1984. 29 Wickenden, 21.; Sharon LaFraniere, “D.C. Audit Official Calls Pitts Contract Exorbitant: Hotel Owner Is Paid to House Homeless,” Washington Post, November 11, 1986.

77 renowned sociologist William Julius Wilson provided hard data on inner-city single parent housing precarity:

By 1984, the inflation-adjusted dollar value of welfare (the combined package of Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps) was 22 percent less than it was in 1972. It's no wonder that there has been an increasing number of homeless black […] women. And they are taking their families with them.30 On the federal level, the government sought solutions to the inner-city public housing crisis through desegregation. In order to build new subsidized housing in integrated areas and attract minority populations to these areas, the HUD implemented an affirmative fair housing marketing strategy requirement for federally-assisted housing project builders. However, the lack of oversight in administrating the policy on a local level opened the door to abuse. George Rodriguez, a reporter for The Dallas Daily News, exposed some of the violations which occurred on the state level in an article entitled “Integration rule widely ignored.”31 He cited a 1983 nationwide study commissioned by the HUD which revealed that only forty-seven per cent of seventy-six projects actually made good on their promise to contact targeted community groups and that the HUD only monitored a fourth of these groups.32 “Without the oversight… there were no incentives for developers and managers to comply with the regulations and conduct affirmative marketing.”33 For example, HUD records uncovered in Dallas, Texas proved that “the agency approved projects that set only token goals and whose plans contained no provisions for marketing the housing to prospective minority tenants.”34 However, affirmative marketing was not the HUD’s only strategy to combat inner-city poverty. In the mid-1980s, policymakers also looked to urban homesteading.

Rep. Jack Kemp’s successful “Urban Homestead” proposal in June 1986, contained two amendments to the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 which would allow tenants living in public housing “to exchange rent payments to mortgage payments,” and assume the responsibilities of property management and private ownership.35 Rep. Kemp’s amendments, which had broad bipartisan appeal, introduced “a direct and simple concept: that the poor can and will improve their own common welfare if they are given the freedom and the tools to do so.”36

30 William J. Wilson et al., "Barriers," Life Magazine Special Issue, Spring 1988, 42. 31 George Rodriguez, “Integration rule widely ignored,” The Dallas Daily News, February 14, 1985. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Donald Lambro, ”Singing the praises of public housing legislation: Victories for Jack Kemp, victories for the poor,” The San Antonio Light, June 18, 1986. 36 Ibid.

This autonomy could be accomplished by giving inner-city low-income families the opportunity to buy their own homes. However, this was not the first time working class families were offered a way out of their circumstances through homeownership. Urban scholar Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor exposes the predatory lending practices of the 1970s as the HUD and lenders set up “golden ghettoes” which leveraged profitable, federally sponsored loan packages at the expense of black applicants irrespective of their ability to repay them.37 Meanwhile, as the public housing crisis persisted and more families found themselves on the streets of America’s inner cities, dependency talk would also pervade the debates about and solutions for homelessness.

The state of family homelessness spoke to the depth of housing insecurity in the District. By December of 1986, 300 families were in shelters and Washington D.C. had the highest per capita cost of $100 per day to house and feed a family of four in the nation. Critics blamed the explosion in the numbers of homeless families on the passage of Initiative 17.38 As for the family emergency shelter system, Earnest Taylor, then director of D.C.’s Office of Emergency Shelter and Support Services commented on the state of family housing: “It’s almost as if we’re a substitute for public housing.”39

According to studies conducted by the National Coalition and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the number of homeless persons in America had grown by twenty to twenty-five per cent in 1986 alone. Homeless families represented about twenty-eight to thirty per cent of that rising population.40 Of the 735,000 people homeless on any given night an estimated 100,000 were children. A vast majority of homeless families received AFDC benefits. The ethnic composition of this subgroup was overrepresented by minorities in cities and whites in suburban and rural areas. Homeless mothers tended to be in their late twenties, single or divorced with several years of high school study. Many homeless mothers were victims of domestic violence. The average size of homeless families was two to three children and the average age of these children was five years

37 Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 5. 38 The National Coalition for the Homeless. “Precious Resources: Government-Owned Housing and the Needs of the Homeless A Survey of 32 Cities.” September 1988, 144.; Marcia Slacum Greene, “Homeless Families Triple in District: City-Funded Rooms at Motel Become Disturbingly Popular,” Washington Post, August 9, 1986.; Tom Sherwood, “D.C. Moves Toward Tightening Requirements for Homeless Aid,” Washington Post, August 26, 1988. 39 NCH, “Precious Resources,” 143. 40 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. The Crisis in Homelessness Effects on Children and Families hearing before the Select Committee on Children Youth and Families, 100th Cong., 1st Session, February 24, 1987, 20.

79 old.41 Many of these families were recipients of welfare benefits which did not keep pace with the growing cost of living. In a prepared congressional statement read by Ciro A. Scalera, Executive Director Tricia Fagan Outreach Coordinator for the Association for Children of New Jersey laid bare the correlation between welfare recipiency and homelessness:

…not only is the AFDC program failing in its intent, but that by failing to keep pace with inflation and provide a grant which allows for at least a minimum decent lifestyle, the program is actually putting these families dependent on AFDC in jeopardy. Housing costs and other economic realities [are ] such that for many AFDC families, homelessness is now a real and imminent danger.42 The tragic convergence of public housing, AFDC programs, and homelessness continued as the nation moved toward the end of the Reagan administration. Passage of the McKinney Act which authorized $443 million for fiscal year 1987 and $616 for fiscal year 1988, for housing, food, and health care for the homeless, reinforced this convergence. Critics viewed the law as “an expensive welfare program that failed to reduce homelessness and service providers noted the inadequacy of the resources provided.”43 Although some housing advocates maintained that the measure only reinforced the shelter industry of emergency shelters and welfare hotels, the law was widely viewed as a step in the right direction.44 Contemporaneously, under Reagan’s New Federalism, public housing issues of rent subsidy pay-outs, housing modernization, affordable housing availability, crack dens, drug trafficking, and gang violence, were further relegated to the states and urban cities to manage. Policy shortfalls on federal and local levels fed the homeless crisis, as growing numbers of families living in untenable public housing conditions joined the ranks of the “new” homeless population.

Revisiting the Third Ghetto: Welfare Hotels In the congressional hearing held on January 26 entitled “Homeless in America 1988,” two things were abundantly clear: homeless families with children were a growing concern and despite the passage of The McKinney Homeless Assistance Act, the homeless crisis had continued to get worse. During her congressional testimony, Maria Foscarinis, Washington Counsel to the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), took stock of the nation’s progress since the first congressional

41 Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs (Washington, D.C.: National Acad. Pr., 1988), accessed December 30, 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218232/. 42 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. The Crisis in Homelessness Effects on Children and Families, 92. 43 Biles, 268. 44 Bogard, Seasons Such as These, 193. 80 hearings on homelessness in America conducted in December 1982. She confirmed that homelessness for men, women, and children was increasing and the Federal government’s response was responding “with extraordinary inadequacy.”45 Additionally, she reported that families with children were now the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. Her testimony underscores a correlation between federal policy, underfunded programs, and homelessness:

Federal policies have continued to cause and exacerbate the crisis. Massive cutbacks in Federal housing programs are literally pushing Americans from their homes. At the same time, grossly inadequate welfare programs are forcing poor families to choose between paying the rent and putting food on the table.46 The emergency shelter system of the third ghetto was created under the false assumption that the needs of the homeless would be short-term and sporadic.47 It was ill-prepared for the chronic, transgenerational, and unrelenting growth of the homeless population. Additionally, the McKinney Act simply reinforced a malfunctioning, underfunded shelter system. Although it put more mechanisms in place, this new federal legislation did little to improve communication and planning between service providers and to abate the scope and persistence of the homeless crisis.

By March 30, 1988, in the District, 525 families (610 adults and 1,338 children) were being sheltered in a local open public school gymnasium which served as a mass shelter, as well as several hotels or motels at an annual cost of $21 million.48 These welfare hotels were federally funded by Emergency Assistance (EA) programs designed to provide accommodation for temporarily displaced families receiving AFDC benefits. States had full discretion as to how they used these EA funds, but the original purpose of the funding was for short-term crises and not for permanent housing.49 Welfare hotels such as the Budget Inn, the Pitts Motor Hotel, and Capitol City Inn became notorious additions to this poverty trap, which was embedded in a system of inhumane predatory sheltering and drug dealing50. With different homeless services for families

45 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homeless in America –1988, 276. 46 Ibid.: The Reagan administration cut one-third of Section 8 housing vouchers. These cuts led to massive homelessness for approximately two million homeless families. See also: Peter Dreier, “ Reagan’s Legacy: Homelessness in America,” Shelterforce Online: The Community of Development, no.135 (May 1, 2004): 5, https://shelterforce.org/2004/05/01/reagans-legacy-homelessness-in-america/ 47 J. D. Wright and E. Weber, Homelessness and Health. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218240/ 48 NCH, “Precious Resources,” 143.; Marcia Slacum Greene, “Homeless Sheltered At RFK Stadium,” Washington Post, March 23, 1988. 49 U.S. Congress. House, Committee on Ways and Means. Background material and data on programs within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means. 100th Cong., 1st sess., March 6, 1987.; Patrice Gaines-Carter, “Tenants Suddenly Homeless as Evictions Season Reaches Peak,” Washington Post, August 21, 1988. The McKinney Act classifies welfare hotels as a form of homelessness.; Russell v. Barry Civil Action No. 87-2-72 see “Testimony under Oath from Timothy Leshan,” October 17, 1988. Nadine Winter papers, Box 86 Folder 8. 50Marcia Slacum Greene, “Children in the Storm: D.C. Young Scramble to Survive in Shelter” Washington Post, March 28, 1988.; U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Use of AFDC funds for homeless families: joint hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Assistance and

81 spread out between these different emergency shelters, life for families without stable accommodation had become a daily “homeless shuffle” from one hotel to the next.51 Shelters for men and women were also woefully inadequate. Initiative 17 stipulated the provision of adequate shelter standards which were not being enforced. This led to the class action suit Atchinson v. Barry, brought against the city in the Fall 1988. Through affidavits collected by volunteers and attorneys: Homeless witnesses spoke of being beaten and robbed in the District’s shelters; of being abused by security guards; of sleeping on tables, chairs, on the floor; of clogged and overflowing toilets, and even where they slept; and rats, lice, and scabies.52

Initiative 17’s right to overnight shelter also required cities to provide shelter for homeless families which opened the flood gates to predatory sheltering practices. Local government corruption, which ingratiated the District’s housing developers, was also part of the problem. For example, Cornelius Pitts of the infamous Pitts hotel profited from federal and local funding for welfare and homeless assistance programs by using it to pay off his mortgage and making only minimal hotel repairs, while lining his pockets with government exorbitant payouts to himself, his wife, and his employees. Mayor Barry, who was instrumental and getting Mr. Pitts and other investors into the homeless assistance business, turned a blind eye to these developers who sold their properties once they reached maturity.53 Barry had already contributed to the homeless problem by breaking many campaign promises made at the beginning of his political career to improve the lives of low-income families and the homeless. He earned a less-than-stellar record on combatting homelessness, by not fulfilling his multimillion-dollar plan to “take the boards off” the city’s estimated 4,500 abandoned buildings for new housing stock; by dissolving the Mayor’s Commission on the Homeless; by not fulfilling his promises to improve homeless services; and by declaring the closure of two

Unemployment Compensation of the Committee on Social Security and Family Policy of the Committee on Finance,100th Cong., 2nd sess., March 28, 1988, 218-219. 51 Engel, “Homeless Women’s ‘Revolving Door,” 1984.; Sharon La Franiere, “D.C. Audit Official Calls Pitts Contract Exorbitant,” Washington Post, November 11, 1986.; Dorothy Gilliam, “Homeless Dealt a Bad Hand,” Washington Post, March 24, 1988.; Marcia Slacum Green, “Homeless Sheltered At RFK Stadium: Crawford Calls Emergency Move…” Washington Post, March 23, 1988.; Peter Carlson, “Is This Any Way To Help Homeless Families?: Exodus: Dee and Kavin,” Washington Post, May 29, 1988. 52 Michael I. Greenberger, Elizabeth M. Brown, and Anne R. Bowden eds, “Comments on the HUD-D.C Initiative Implementation Plan: “Working Together to Solve Homelessness.’” rep. Cold Harsh, and Unending Resistance: The District of Columbia Government’s Hidden War Against Its Poor and Its Homeless. (The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. November 22, 1993), 47. 53 Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 153-154.; Marcia Slacum Greene, “D.C. Urged to Close Capitol City Inn Shelter,” Washington Post, September 17, 1988.; “A Short History Of a Failed Policy,” Washington Post, May 29, 1988.

82 emergency shelters.54 In terms of the housing poor and the homeless, Marion Barry was a reactionary, “ceremonial” leader more obsessed with building up the middle class and maintaining power than actually wielding it to improve the lives of the District’s poor.55 Barry went from an official approval of shelter as a basic human right in his first mandate, to vehemently campaigning against the right to overnight shelter by his second term in office.56 Additionally, from the mid- 1970s to the first half of the 1980s, D.C. local government was marginally involved in the homeless crisis. Until the mid-1980s in the District, public attitudes towards the homeless and homeless advocacy were principally shaped by liberal pundits, local grassroots activists of Hometown Washington, faith-based service providers, and Congressional outliers of Federal Washington. Poverty scholarship has established the linkages between housing instability and the broader issues of persistent concentrated inner poverty, institutional racism, gentrification, redevelopment, urban renewal, and national housing policy.57 In the District of Columbia, the first generations of the black middle class, who rose as a result of civil rights legislation, began fleeing to the suburbs of Prince George’s County due to the increase in drugs, crime, and poverty which had taken over parts of the city by the late 1980s. Research has shown that the positive effects of this legislation did not trickle down to the District’s low-income, poor and homeless families who were trapped within “the white ring” of the suburbs.58 However, a gap remains in the literature of twentieth-century poverty knowledge, as scholarship has not adequately historicized the nexus of persistent and concentrated inner-city poverty, the welfare state, housing instability, and urban homelessness.

In September 1988, the National Coalition for the Homeless released a survey which assessed the state of government housing and conditions for the homeless in thirty-two cities. In the District of Columbia, there were only 14,866 low-income rental units for an estimated 46,545 very low-income renter households. The maximum AFDC benefits for a family of three was $364 a month or 48.1 per cent of the poverty line. The maximum of food stamps was at 74.4 per cent of the poverty line. Supplemental Social Security payments were 78.1 per cent of the poverty line.

54 Milton Coleman, “100 Days: Barry: ‘We’ve Tried Harder’ to Solve Problems Barry Says ‘We’ve Tried Harder’ to Solve City’s Problems,” Washington Post, April 15, 1979.; Nicholas Lemann, “Marion Barry: The Question Is Will He Deliver?” Washington Post, December 16, 1979.; Jack Eisen and Eugene Robinson, “’81 Barry Budget Sets More Cuts,” Washington Post, 21 May 1980; Rader, 134-136. 55 Gillette, 177. See also. Thompson, Double Trouble.; Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City. 56 Paul W. Valentine, “Barry Backs Small Shelters Centers for Street People,” Washington Post, February 15, 1979. 57 Hyra, "Commentary: Causes and Consequences of Gentrification,”169-77.; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid.; Brett Williams, “Beyond Gentrification: Investment and Abandonment on the Waterfront,” in Capital Dilemma Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C, ed. Derek Hyra and Sabiyha Prince (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 227-37. 58 Hyra, Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City, 29. Williams, "Deadly Inequalities,” 142-159.

Of an estimated 10,000 homeless people in the nation’s capital, homeless families represented at least one-third of this population and their numbers were increasing dramatically.59 The data in Table 2.1 below shows that in 1970 the two-parent home was still the most common family structure. By the end of the 1980s, with the exception of Ward 3 the District’s most affluent ward, the percentage of families with children headed by single mothers had increased dramatically.60

Map 2.1 D.C. Ward Map.61

59 NCH, “Precious Resources,” 142. 60 See Table 1. 61 D.C. Ward Map 2002, Wikimedia Commons, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/DC_Ward_Map_2002.png, Accessed April 28, 2020.

Table 2.1 Percentage of Families with Children Headed by Single Mothers by Ward, 1970-1990.62

Due to local government mismanagement, municipal corruption, the misappropriation and/or lack of funds, the provision of affordable housing and wrap-around services did not keep pace with local need. In the absence of more viable remedies, the local government resorted to stopgap solutions for families on welfare. In 1988, as homeless families continued being processed through the shelter system, a debate was raging about the city’s vacant houses which could have been potentially converted to affordable housing. Washington, D.C. was chosen once again as a test case, this time for a large scale housing program in which “the District … committed more of its own resources for public and subsidized housing than any state, county or city in America.”63 Would the city’s ambitious $375-million plan to modernize the city’s vacant units be completed? The city’s vacancy rate of eight per cent meant that 799 vacant units were not scheduled for renovation. If the city government were ever able to renovate the units, there was an assumption that these would be occupied by homeless families. However, there were 12,000 people still on a waiting list for public housing.64 Conflicts between requests for public housing and the maintenance of an adequate supply of emergency shelter for a rapidly expanding homeless crisis would be one of the contributing factors to the nullification of Initiative 17 which overburdened the city logistically and financially.

62 De Vita, et. al., 10. 63 Alphonso, Jackson, “D.C. Housing: Keeping a Promise,” Washington Post, May 22, 1988. 64 Ibid. 85

Although the federal government had just passed major reforms in welfare and homeless assistance over the past two years, the administration’s federal cuts and underspending on low- to moderate-income housing resulted in an inadequate supply of affordable housing stock had a direct impact on single-parent families in public housing projects and homeless families in the District. More precisely, a seventy-seven per cent cut in housing programs resulted in “a massive increase in homelessness.”65 On October 25, 1988, at Parkland Community Center, D.C. Del. Walter Fauntroy’s news release warned that “a time bomb was set to go off in the early 1990s” once landlords were freed from their twenty-year commitments to reserve their apartments for low- to moderate-income families. In order to prevent these families from being evicted from federally subsidized apartments, Congress would have to spend an estimated $17.7 billion. This would also mean the loss of 600,000 to 700,000 units of affordable housing in the first half of the 1990s. An additional 50,000 to 60,000 public housing units could be lost during the same period if an additional $21.5 billion was not spent on modernization. Fauntroy offered a two-phase course of action to remedy these issues. The first phase was to allow low- and moderate-income families to own and manage their own housing. The second phase was to raise funds to initiate the procurement of new units of public housing and to modernize and rehabilitate federally-assisted housing from the private market. With a broad coalition of colleagues including Congressman Jack Kemp (R-NY), Fauntroy was able to obtain authorization for $2.5 million in funding for fiscal year 1989.66 Washington, D.C. was chosen as the cite for the first demonstration project investment.

The pilot project was launched at Kenilworth-Parkside, a public housing project in Northeast under the direction and management of Kimi Gray.67 This demonstration project met all of its targets: rent collection was up seventy-seven per cent crime was down, and 130 former tenants receiving welfare were now employed.68 Yet this success story risked being an isolated event in the District, due to the Reagan administration’s shut down of all federal spending on new public housing construction.69 Fauntroy’s press release illustrates an important connection

65 Ann Mariano, “Tenants of D.C. Project Move Toward Ownership,” Washington Post, October 25, 1988. 66 Walter Fauntroy, “Fauntroy Outlines His Housing Program: A Statement by the Honorable Walter E. Fauntroy,” Washington Post, October 25, 1988. 67 The Kemp-Fauntroy proposal of 1986 of public housing management was based on successful pilot projects in New Orleans, St. Louis, and Boston.; Lambro, 1986. 68 Fauntroy, “Fauntroy Outlines His Housing Program,”2; Courtland, 1988.; Mariano, 1988. 69 Fauntroy, “Fauntroy Outlines His Housing Program,”1-2.

86 between housing instability and homelessness in his denunciation of the administration’s reduction of federal subsidy programs:

…for the construction and rehabilitation of low- and moderate income housing in the private sector [was so severe] that literally millions of Americans are being thrown on the streets of our country – homeless… and D.C. families [are] now forced to live at District Government expense in the Capital Inn and the Pitts Motel… [It] has shut down the Section 8 program to provide low- and moderate-income families with housing vouchers. These vouchers are useless to citizens because so very few private developers have any incentive to provide housing that is within the range of what these vouchers can purchase.70 What was the solution for D.C precariously-housed families, many of whom were exposed to the city’s illegal drug market?71 As the crack cocaine epidemic hit the District’s public housing residents and homelessness became increasingly associated with addiction, fighting the War on Drugs remained a local and national priority, with new battlegrounds: housing projects and crack dens.

Concurrent with the end of the Reagan administration, the War on Drugs moved into a new phase in the District’s public housing projects. Law enforcement’s antidrug “Clean Sweep Operation” (begun in August 1986) left an exhausted, understaffed, and underfunded police force fighting a losing battle in the War on Drugs just two years later.72 Early on in fiscal year 1988, the local D.C. government rapidly found itself in the red and unable to pay out housing aid funds to its public housing tenants, who were already struggling to make ends meet.

The re-emergence of “Operation Clean Sweep,” expanded to the drug distribution centres or crack houses located in brick apartment buildings. The earlier version of the operation targeted the estimated sixty citywide open drug markets in alleys, parking lots, and cul-de-sacs and apartment courtyards.73 However, in the absence of adequate, effective police power, public housing tenants were relying increasingly on themselves. For example, property manager James

70 Fauntroy, “Fauntroy Outlines His Housing Program,”2. The Section 8 Program allowed tenants to pay about thirty per cent of their income for rent while the rest was subsided with federal money. This program was created as a result of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 as an amendment to the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. The Voucher Program was added in 1983. 71 William Raspberry, “The Homeless Crisis is Over! Somebody Tell the Homeless,” Washington Post, October 9, 1988.; Ed Bruske, “Rent Control In D.C. Seen As successful,” Washington Post, October 26, 1988. 72 Editorial. “D.C. Police: Strained, Overworked,” Washington Post, January 22, 1988; Linda Wheeler and Sari Horwitz. “Operation Clean Sweep’s Future Uncertain: D.C. Police Officials Seek To Revamp Drug Program to Cut Cost,” Washington Post, January 26, 1988. 73 Wheeler and Horwitz, “Operation Clean Sweep’s Future Uncertain.”; Milloy Courtland, “Drug-Induced Frustration Plagues Search for Solution,” Washington Post, February 4, 1988.; Victoria Churchville, “Clean Sweep Reborn as Police Seek Drug Sites: District Officers Enter Suspected Crack Houses,” Washington Post, February 15, 1988.; Victoria Churchville, “Antidrug Faction Won’t Surrender in NE Housing War Zone,” Washington Post, March 29, 1988.

Womack of Clifton Terrace Apartments found forty-eight “crack units” and hidey-holes carved in the walls of the property as “lockers” to store drugs. Womack’s plan was to use eviction as a weapon to eject drug dealers and move in homeless families from the Capitol City Inn. Welfare hotels or “hotel shelters” were notorious for drug-dealing to the vulnerable low-income families who lived there. Womack was able to utilize eviction by tracking prior arrests and convictions of Clifton Terrace tenants and any further illegal activity by tenants with “priors” as a cause for eviction. 74

Aside from its obvious connections to the drug trade, public housing for single female heads of household held its own tragic realities. An article entitled “Housing Crisis Grips Low- Income Women” followed the life of Mary Gay, a resident of Adams Morgan, who was a testament to the consequences of public policy and the feminization of poverty. Gay, a single mother of two daughters, was “among an increasing number of women whose housing costs [were] eating up a larger portion of their financial resources while their incomes [stood] still or decline[d].”75 Equally noteworthy were the results of a study conducted by the Women’s Research and Education Institute which concluded that “more than one-third of single-parent families spend 75% or more of their income on rent.”76 As these families “became increasingly vulnerable to the housing crisis…” “[a]n unexpected… crisis [could] push many low-income women over the edge into poverty and homelessness.”77 Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass) commented on federal poverty strategy in the 1980s: “If the Reagan administration’s war on drugs was as effective as the attack on housing the country would not have any drug problems.”78 In December 1988, with two months left in the fiscal year, the District had to solve a major crisis in public housing: how would it manage Mayor Barry’s freeze on payments for the Tenant Assisted Programs (TAP) in rent subsidies due the city’s lack of funds? Who would house the 6,400 new TAP applicants? The lack of adequate, affordable housing was becoming a more pressing need.79

74 Marcia Slacum Greene, “The Clifton Terrace War: Manager Fights to Uproot Drug Trade Complex…,” Washington Post, August 22, 1988. 75 Ann Mariano, “ Housing Crisis Grips Low-Income Women,” Washington Post, October 8, 1988. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 "Making Affordable Housing A Priority," Walter E. Fauntroy to Cindy Hunter Employment Specialist of New Endeavors by Women, November 18, 1988, Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. MS2310 Box 348 Folder 25, Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II, Special Collections Research Center, George Washington University.; Marci Slacum Greene, “D.C. Rent Subsidies Used up for the Year With 10 Months Left: 6,400 Applicants Without Help,” Washington Post, December 1, 1988; Athelia Knight, “15 Arrested in Protest of D.C. Cuts in Rent Aid,” Washington Post, December 10, 1988.

Recent scholarship has revisited this period to document the miscarriages of justice perpetrated on African American communities from the supply-side of the War on Drugs which targeted black male youth through racial profiling, mandatory minimums, and mass incarceration.80 There is an unfortunate paucity of academic literature concerning how these injustices impacted the consumer side of the equation, particularly public housing tenancy, its fight against the scourge of in-house drug markets, and their connection to homelessness at the end of the twentieth century.

A study conducted by the city’s Office of Criminal Justice Plans and Analysis, examining 700 drug-related homicides from January 1985 to June 1988 in the District, concluded that “most victims [were] cocaine users who [were] killed in or near their homes, which tend[ed] to be low- income neighborhoods that harbor drug markets.”81 Wards 1, 6, and 8 were singled out for their particularly high homicide rates. The most frequent victims in the study were black male youth between the ages of eighteen to thirty-two.82 Besides the added stigma that this report imposed on high-crime neighbourhoods and African American males in the District, the study was also potentially nefarious, because it could provide law enforcement with a statistical rationale for not only profiling and targeting black males, but excluding them from public housing projects. In fact, exclusionary practices such as eviction for drug use or drug-dealing became more formalized through federal and local legislation passed at the end of the 1980s. D.C. Del. Fauntroy was instrumental in passing this legislation.

By the end of the Reagan administration, as social scientific research on new homelessness and street people was increasingly becoming a topic of interest, the liberal structuralist view of homelessness began to take shape as macro factors such as the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, lack of housing, and lack of jobs were designated as a few of the fundamental causes of homelessness. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when scholarship on the subject of homelessness began to develop, many scholars integrated other structural features into their causal models such as low wages and insufficient affordable housing provisioning.83 However,

80 Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.; Alexander, New Jim Crow. 81 Linda Wheeler, “700 Slayings Analyzed in D.C. Study,” Washington Post, February 18, 1989. Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II Box 60 File 39: “Task Force Meeting.”; Michael Abramowitz and Marcia Slacum Greene, “Drug War Puts Unanticipated Squeeze on D.C. Budget: Second of three articles,” Washington Post, January 9, 1989. 82 Wheeler, “700 Slayings Analyzed in D.C.” 83 Barak, Gimme Shelter.; Joel Blau, The Visible Poor: Homelessness in America. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).; Michael Fabricant and M. Kelly, “No Haven for the Homeless in a Heartless Economy,” Radical America, 20th ser. (1986): 23-34.; Hoch and Slayton New Homeless and Old; Kim Hopper and Jim Hamburg “The Making of America’s Homeless 1945 -1984,” in Critical Perspectives on Housing, eds.

89 allegations that the Reagan administration was responsible for exacerbating homelessness through a reduction in federal housing aid of sixty to eighty per cent, would come under fire, as scholars – determined to debunk myths created by the mainstream media, the consensus of liberal politicians, and grassroots activists –published hard data.84 Dr. Stuart Butler, Director of Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation, made an observation which articulated some of the major challenges to the research of new homelessness:

There is conflicting information about who the homeless are and why they are on the streets. We are sometimes told that they are basically ordinary people, just like you and me, who are victims of either economic conditions, some social problem, or housing policy. We are told by other reporters and analysts that most homeless people are mentally ill, suffering from very severe chronic mental problems, and that they are the victims of a breakdown of mental health policy. Other people argue that there is a fundamental change in the nature of homelessness. They say we are now seeing the “new homelessness” – families with children… The idea of a homeless child is an emotional and heart-rending new aspect of the whole problem.85 Indeed, individual behaviour and pathology became the focus of poverty experts who worked for the same conservative think tanks and foundations that comprised the welfare consensus of the late 1980s.86 Michael Katz argues that the factors that disturbed affluent Americans most were: female sexuality of teenage pregnancy found in female-headed households perceived as an aberration of “normal” family patterns; welfare dependency that was supposedly a substantial drain on federal resources; their alleged aversion to working low wage jobs; and their purported tendency towards drug use and violent crime that contributed to the erosion of inner-city public safety. These factors were seemingly more important than the suffering and degradation of poor urban minorities.87

Of the estimated 10,000 homeless people in Washington, D.C. experts such as Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey argued that “fully 39% of the D.C. Homeless are psychotic, and another 36% are

Rachel G. Bratt, Chester W. Hartman, and Ann Meyerson, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 12-40.; Christopher Jencks, The Homeless (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).; Peter Marcuse, “Neutralizing Homelessness,” Socialist Review 18, no. 1 (1988).; Peter Marcuse, “Gentrification, Homelessness, and the Work Process.,” Housing Studies 4 (1989).; Karin Ringham, At Risk of Homelessness: The Roles of Income and Rent (New York: Praeger, 1990). 84 “Rethinking Policy on Homelessness: a Conference,” November 10, 2018, file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Desktop/Ch 2 Primary documents on homelessness/1988/Homeless Issues/Rethinking Policy on Homelessness.pdf. Accessed February 21, 2019. 85 Ibid., 1. 86 Marian Moser Jones, “Creating a Science of Homelessness During the Reagan Era,” Milbank Quarterly 93, no. 1 (2015): 139–78. O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 242-283. 87 Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 185.

90 alcoholic or alcoholic and psychotic thus accounting for 75% of the local homeless population.”88 Compliance with the Dixon Decree of 1975 created the sweeping deinstitutionalization of mental health care facilities during the 1980s in the District. As the city’s homeless shelters took in the mentally ill once cared for at Saint Elizabeth’s, shelter operators became the District’s de facto mental health providers.89 Enforcement of the decree for the District’s 6,000 to 8,000 mentally ill, found the mental healthcare services on the verge of collapse – understaffed and underfunded.90 By the end of the 1980s, many of these shelters had reached full capacity and the city, scrambling to comply with the right to shelter on demand, resorted to makeshift solutions and sub-quality facilities. Despite efforts by either city-run or non-profit providers to contain the problem, homelessness remained a visible crisis. As the general public, scholars, pundits, and politicians began to discover who the homeless were, the War on Drugs intensified, and the end of homelessness had not arrived, tropes of the homeless as mentally ill and drug addicts became more pervasive – undermining public compassion. A brief examination of the scholarship of homelessness in terms of its root causes yields some compelling information.

Sociologist Barbara Duffield challenged the notion that most of the homeless in the 1980s suffered from mental illness due to the fact that the surge in the new homeless era occurred well after the “deinstitutionalization phenomenon.”91 She also argued that the homelessness cannot be explained exclusively by substance addiction.92 Sociologists Snow, Baker, Anderson and Martin assert that the misconception of the homeless as primarily mentally ill was due to four factors: “misplaced emphasis” on “the causal role of deinstitutionalization,” “the medicalization of the homeless problem,” “the greater visibility of the homeless mentally ill” compared to the non- disabled population, and “questionable” methods in assessing the homeless.93

88 Ann O Hughes, Joseph s Drew, and Emanuel Chatman, “The Third Washington: Homelessness,” working paper, The Third Washington: Homelessness (Washington, D.C., February 1989), 27. Nadine Winter Papers, Box 86 Folder 8. 89 Zita Arocha, “D.C. Mental Health Services Called on Verge of Disaster,” Washington Post, May 13, 1988. The Dixon Decree was the result of the lawsuit Dixon v. Weinberger (December 1975) which favoured community-based treatment for the mentally ill at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C. Victory for the plaintiffs led to deinstitutionalization of St. Elizabeth’s. 90 Arocha, “D.C. Mental Health Services Called on Verge of Disaster.” One-third of the 1,100 men and 30% of the 130 women at the CCNV shelter in 1988 had some form of mental disability. 91 Barbara Duffield, “Poverty Amidst Plenty: Homelessness in the United States,” Contributions in Sociology 135 (2001): 204.; Between 1955 to 1994 approximately 487,000 mentally ill patients were released from state mental facilities.; see also: Mark James Estren, Prescription Drug Abuse (Oakland, CA: Ronin Publishing Inc., 2013), 28. 92 Duffield, “Poverty amidst plenty: Homelessness in the United States,” 204. 93 David A. Snow, Susan G. Baker, Leon Anderson, and Michael Martin. “The Myth of Pervasive Mental Illness among the Homeless.” Social Problems 33, no. 5 (1986): 407, 419. 91

The debate amongst sociologists over the root causes of homelessness at the end of the twentieth century were comprised of two sides. The first group comprised scholars that supported the structural causal model. According to the structural position, homelessness was due to: economic circumstances, the lack of available housing, and policy changes in mental health and welfare programs. These external, macro-level forces were seen to be out of homeless people’s control. Other analysts in the second group underscored internal traits which were specific to an individual: mental illness, drug addiction, and “deficits in talent or motivation” as the root causes.94 Sociologists Barret Lee, David W. Lewis, and Susan Hinze Jones rightly assert that any study which attempts to understand why homelessness exists must objectively examine its causes.95 However, the purpose of this study is not to relitigate this debate, but to historicize the causal beliefs which actually shaped homeless policy at the end of the twentieth century.

Control over public beliefs about how to solve the homeless crisis had a direct impact on policy outcome. The homeless activist of the 1980s, popular, artists, and a sympathetic media successfully shaped that opinion through what sociologist Susan Bogard calls “a glamour offensive” which made homelessness appear more attractive.96 However, as the nation approached the 1990s and homeless fatigue gradually took hold, public compassion began to wane (see Chapter Three).

Analysing the changing attitudes towards the homeless is important because they provide us with a better understanding of the causal views which blame the victim, deny the homeless crisis, or label poor communities as lost causes in the War on Poverty – messages which emanated from the White House during the Reagan administration. Although this thesis regularly historicizes the causes of homelessness, it also recognizes and prioritizes the place of public beliefs about the homeless in their own right.97 Policy makers of the 1980s and 1990s were focused on getting the homeless off the streets (the McKinney Act 1987) and doing so in the most efficient and cost effective way possible (the DC Initiative of 1993). As we will see in Chapters Three and Four, changing public attitudes towards the homeless were instrumental in the creation of policies that sought to remove homeless visibility from the public square and to displace the homeless to the

94 Lee et al., “Are the Homeless to Blame?”, 536. 95 Ibid. 96 Bogard, Seasons Such As These, 186-189. 97 Jo Phelan et. al., “The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label “Homeless” on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons,” Social Psychology Quarterly 60, no. 4 (1997): 323-337. 92 designated areas of the third ghetto, while criminalising homeless activity that trespassed onto contested areas such as the business district and certain residential areas in Washington, D.C.

Due to the fact that the concurrent Wars on Poverty, Drugs and Crime proved too costly and ineffective in the District, hometowners were enlisted to be a part of the solution to a deepening homeless crisis. Self-reliance in the comprehensive plan for the homeless, self-management in Section 8 housing tenancy, and low- to moderate-income homeownership were the solutions proposed by Hometown and Federal Washington at the dawn of the George H. W. Bush administration. As in the Reagan administration, public policy and local government intervention in the homeless crisis during the Bush administration were driven not by the causes of the homeless crisis but rather the search for expedient cures. These “solutions” would eventually become mere failed mitigation strategies.

The “Second” War on Poverty and Dismantling Initiative 17 Public housing improvement, ending homelessness, and winning the War on Drugs, were three issues that Fauntroy fought for in the House of Representatives and from the pulpit of the New Bethel Baptist Church. The newly appointed, ambitious HUD Secretary, Jack Kemp maintained his on-going collaboration with Fauntroy on drug-free public housing legislation. This alliance allowed Fauntroy to fight all three issues on one united front – more sanitary and safe affordable housing. Hometown and Federal Washington’s subversive use of dependency talk to dismantle Initiative 17 and to advance partisan political agendas for the precariously-housed and the homeless have not been sufficiently historicized. Analogous to the strategy of self-support in Great Society welfare policy, self-reliance was utilized in the District as stopgap solutions to the local homeless crisis, and as a means to win the second war on poverty promised by the new HUD Secretary.

The District’s local leadership opposed to Initiative 17 argued that its “haphazard and piecemeal approach” to the homeless crisis was ineffective.98 With new federal legislation and the gradual professionalization of homeless assistance, came increasingly vocal criticism of “warehousing” the homeless in emergency shelters and welfare hotels which “too often focused on providing mass shelter facilities and food with little thought of directing homeless persons

98 The Honorable Nadine P. Winter, "Statement Before The Press on Homelessness," news release, Washington, D.C., February 13, 1989. MS2188 Box 83 Folder 7, Nadine Winter Papers, Special Collection Research Center, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

93 toward independent living and mainstream society.”99 Confronted with this increasingly entrenched and inadequate shelter system, District leadership was in search of new solutions: “a comprehensive plan that encourages… [homeless persons] to once again become self- sufficient.”100

The “Statement Before The Press on Homelessness” delivered by Councilmember Nadine Winter (Ward 6) on February 13, 1989, set down the parameters of a potential solution:

…the District government has failed the homeless. Instead of pursuing homeless assistance, we have pursued homeless handouts and homeless warehouses. For most, a combination of personal, family, and economic crises may have forced them to be homeless. My goal is to guide the homeless in from the cold and help them along the road to self-sufficiency and independent living…101 Although this proposed “comprehensive plan” was an amended version of Initiative 17 designed to include at-risk and homeless populations with a variety of solutions adapted to their specific needs, its proposed solutions were more geared towards able-bodied, single, working homeless people. Winter’s plan proposed transitional and supportive housing with a particular focus on SROs, a solution more adapted to homeless single working males and females than to homeless families. She singled out the Federal City Shelter’s estimated 1,400 residents, half of whom were employed and fifteen per cent of these tenants received pension, retirement, social security, and some form of income. However, she carefully distinguished them from those whose mental illness and drug abuse problems rendered them unable to care for themselves.102 A closer reading of this document suggests a clear dichotomy of the deserving medically dependent homeless persons and the undeserving “warehoused” homeless living in shelters off the taxpayer-funded shelter system. This text suggests that even the poor had to be made accountable and those who had the means, even if it meant using part of their public assistance checks, should be made to reimburse the city for its services.

The purpose of Winter’s plan was clear: those who were able had to be financially accountable. Considering the limited resources of the District, a six-month residency and

99 “White Paper: Helping the Homeless: Analysis of the District Government's Response to the Homeless Population.” Washington, D.C., January 30, 1989, The Honorable Nadine P. Winter, Chairman Pro Tempore. Nadine Winter Papers, Box 83 Folder 7: 10. 100 Ibid. 101The Honorable Nadine P. Winter, "Statement Before The Press on Homelessness," press release, Washington, D.C., February 13, 1989: 1. Nadine Winer Papers Box 86 File 7. 102 Ibid., 2. 94 registration requirement for mid- to long-term homeless assistance was designed to facilitate understanding and response to homeless communities in a more comprehensive manner. The plan’s reimbursement component was introduced to establish a return on the government’s human capital investment, to compensate for the growing homeless population, and the city’s diminishing tax revenue. Yet Winter couched this compensatory objective of the legislation in self-help rhetoric for a plan designed to: “restore pride and dignity to homeless persons by stressing self- sufficiency.”103 Winter’s pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps approach, aimed at the diversification of services, yet ignored individual capabilities in completing the transaction.

Winter’s bootstrap-capitalist approach is analogous of the workfare requirements for female single heads of household required to earn their entitlements. Although the welfare state under New Federalist policies mandated job training and workfare compensation for benefits of entitlement programs, it did not take into consideration: the rising cost of living; individual workforce employability; a globalizing economy which offered less semi-skilled employment; the lack of growth in public sector jobs from 1980 to 1991 which undercut a consistent source of employability for African Americans in urban spaces; and declining wages in the public sector due to cuts in federal and state programs.104 These factors also affected homeless employability, the homeless and the precariously-housed populations collecting benefits, and the working poor in the District’s emergency shelters and welfare hotels. Winter’s proposed comprehensive plan to reduce homelessness, accompanied other objectives: to alleviate the financial burden caused by the right to overnight shelter on demand and “to preserve and maintain the quality of life for all district residents, rich or poor.”105 Yet, this plan proved ill-adapted to the needs of homeless families, as the District’s homeless assistance services were increasingly guided by ineffective strategies of self-reliance.

“Self-sufficiency” and dependency talk were discursive elements which conjoined Winter’s comprehensive plan to aid the homeless, with her opposition to Initiative 17 – a strategy which garnered much support. In a personal note sent shortly after her press release, Kimi Gray, an opponent of the Initiative, congratulated Councilmember Winter for taking “an important step towards addressing the multi-faceted problem of homelessness, particularly since the District

103 Ibid. 104 Kelly, 95-96. 105 The Honorable Nadine P. Winter, "Statement Before The Press on Homelessness," press release, Washington, D.C., February 13, 1989: 2. Nadine Winer Papers Box 86 File 7.

Government’s current efforts … led to greater dependency, exorbitant expenditure and low expectations of our homeless citizens.”106 In a letter to Winter later in the year, Gray further validated the plan by aligning the success of her public housing pilot project with Winter’s self- help rhetoric and the plan’s homeless assistance initiative: “My goal is to guide the homeless in from the cold and help them along the road to self-sufficiency and independent living. The government has a mandate to deliver professional services and to strive to restore pride and dignity to individuals as well as families.”107

The introduction of the “District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Act of 1984 Amendment Act To Establish a Comprehensive Homeless Assistance Program of 1989” at a public hearing held on April 12, 1989, was also an opportunity to expose some of the shortcomings of Winter’s legislation and self-help values.108 Ann Ryan, the executive Director of New Endeavors by Women, then a transitional centre of forty-two homeless women, outlined the pitfalls of attempting to reduce the number of homeless with reactive policy rather than proactive solutions. According to Ryan, the plan seemed to “implement new bureaucratic procedures… that [did] not begin to address the causes of homelessness, nor any long-term solutions.”109 Reimbursement, residency requirements, financial disclosure, and estimated earning potential implied: “that if homeless people had to prove they were deserving of shelter, we would reduce the numbers dramatically. This is not the case.”110 For Mrs. Ryan, more viable solutions for reducing the number of homeless were policies which focused on education and housing – in particular affordable housing.111 In a testimony before the Committee on Human Services, the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless was also highly critical of the bill’s “attempt to overrule Initiative 17” which they believed would “unleash the wrath of the [City] Council on a completely inappropriate target.”112 Despite these scathing testimonials against her bill, Winters resolved

106 "Personal Note to Councilmember Nadine P. Winter," Kimi O. Gray to Nadine Winter, February 15, 1989, Kenilworth/Parkside 4500 Quarles Street NE, Washington, D.C. 20019. Box 86 File 7. See also: Susan Swain, "Interview with Kimi Gray." Transcript. In Life and Career of Kimi Gray. CSPAN. January 19, 1990. 107 "Letter of Thanks concerning the Homeless Situation in the District of Columbia," Kimi O. Gray to Nadine P. Winter, June 22, 1989, Kenilworth/Parkside Resident Management Corporation 4500 Quarles Street NE, Washington, D.C. 20019. Nadine Winter Papers Box 86 File 7. 108 See also Winter, Nadine P. “Self-Help Program for Homeless Reviewed,” Working With You, Fall 1989. Nadine Winter Papers Box 29 Folder 11. 109 Ann Ryan, Executive Director of New Endeavors by Women, Public Hearing, "Statement on Bill- 8-156 "District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Act of 1984 Amendment Act To Establish a Comprehensive Homeless Assistance Program of 1989"," news release, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1989. Nadine Winter Papers Box 86 File 6: 2. 110 Ibid., 3. 111 Ibid., 4. 112 "Testimony of the Washington Legal Clinic for The Homeless Before The Committee On Human Services on Bill 8-156 District of Columbia Right To Overnight Shelter Act Amendment Act to Establish a Comprehensive Homeless Assistance Program of 1989," news release, Washington, D.C., April 12, 1989. Box 86 File 6: 2.

96 remained unbroken. In fact, she continued to send out formatted letters to concerned citizens vindicating the government’s “mandate to deliver professional services and to strive to restore pride and dignity to individuals as well as families” made possible through the imminent passage of her bill.113 Meanwhile, the city faced other issues that undermined the District’s ability to assist its homeless population.

HUD Secretary Kemp “promised to wage a second war on poverty.” 114 The main battle ground for this new war was in the public housing projects of the Nation’s inner cities. In the wake of the 372 murders committed in Washington, D.C. the previous year, the vast majority of which were drug-related, the new administration decided to expand its war on poverty to the Wars on Drugs and Crime and to requisition the District as a test case for some of its initiatives. The purpose of this expansion was to extend the official battleground “to the fight against drug dealers throughout the nation’s public housing.”115 Early on in the Bush administration, Kemp sent out 3,300 letters to public housing agencies requesting reports on how they planned to “deny access” to those who “consistently violated the law” and their strategies to “evict drug abusers and drug deals from [their] projects.”116 In an April seventeenth op-ed article for The Washington Post, Sec. Kemp singled out Washington, D.C. as a model city for initiatives he hoped to implement nationwide through:

Operation Clean Sweep tactics, financial assistance to the housing authority for security programs, swift evictions and enforcement of public housing lease provisions and replication of Kimi Gray’s substance-abuse prevention strategies, which have been so successfully managed by Kenilworth-Parkside residents.117 Homeownership for low-income persons, another cornerstone of his war on poverty, seemed out of step with the reality of a homeless crisis that had reached alarming levels. In this new brand of “progressive conservatism” Kemp argued that the poor and those in distressed neighbourhoods could best be empowered through homeownership rather than through rental

113 "To Ms. Jeanne Wood," Nadine P. Winter to Imminent Passage of the Comprehensive Homeless Assistance Program of 1989, August 28, 1989, Washington, D.C. 20004.; "To Ms. Juanita Rodriguez of Shelter for the Homeless, Inc.," Nadine P. Winter to imminent Passage of the Comprehensive Homeless Assistance Program of 1989, May 8, 1989, Washington, D.C. 20004. 114 Biles, 289. 115 “Statement by William J. Bennett Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy Press Conference on Drugs and Crime in Washington, D.C.” (Washington, D.C. , April 10,1989), The White House.; “Statement by Jack Kemp Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Policy Press Conference on Drugs and Crime in Washington, D.C.” (Washington, D.C., April 10, 1989), The White House. Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II Box 359 Folder 27. 116 Gwen Hill, “Kemp Quarterbacks Drug Fight: Crusade in Public Housing Systems Resurrects Legal Problems,” Washington Post May 22, 1989. 117 Jack Kemp, “Drug-Free Housing for the Nation’s Poor,” Washington Post, April 17, 1989.

97 housing subsidies.118 Yet this project did not take into consideration, the economic realities of these fragile and marginalized communities to generate and invest in this venture. It was, in fact, a perfect example of what Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion,” which “describes how African American homebuyers were granted access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing, but … on comparatively unequal terms.”119Moreover, homeless service providers were forced to deal with the results of government-sanctioned evictions. The drive for law and order in public housing projects was affecting not only the drug dealers and users but their families. Maria Foscarinis of NCH declared: “Public housing should have decent security. But innocent family members should not become homeless.”120 She also denounced Kemp’s campaign as a stunt to distract the nation’s attention away from the more pressing problem of insufficient units of public housing.121

The lack of affordable housing units for low- to moderate-income families was a “dirty little secret” that the Bush administration was not prepared to face. Instead, the HUD became the bully pulpit for the expanded debate on where best to fight the War on Drugs, the right to due process for drug dealers, and to what degree law enforcement should be extended to public housing projects. Furthermore, the success rate of the many pilot programs tested in the District over the years, from public housing to the War on Crime, had been more inconclusive than laudable.122

A Washington Post July editorial entitled: “Kenilworth-Parkside and the Politics of Public Housing,” provided an insightful analysis of HUD policy for the precariously-housed and the Kenilworth-Parkside pilot program.123 The editorial exposed the fact that the HUD’s “new” tenant- management programs had already been tested in Boston’s Bromley Heath Projects in 1973 and St. Louis’s Cochran Gardens in 1976. Local authority’s practice of “turnkey” sales to tenants predated these ground-breaking tenant-management projects. The editorial also stated that liberal critics were highly critical of the D.C. Kenilworth-Parkside project for three reasons. First, the difficulty and expense inherent in self-managing properties ensured tenant failure. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that most D.C. public housing residents had no authority in making

118 Biles, 289. 119 Taylor, Race for Profit, 5. 120 Hill, “Kemp Quarterbacks Drug Fight.” 121 Hill, “Kemp Quarterbacks Drug Fight.”; Atkinson, Rick and Chris Spolar, “D.C. Public Housing: A Legacy of Despair: History of Mismanagement…,” Washington Post, March 26, 1989. 122 Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. 123 Editorial, ”Kenilworth-Parkside and the Politics of Public Housing,” Washington Post, July 30, 1989.

98 public housing decisions, no power to police their own communities, enforce standards of behaviour, evict criminals, or control drug dealing. Second, HUD policy did not control the diminishing stock of public housing nor was it exclusively reserved for the poor once improvements were made. Finally, the editorial posited: “Unless … [ Kemp’s strategy was] accompanied by significant new funding for low-income housing, the Reagan-Bush embrace of Kimi Gray [was] a political sideshow designed to distract voters from the appalling homelessness that [was] the real result of conservative policy.”124 The significance of this citation lies in its exposure of Federal Washington’s lack of innovation to deal with housing precarity and the absence of viable solutions to the affordable housing crisis. What were the key indicators of this affordable housing crisis in black communities at the end of the 1980s?

On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the Housing Act of 1949, Dr. Phillip Clay analyzed the depth of the housing crisis in America through six key observations.125 First, following a twenty-year decrease in the national poverty rate (from a rate of twenty percent), America experienced a significant increase in poverty across all households: just under twelve percent in 1970, to fifteen percent in the early 1980s, and thirteen per cent in 1989. However, more than thirty per cent of blacks were living in poverty in 1989. Second, federal programs that prevented nearly twenty per cent of families from falling into poverty in the 1970s, had since been cut. Third, the severity and concentration of poverty in black communities had experienced a dramatic increase in the 1980s. Fourth, “housing prices, interest rates, and other housing cost factors …[leapt] forward and remained at historic high levels.”126 Fifth, there were an estimated twelve to fourteen million urban households facing housing precarity in 1989.127 Finally, homeownership was still considered the “single most important indicator of housing well- being.”128 However, fewer than twenty per cent of poor families could afford homeownership.129 In Washington, D.C, these challenges were compounded by the demands of Initiative 17.

In Hometown Washington, the right to overnight shelter loomed over the city government and local inhabitants, like the sword of Damocles, threatening to drive the District into bankruptcy,

124 Ibid. 125 Phillip Clay, “Housing Opportunity: A Dream Deferred,” in The State of Black America 1990, ed. Janet Dewart (New York City: The National Urban League Inc., 1990), 73-84. 126 Clay, 75. 127 Clay defines the “ill-housed” as paying more than thirty per cent of their income on housing or living in “substandard, crowded” units. See page 75. 128 Clay, 75. 129 Ibid.

99 provoke congressional intervention, and further diminish indigenous control over the city’s finances. In a letter to Winter dated August 30, 1989, Mayor Barry presented the results of a class action decree: Atchinson V. District of Columbia which mandated that the city be divided into five areas in which twenty-five emergency shelter beds had to be provided in each area with an option to increase the shelter beds as needed and that trailers with a capacity to house 200 to 300 homeless persons should be provided with the city budget in each area. Barry revealed the District’s plan that within five days’ time, the city would begin the installation of six trailers at 27th and I Street N.W. and six trailers on Butler Street S. E. on District-owned property. A third site situated on Mississippi Avenue, a former police training facility, was slated for conversion to bring the city into full compliance. He explained that although the city was also providing 1700 emergency shelter beds for homeless single adults, plaintiffs filed a motion for contempt on August 28, 1989, due to the cities non-compliance with the number of beds required by the original order. The plaintiffs were subsequently awarded punitive damages to the amount of $10,000 per day.130

Barry held Initiative 17 directly responsible for the city’s predicament. Its “implementation has resulted in an extraordinary need for shelter space.”131 However, Barry’s concern for the homeless did not absolve him from Winter’s disparagement of his performance vis-à-vis the homeless. Responding to his letter the next day she wrote:

I am mindful of the fact that a court order compelling you to act has been standing for quite some time. It is for this reason that I must now completely agree with many of your critics who believe that you are derelict in your duty to develop and implement a short -and long-range plan to reduce the deficit and provide adequate services for all residents of the District without placing an additional hardship on the taxpayers.132 As in 1985 with the CCNV shelter displacement incident (see Chapter One), Winter incurred immediate push-back from the Anacostian community on sheltering the homeless in nine portable units for 162 men at Hunter Place.133 The Advisory Neighborhood Commission in Ward 8A, in a letter addressed to D.C. City Council Chairman David Clarke, expressed concerns that echoed those voiced in 1985 when the District threatened to close CCNV’s shelter and open

130 "Letter concerning the Plight of the Homeless," Marion Barry, Jr. to The Honorable Nadine P. Winter Councilmember, August 30, 1989, Washington, D.C. Nadine Winter papers. Box 91 Folder 17: 1-2. 131 Ibid. 2-3. 132 Anacostia is shared by Wards 6 and 8. "A Letter Criticizing Barry's Approach to the Homeless Crisis," Nadine P. Winter to Mayor Marion Barry Jr, August 31, 1989, Washington, D.C. 20004. 133 The CCNV shelter is also known as the Federal City Shelter.

100 another in Anacostia. According to Hannah Hawkins, a Ward 8 ANC Commissioner, Anacostia had reached its saturation point “with community residential facilities that house the homeless and the chronically mentally ill.”134 Additionally, she expressed concerns that such trailers would create “breeding grounds for another pocket of chronic drug trafficking.”135 She cited the Capitol City Inn, Pierce, and Pitts shelters as examples of the city government’s deplorable record at running shelter facilities. She also criticised the behaviour of shelter residents who without structured programs were given to “idleness [which] inevitably breeds unsavory behavior.”136 Clearly, these stereotypes of the homeless as mentally ill, idle, and dangerous had not been obliterated by the grassroots activism of the first half of the 1980s. Conversely, the results of a study Winter cited in a white paper reported that “only 20% to 40% of the homeless population [were] the chronically ill.”137 This paper afforded her the opportunity to dispel certain myths about the homeless and to promote her political position on homeless workfare.138 Yet, proximity and constant exposure to the front lines of the homeless problem through the Federal City Shelter at 425 2nd and D NW in Ward 6, certainly contributed to compassion fatigue for the homeless on both sides of the Anacostia River. The communities of Wards 6, 7, and 8 were never shielded from the “dirty little secret” of the connection between drugs and alcohol addiction in the homeless and precariously-housed populations. The War on Drugs waged disproportionately in their neighbourhoods had brought this reality to their doorstep. Robert Hayes of the NCH, one of the major actors in the early years of homeless legal advocacy, corroborated the fact that there was a strategy to portray street people as citizens deserving compassion and therefore activists “shied away from discussing the problem of drug abuse because they feared that the public would lose its sympathy for the homeless.”139 Additionally, “much research during the initial phase of homeless scholarship focused on ... large numbers of individuals with physical or mental disabilities,” as granting agencies and specialized experts normalized alcohol and mental illness research.140 Whether trying to manipulate public compassion for street people or proliferating research that focused on pathologies which merely

134 “Letter Concerning 9 Trailers for the Homeless at Hunter Place in Anacostia,” Hannah M. Hawkins to David Clarke Chairman of the D.C. City Council, August 30, 1989, 2912 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE, Washington, D.C. 20032. Box 86 File 7: 1. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137Winter, “White Paper January 30, 1989,” 2 138 Ibid. 139 Gina Kolata, “Twins of the Streets: Homelessness and Addiction,” The New York Times, May 22, 1989. 140 Elwell, 93; Alice S. Baum and Donald W. Burnes, A Nation in Denial: The Truth about Homelessness (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).; Snow, Baker, Anderson, and Martin. “The Myth of Pervasive Mental Illness among the Homeless.”; Dear, Landscapes of Despair. Wright, Out of Place, 20-21.; Bogard, “Claimsmakers and Contexts in Early Constructions of Homelessness,”435-436.

101 reiterated the “culture of poverty” thesis, neither advocates nor scholars in these cases had achieved the proper balance in their portrayals of the homeless. It was against the backdrop of this shifting paradigm that Initiative 17 faced its inevitable dissolution in conjunction with the intensification of the homeless crisis. In response, activists and service providers called for new solutions such as the abandonment of the “one size fits all” approach to homelessness taking place through emergency shelter and emergency assistance expansion.141 Opponents of Initiative 17 argued that “warehousing of bodies” in the shelter system created “a permanent underclass” of homeless people.”142 Additionally, federal and local policies which proved more punitive than palliative had become a part of the problem. Confronted with the growing homeless and housing crises, advocates, faith-based organizations, coalitions, and services providers demanded that local and federal governments face an important reality: the pressing need for more affordable housing.143 Housing Now!

Figure 2.1: Housing Now! Newsletter.144

141 Elwell, 116.; Kim Hopper, "More Than Passing Strange: Homelessness and Mental Illness in New York City," American Ethnologist 15, no. 1 (February 1988): 163. 142 Dana Standish, “Changemakers: In From the Cold and Learning About Loss,” New Age Journal, March 1985: 32. Mary Ellen Hombs Papers Box 2 Folder 9. 143 Benjamin Holtzman, “‘Shelter Is Only a First Step’: Housing the Homeless in 1980s New York City,” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2017): 886–910.; U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homelessness in America – The Need for Permanent Housing: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 101st Cong., 1st Session, March 1 and 15, 1989. 144 Housing Now! newsletter, Nadine Winter papers, Box 72 File 36.

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It was his tenth term on Capitol Hill and as ranking member of the Housing Subcommittee, D.C. Del. Walter Fauntroy intended to use the accumulation of his political capital to combat the crisis in affordable housing. On July 25, 1989, he outlined his five-point plan at the Housing Now! Press Conference which echoed Secretary Kemp’s April seventeenth op-ed. For Fauntroy, who had spent over twenty years of his career on the frontlines of the District’s most formidable social and economic challenges, this fight was quite personal. The housing initiatives he sponsored were designed to create affordable housing for low- to moderate-incomes and “mend the mistakes of the past, meet the challenges of the present and lay the foundation for the future.”145 First, he presented his Fauntroy-Kemp-Tenant Management provision incorporated in the Housing Bill introduced in the 99th Congress. The Urban Homestead Act of 1989 ( H. R. 118) was introduced not only to reinforce tenant management but also to facilitate resident/management/corporation purchase of public housing. Second, he proposed H. R. 1183 to fund public housing tenant management, rehabilitation, and maintenance jobs to be done by the tenants of their own respective projects. Third, he introduced a “Rent Ceiling Bill” (H.R. 1182) as an amendment of the Housing Act of 1937 to provide a ceiling cap on rental units in public housing. 146 Fourth, Fauntroy co- sponsored the Omnibus Housing Bill introduced by Chairman Gonzalez who was one of the congressmen who helped pass the McKinney Act. This housing bill (H.R. 1180) was designed to assist first-time low- to moderate-income homeownership. Finally, he presented H.R. 1194 known as The Drug-Free Housing and Neighborhoods Act of 1989, whose objective was to rid residential properties of “drug dens.”147

Fauntroy had a long history of bipartisan cooperation with the HUD Secretary Kemp who as former Congressman from New York, defended a self-reliant, decentralized approach to housing instability and homelessness. Fauntroy sponsored many of Sec. Kemp’s initiatives even though they appealed to the conservative approach to poverty and incurred disapproval from certain Democrats.148 Despite these rumblings from the left, bipartisanship once again would be put to the service of seeing to “the fate of the underclass and the homeless.”149 The premises of Fauntroy’s five bills were meticulously laid out in a pamphlet entitled: “Everyone Deserves A

145“National March for Housing Now!” National March for Housing Now! Washington D.C.: Housing Now Coalition,1989.; Housing Now Press Conference, Congressman Walter E. Fauntroy, "Housing Program For the 101st Congress," news release, Washington, D.C, July 25, 1989, 4. Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II Box 1 Folder 17. 146 Fauntroy, “National March for Housing Now” 3.; Bruske, 1988. 147 Fauntroy, “National March for Housing Now” 3. 148 Courtland, “The Republican Approach.” 149 Biles, 298.

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Home!” for a Housing Now! event at the New Bethel Baptist Church on October 4, 1989.150 Although the five bills were published under the Housing Now! label they received no official support from the Housing Now! Coalition. In contrast to the protests which led to the bipartisan support and passage of the McKinney Act, the Housing Now! Coalition gave no official support to congressional legislative efforts until after the march.151

In the articles of incorporation for Housing Now! (May 1 to December 30, 1989) there were no proposed bills or actions other than a general statement of purpose “to end homelessness in America, and to create decent and affordable housing for all Americans.”152 The Housing Now! brochure offered a more precise justification for the march:

While many factors have contributed to the crisis, the lack of affordable housing is the most common and universal. During the last eight years, Federal support for housing has been all but eliminated. Since 1981, budget authority for all Federal housing assistance programs has been cut 77 percent – from $32 billion less than $8 billion per year. 153 Ending homelessness, funding the creation of affordable housing, and restoring the funds for housing programs were the central aims listed in the Housing Now! literature.154 However, the “many factors” which also contributed to the crisis were neither explained nor named, reducing the literature to a single, one-size-fits-all solution of affordable housing. The forums of Housing Now! protest, marches, and rallies were insufficient to deal with the complexity of these issues. It is for this reason that the perennity of the Housing Now! Coalition beyond the dates of its incorporation was essential. Unfortunately, a lasting federation around structural barriers such as healthcare, education, and employment was not achieved nor was long-term coalition-building an

150 Walter E. Fauntroy, “Everyone Deserves A Home.” Housing Now! Washington, D.C.,1989. Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II, Box 169, Folder “Housing Now.” These bills would later be subsumed under Title IV and V of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act (1989- 1990). Public Law No. 101-625. Passed on November 28, 1990, this law was not officially endorsed by the Housing Now Coalition. 151 Karlyn Barker and Eric Pianin, “The Grate Society: Actors and Lawmakers State ‘Sleep-out’ for the Homeless,” Washington Post, March 4, 1987; The Mickey Leland Peace Dividend Housing Assistance Act of 1990 H.R. 4621 was introduced to the House on April 25, 1990.; Under Housing Now! banner, The Next Step Coalition particularly supported H.R. 4621 Title II’s: Community Housing Partnership Grants which authorized funds to States and cities for the acquisition, construction, and rehabilitation of low- and moderate-income housing. Under H.R. 4621, rents would be based on management and construction and not market conditions. Source: Nancy Degnan, Vicki Oppenheim, and Tracy Quitasol, “Housing Now! An Analysis of Its Formation, Organizational Structure and Accomplishments,” working paper, ed. Chester Hartman, Housing Now! An Analysis of Its Formation, Organizational Structure and Accomplishments, 1991: 55. Carol Fennelly Papers Box 13 File 14. H.R. 4621 was never passed into law. See also: https://www.congress.gov/bill/101stcongress/housebill/4621?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22HR+4621+Community+Housing+Partnership %22%5D%7D&r=20&s=2 152 Donna Brazile, Carol Fennelly, and Mitch Snyder, "Articles of Incorporation of Housing Now," 1989, TS MS2153, Carol Fennelly Papers, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Box 14 Folder 3.; Donna Brazile was the National Director of the Housing Now! March and Bernie Bemczuk was the D.C. Coordinator of the Local Housing Now March.; See also: Housing Now! Everyone Deserves A Home! Brochure Walter Fauntroy Papers Part II, Box 169, Folder Housing Now. 153 “National March for Housing Now!” (Washington, D.C.: Housing Now!, 1989): 2. Carol Fennelly Papers, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Housing Series 7. Box 13 Folder 9. 154 Ibid., 1.

104 official objective. Even though the Housing Now! Coalition’s objectives were clearly articulated in the literature, its strategy to reach its three primary goals was not. This absence of a coherent strategy was a major contributing factor to the march’s long-term inefficacy.

Although distinguished guests infused the October 7 rally with impassioned speeches which demanded affordable housing, appealed to the nation’s compassion, and demanded social justice, the protest did not have the ear of President Bush (then away at Camp David) nor did it enlist bipartisan congressional support and participation. Its illustrious speakers adhered to the overall theme of affordable housing yet spoke to their own agendas, which rendered the event generally incoherent and diluted its central message of more affordable housing. For example, Gerald McEntee, president of AFSCME, an AFL-CIO affiliate, spoke of the urban poor and the administration’s tax breaks for the rich; John Jacobs, president of the National Urban League, spoke of discrimination and racism; James Rouse of The Enterprise Foundation addressed the issue of “Competitive America”; and Jesse Jackson, head of the Rainbow Coalition, spoke of freeing Mandela and ending apartheid.155

Many of the estimated 150,000 demonstrators, also supported a more-units approach to the housing problem. This was contradictory to the conservative think tank position championed by housing analysts such as the Heritage Foundation and Brookings Institution who concurred with the Federal government’s position that it should not venture into the business of housing construction. These analysts posited that the government should rather assist with rental costs, homeownership, and improving existing public housing units. In other words, these researchers concluded that the federal government should adhere to its current policies.156

After a three-hour meeting, the organizers succeeded in getting Sec. Kemp to sign a letter of commitment to take several steps to assist the homeless such as reserving 5,000 government- owned single-family houses for them. Sec. Kemp added the handed-written postscript: “On this occasion of the [W]ar on [P]overty, be assured of my desire to work full-time to win this war

155 “National March for Affordable Housing on October 7, 1989,” C-SPAN.org, Last modified October 9, 1989. https://www.c- span.org/video/?9439-1/national-march-affordable-housing. AFSCME: International American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Union. AFL-CIO: American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organizations. 156 Chris Spolar and Steve Twomey, “Housing Marchers Assembling Here With Focus on ‘Affordability Crisis’” Washington Post, October 6, 1989, B6.; See also Housing Now! A Call to Action, 1989, MS MS2153, Carol Fennelly Papers, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Box 14 Folder 2.

105 against poverty, homelessness and despair.”157 Despite this gesture, the Housing Now! Coalition ultimately failed to change the central tenets held by the previous administration which asserted: “the shortage of affordable middle- and lower-income housing policy [was] a problem of affordability and not availability” [and] “[t]here [was] no better housing policy than a growing economy.”158 Ultimately, the Housing Now! activists failed to obtain backing from the Bush administration to build more affordable housing and institute measures to end homelessness nor did they rally congressional support.

Figure 2.2 The second page of HUD Sec. Kemp’s Declaration of War Against Homelessness after the Housing Now! March on October 7, 1989159

157 See Figure 2.2.; See also Alan R. Gold, “Thousands March on Washington In Protest Against Homelessness,” New York Times, October 8, 1989. 158 Biles, 293. 159“ Jack Kemp’s Declaration of War on Homelessness.” Carol Fennelly Papers, 2. October 6, 1989.

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Even though the Housing Now! March created what urban policy analyst Peter Dreier called a “periodic burst of mobilization” and public awareness of the homeless and housing crisis was temporarily raised, the housing movement remained “relatively weak at the national level.”160Analysing the ongoing debate over solutions to the housing and homeless crises brings the nature of this impotence into sharper relief.

Reactions to the march from conservative pundits such as David Whitman reveal the frustration with the Housing Now! Coalition’s central tenet of the need for more affordable housing. For Whitman, the housing crisis was too complex to be confined to mere “sloganeering.”161 The epistolary exchange between Whitman and the collective rebuttal from some of the activists behind the march yields some pertinent insights into the premises put forth for more affordable housing and the Housing Now! Coalition’s failure to convince. Whitman made four key points. First, he maintained that the low-income housing crisis and the housing shortage was not “largely responsible for family homelessness” and that the low-income housing shortage was due to “the disintegration of the private unsubsidized market.”162 Second, the private rental market was responsible for the systematic decimation of low-income housing stock in the 1980s. The urban renaissance of the 1980s, which brought gentrification, overcrowded drug treatment programs, and insufficient mental health care facilities had disastrous consequences for the poor. Third, the marchers should have organized a single lobby for more spending on local services for the addicted and mentally ill. Finally, he made the point that transitional housing for homeless adults was a matter best managed mainly by local entities and not the federal government.

Whitman went on to posit that although the children and youth participation in the October 7 Housing Now! March was an effective means of currying sympathy and compassion, it should have been supplemented by more substantive efforts to avoid some of the pitfalls typical of large- scale protests such as over-simplified ideas, and misguided targets. Whitman argued that the marchers focused on the wrong culprit and were best advised to look to:

The neighborhood organization, that fights the group home for the mentally ill; the zoning board chairman who frustrates construction of inexpensive rental housing; the yuppie who renovates a dilapidated apartment that once housed a poor family; the

160 Peter Dreier and Richard Appelbaum, “The Housing Crisis Enters the 1990s,” New England Journal of Public Policy, Special Issue on Homelessness: New England and Beyond, 8, no. 1 (March 23, 1992): 163. 161 David Whitman, “ Behind the housing Crisis: private sector forces, not Reagan, killed off affordable rentals,” U.S. News and World Report, October 16, 1989. 162 Ibid,1. 107

landlord who forces out tenants by jacking up rents; even the middle-income homeowner who takes his thousands of dollars of tax deductions each year from the federal government...There is a villain in the affordable housing – tragedy… It is us.163

His arguments, however thought-provoking, did not exonerate the Reagan administration from its neglect of the housing poor and homeless, its drastic cuts in domestic spending, and the lack of oversight concerning the HUD’s public housing outlays. Anticipating and challenging the veracity of Whitman’s arguments in the form of a public debate and then laying out the rebuttal in a well-distributed press kit or in the Housing Now! newsletter would have had a more lasting impact. Furthermore, acknowledging Whitman’s statements as to the culprits of the housing crisis and its impact on not only the housing poor and the homeless but also the communities they live in would have better prepared Hometown-Washington protestors for the NIMBY battles of the 1990s. Nevertheless, in an unpublished letter to the editor, the collective authors addressed this “Cassandra.”164

Conversely, the march organizers’ letter to the editor challenged Whitman’s central argument: that private market forces, not the federal housing policy were responsible for the housing crisis during the Reagan/Bush years. This well-written rebuttal carefully elaborated arguments concerning: the administration’s lack of new apartment construction which contributed to eliminating incentives for middle-class homeownership; Reagan-era cutbacks which widened the gap between “what the poor [could] afford and what the private housing market [offered];” how “federal subsidies failed to keep pace with growing need;” the swelling waiting list for public and subsidized housing; the precarity of the single mother paying up to seventy per cent of her income for housing; and the increasing amount of these families getting pushed out of public housing and becoming homeless.165 They also reminded the reader that the Reagan administration shifted funds for building new low-rent apartments to the stigmatizing voucher program. Furthermore, they denounced Whitman for blaming the victim and that his characterization of the homeless as mentally ill and addicts excluded other subpopulations such as families with children

163 Ibid., 2. 164 Flynn, Raymond L, Jack Joyce, Robert Hayes, James Rouse, Donna Brasile, Mitch Snyder, and Barry Zigas. “Letter to the Editor,” Washington, D.C.: U.S. News and World Report, October 1989. Carol Fennelly Papers, Series 1, Box 13 Folder 15. 165 Ibid., 1.

108 and the working poor, as all homeless “deserve better than life on the streets or in shelters.”166 All of these points were valid but this kind of confrontational strategy and its attempts to maintain control of the narrative of the deserving poor were proving less effective in Hometown Washington, as its residents were growing tired of seeing the homeless on their streets – whatever the cause. The argument posited by scholars Alice Baum and Donald Burnes that over the past decade homeless advocates had spent too much time trying to control the homeless political agenda and not openly addressing some of the structural and social barriers to homelessness, merits reflection.167 This thesis argues that it was the D.C. homeless advocate’s inability: to adapt its communication strategies to the new realities of compassion fatigue, to understand the changing forces of professionalized homeless service provision, to change its lack of long-term coalition building with mainstream organizations, and to come to grips with its lack of vision for all the housing poor in Hometown Washington. These deficiencies not only contributed to the Housing Now! March’s inefficacy, but also impaired their ability to anticipate the shifting paradigm of compassion in the Bush administration. In a newsletter published in November 1989, Brian Williams, chairperson of the Catholic Commission and convener of the Summit County Housing Now! reflected on the impact of the march: The HOUSING NOW! rally …was a day of inspiration for all of us, from the Ohio mini-rally which began it to Jesse Jackson’s impassioned speech that ended it. In between we marched, sang, and yelled our message…: Immediate action by Congress to restore funding for affordable housing. How soon we get a response and what type of impact we’ll have on the homeless crisis is still left unanswered.168 Even in the wake of the HUD’s Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation program fund misappropriation scandal, economic experts extended the reasons for the housing crisis beyond the allegations of fraud, mismanagement, and waste which occurred under the Reagan administration policies. Rent control, a shift from manufacturing to service jobs, and soaring real estate prices in a competitive housing market, were also posited as causes for housing instability. Furthermore, the Bush administration not only supported Reagan era solutions to the homeless crisis, but it also expanded on the pre-existing voucher program. The Bush administration pursued its own agenda through the development of a series of housing and development initiatives known as the

166 Raymond et. al. “Letter to the Editor,” 2.; See also: Elliot Liebow, Tell Them Who I Am: the Lives of Homeless Women (New York: Free Press, 1995), xii-xiv, 1-2. 167 Baum, and Burnes, A Nation in Denial. 168 Brian J. Williams, “Housing Now: The Newsletter!,” The Affordable Housing Coalition 1, no. 1 (November 1989):1. Carol Fennelly Papers Box 14 Folder 4.

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Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE). These housing and economic development initiatives were designed to allow moderate- to low-income housing tenants to purchase their own homes. However, the initiative did not receive bipartisan support. Democrats such as Senator Patrick Moynihan (N.Y.) claimed that this proposal would not compensate for the extreme cuts in federal housing subsidies of the 1980s. Barry Zigas president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition weighed in on the HOPE initiatives declaring “it’s impossible to see any real dent in the crisis confronting low-income people.”169 Although there was much disagreement on how to solve the crisis in affordable housing, the HOPE initiatives and the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act of 1989 (amended in 1990) would set the scene in the 1990s for the rehabilitation of substandard housing and homeownership for low- income families in the inner city.170

Conclusion “Self-sufficiency” was a major leitmotiv of the welfare consensus and homeless assistance debates throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. This “remedy” contrived from pernicious dependency talk was deployed to demonize single-parent motherhood in America’s inner cities, to pathologize homelessness, and in the District – to dismantle Initiative 17. The most serious crimes against the homeless lay in the help not given and what the most well-intended policies failed to do. With this absence of assistance, culpability was shifted to those most in need, blamed for an inability to help themselves. Perhaps the greatest injustice there was the lack of understanding that not everyone was meant to thrive or even survive in those broken places without adequate assistance. In other words, for the housing poor and homeless, self-sufficiency is not innate but must be fostered, despite structural barriers such as institutional discrimination.

Self-help rhetoric in America’s housing and homeless policies permeated political and social scientific discourse at the end of the 1980s. Its utterances fed academic debate, think tank data, and political rhetoric which often proved disconnected from the realities of local need. As with the welfare consensus and its subsequent influence on poverty knowledge, homeless scholarship experienced its own consensus at the end of the 1980s. Defining the homeless, and its

169 Ibid. 170 Biles, 297-298.

110 causes dominated poverty knowledge of homelessness.171 The nexus of homelessness and housing had not yet become a coveted subject of funded poverty research.

Since the historical trajectories of the public housing and homeless crisis were so deeply intertwined, developments in one arena continued to influence changes in the other, even throughout the 1990s. The self-help ideology fueled by dependency talk in political and intellectual debates of the Bush administration was formalized in the second war on poverty declared by HUD Secretary Jack Kemp and the continued War on Drugs waged under the direction of drug czar William Bennett.172

In principle, Sec. Kemp’s homeownership scheme for low- to moderate-income families, and the creation of enterprise zones to increase inner-city tax revenue were ideal components of Bush’s “thousand points of light.”173 This “new activism” was designed “to replace the grand gestures of the Great Society welfare state” in the fight against poverty and to restore the dignity of the low-income families and the poor through tax cuts and welfare-to-work programs.174 Unfortunately, Kemp’s ambitions were tethered to his own falling star, which diminished his progressive, “bleeding-heart” conservative war on poverty into little more than a “skirmish.”175 At a time when one million families were on the waiting list for public housing and the 55,000 families (4% of the nation’s 1.4 million public housing units) were cited as being “on the path” to owning their own homes, the HOPE program did not transfer any public housing into tenant homeownership during the Bush administration.176

Although the claimsmakers of the 1980s in the District did not produce clear typifications of street people, the conviction that “something must be done” drove the making and unmaking of local measures. Unfortunately, early overtures to solve the homeless crisis consisted in throwing insufficient local and federal funds, at the problem. Additionally, despite the fact that certain

171 Martha Burt, et. al. “Who Are the Homeless and Why Are They on the Streets?” Lecture, Rethinking Policy on Homelessness: A Conference Sponsored by The Heritage Foundation and The American Spectator, The Lehrman Auditorium, Washington, D.C, December 14, 1988 (Heritage Foundation, 1989): 16-27. https://www.c-span.org/video/?5369-1/rethinking-policy-homelessness; Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs (Washington, D.C.: National Acad. Pr., 1988), accessed December 30, 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK218232/. ; Kim Hopper, "More than Passing Strange.”; E. L. Bassuk and L. Rosenberg, "Why Does Family Homelessness Occur? A Case-control Study.," American Journal of Public Health 78, no. 7 (1988).; Rossi, Down and out in America.; Charles Hoch and Robert A. Slayton, New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).; Barak, Gimme Shelter. 172 Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. 173 "The 1988 Republican National Convention," in George H.W. Bush 1988 Acceptance Speech, transcript, CSPAN, August 18, 1988. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25955 174 Biles 288-289. ; Lauren Gail Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004):2. 175 Biles, 304, 315. 176 Ibid. 111 members of elected leadership and some ground-level practitioners concluded that the homeless should not be warehoused, the solutions provided in the 1980s relied on a limited understanding of the various subgroups in homeless communities. Despite the fact that the city government had finally taken the helm of homeless service provision, the challenge of providing adaptable solutions for affordable housing and wraparound services remained unmet.

Claimsmakers of the 1980s in the nation’s capital who sought to bring the plight of the homeless to the public on a local and national level observed their local struggle impact other cities across the country from the unique vantage point their proximity to federal institutions provided. In Hometown Washington, claimsmaker efforts in the first half of the 1980s to dramatize homelessness as a social problem where street people were “just like us, ” highlighted a typification of the homeless movement still in its infancy. The alternative representations of the homeless and the capacity to move beyond the deficiency typification model had not yet taken hold on a national level. By the end of the 1980s, the persistent crises in public housing and homelessness eroded public compassion. Homeless advocates had lost control of the narrative.

This paradigm shift was reflected in the Housing Now! Coalition’s inability to make a lasting political and social impact. The Housing Now! Coalition’s central flaw was its neglect of the fact that housing stability for the precariously-housed and the homeless involved more than just the quest for affordable housing. In “Homelessness and the Low Income Housing Crisis” housing expert and founder of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, Cushing Dolbeare asserted that healthcare, treatment for mental illness and substance abuse, job training, and childcare were essential companions to closing the housing affordability gap.177 Additionally, an inability to gain bipartisan congressional support for the Housing Now! Coalition; the Coalition’s inefficacy in shaping the public debate on housing issues; and a lack of strategy to address housing concerns not only for low-income families and the precariously-housed but also middle-class families affected by the housing crisis, were major impediments to the coalition’s success.

Whereas local struggles to educate the public about their moral and civic duty to help the homeless eventually played out in the national arena, the right to overnight shelter did not. Taking into account the first wave of civil rights leadership still on the District’s City Council,

177 Cushing N Dolbeare, “Homelessness and the Low Income Housing Crisis,” HeinOnLine (Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 1992): 172. file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Desktop/CushingNDolbeare Homelessness and the Politics of Low income housing.pdf. Accessed February 25, 2019.

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Washington, D.C.’s passage of Initiative 17 in the mid-1980s seemed out of step with the national trend of increasing pressure towards workfare reform for the welfare state. It was a discrepancy which would be rectified five years later with the nullification of the right to overnight shelter on demand and the failure to restore it by referendum in 1990. Furthermore, the aim of “breaking the cycle of dependency” in welfare recipiency on both sides of the political divide would also be applied to the rising institution of homeless assistance of the 1990s.

By the end of the 1980s, the D.C. government had begun facilitating the professionalization of homeless service provision and its on-going institutionalization. Unfortunately, Mayor Barry’s political and personal missteps and the Department of Human Services’ numerous corruption scandals rendered city-run homeless services grossly insufficient.178 As Sharon Pratt Dixon declared upon winning the 1990 mayoral election, it was “time to clean house.”179

As we shall see, the principle of “self-sufficiency” would re-emerge in the growing bureaucracy of public homeless assistance discourse under the guise of the “breaking the cycle of dependency” rhetoric in Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s administration and in the “breaking the cycle of homeless” plan of the Clinton administration.180 Meanwhile, compassion fatigue in affluent communities translated into resident activism and the NIMBY battles of the 1990s, further marginalizing the city’s homeless into Washington, D.C.’s third ghetto.

178 Elwell, 170, 174.; Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City. 179 Mary Ann French and Steve Twomey, “Dixon –and the City – ‘Ready for Change’: Little Funded, Little Known Victor Vows to ‘Clean House,’” Washington Post, September 12, 1990. 180 Sharon Pratt Kelly, “Press Conference for the Homeless Task Force Meeting,” October 20, 1992. DCAAP.0021 Collection Number 228 Cassette, Box 70 Folder 15, Sharon Pratt Kelly Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.; U.S Housing and Urban Development, “ Priority, home! : the federal plan to break the cycle of homelessness,” Washington, D.C., 1994.

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Chapter 3 –Not in My Back Yard! Shifting Attitudes Toward the Homeless

The expanding homeless assistance bureaucracy of the 1990’s, infamously known as “the shelter industry” created its own revolving doors of dependency.1 As the homeless crisis persisted, homeless service provision became increasingly professionalized and subsumed under the growing bureaucracy of the case management system for homeless consumers in the third ghetto of the 1990s.2 Poverty scholars have well-documented the trials and tribulations of homeless consumers of these public assistance services. For example, they were forced to remain in close proximity to emergency shelters with seven p.m. to seven a.m. curfews. They were also tethered to the long periods of waiting necessary to access the most basic public services which rendered “homeless people dependent on institutionalized work schedules for food and shelter.”3 These tools, put in place to aid the homeless, became mere poverty traps.

The appearance of these service-dependent ghettoes in wards west of the Anacostia River provoked anger and protest. This conflict was exacerbated by the placement of temporary homeless shelters not in “the abandoned residential” and “residual” cities, east of the Anacostia River, but in “the luxury housing spots,” in “the residential city,” in the “places of big decisions,” and in “the city of advanced services, and direct production” of beachhead areas in affluent neighbourhoods such as Georgetown, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, and the West End in the District.4 It was the presence of the third ghetto and its residents in the “residential city” and “economic city” in Wards Two and Three of the District, reaction to the “noxious facilities” designed to aid the homeless and homeless service providers, as well as fear of the disorder and crime the homeless allegedly brought with them, which fuelled the NIMBY battles waged during the early 1990s.5 As for homeless activism in the District, the nullification of Initiative 17 and neighbourhood confrontations with residents and business associations were clear indications that homeless advocacy was losing ground in its ability to shape public opinion concerning the

1 Gregg, Gimme Shelter.; Blau, The Visible Poor. 2 Elwell, 183- 286. 3 Susser, 417.; See also: Williams, “Deadly Inequalities,” 150.; Sarah H. Strauss and Andrew E. Tomback, “Homelessness: Halting the Race to the Bottom.” Yale Law & Policy Review 3, no. 2 (1985): 551–70. 4 Marcuse, "Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City,” 196-197. 5 Linda Wheeler, "005 Felled By Voters In Ward 3; Homeless Issue Won In Most of District," Washington Post, November 15, 1990; Linda Wheeler, “"A Test of D.C.'s Policy on the Homeless; Advocates Seek Voter Support to Continue Initiative Guaranteeing Right to Shelter Series: Campaign’90,” Washington Post, November 4, 1990.

114 homeless. Conversely, neighbourhood residents and business associations, exasperated with the continued presence of visible homelessness near their homes and businesses, were beginning to fight back through community activism to exclude the homeless from these contested spaces.

Recent scholarship has also exposed the exclusionary projects of penal institutions and welfare programs, which disempower members of “undeserving groups” comprised of low- income African American women and men as well as Latino men through disenfranchisement, stigmatization, and marginalization.6 Historian Kohler-Hausmann argued that state intervention in the penal, welfare, and rehabilitative institutions exposed the trajectory of increasingly punitive policies that marginalized convicts, welfare recipients, and addicts. Additionally, these types of government interventions created systemic barriers to employment, social resources, political agency, and citizenship for the aforementioned “undeserving groups” in the last decades of the twentieth century.7 An important subset of the “undeserving” poor must figure into poverty knowledge of this period – the homeless. Although ethnographers and sociologists have addressed homelessness and its connections to incarceration, and more discretely to housing precarity and eviction, the nation’s carceral state, welfare state, and the institution of homeless assistance are inextricably intertwined.8 However, poverty scholarship has not sufficiently addressed the historical interaction of this triptych. Chapter Three affirms this triad as the historical context for the on-going institutionalization of the third ghetto of the nation’s capital in the 1990s.

The purpose of Chapter Three is to answer one central question: after a decade of general public compassion for visible homelessness in the 1980s, how can the shifting attitudes towards the homeless at the beginning of the 1990s be explained?9 This chapter focuses on the intensification of hostility towards the homeless population in Washington, D.C., through the analysis of local policy and the observation of community opposition to the presence of the homeless and homeless assistance services from 1990 to 1992, as well as the drivers of the NIMBY battles, particularly in Wards Two and Three. These two wards are the central geographical focus of this chapter which also has three main objectives. First, is to present some of the contributing

6 Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, “Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States.” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 87–99. 7 Kohler-Hausmann, 87, 92.; See also Alexander, The New Jim Crow. 8 Gowan, “The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration.”; Mathew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. (London: Penguin Books, 2016).; Kerr, Derelict Paradise. 9 Evidence of an emerging attitude of public compassion can be found in a marked increase in media coverage which began in late 1981 and 1982 as “claimsmakers” such The Washington Post and The New York Times began to construct homelessness as a social problem.; See also Bogard, 47-68. Passage of Initiative 17 by seventy- two per cent of the voting population was also a strong local indicator. 115 factors to the changing attitudes toward the homeless. Second is to analyse the dismantling of the right to overnight shelter on demand in the context of shifting attitudes towards the homeless. Third, to examine the impact of “nimby syndrome” in the context of Washington, D.C.’s homeless assistance policies of the early 1990s which entailed an increased backlash towards local homelessness, and the homeless service providers and infrastructure set up in two of the most affluent wards of the District.

The Times On January 11, 1990 Police Chief Isaac Fulwood Jr. issued the following letter to community leaders in Washington, D.C.:

The Metropolitan Police Department will soon introduce an innovative policing strategy called Community Empowerment Policing (CEP). Under CEP, the police will take an active leadership role in mobilizing citizens and resources to prevent and reduce criminal activity, especially among youths, and to assist in improving the overall quality-of-life within our communities.10 There were several types of policing styles used to fight inner-city crime in the second half of the twentieth century. Answering calls and patrolling communities in search of crime with a particular focus on serious crime was the form of work police officers did from the 1950s to the 1970s known as “traditional” policing. Team policing was a “poorly defined” and ineffective strategy adapted in the1970s and 1980s, which used a team of officers working round the clock in designated neighbourhoods to reduce crime.11 The central philosophy of community policing was that most Americans encountered more instances of uncivil behaviour than actual crime; therefore the reduction of civil disorder was essential to crime prevention. Contrary to traditional and team building policing, community policing focused on working with the community to identify incivilities thereby involving concerned citizens with the process of order maintenance. The participatory angle of this policing style capitalised on a pre-existing spirit of “taking back the streets” for residents of the District who were caught in the crosshairs of gang violence and the War on Drugs in the early

10 Isaac Fulwood Jr., Letter to Community Leaders, “ Introducing Community Empowerment Policing.” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Police, January 11, 1990).Walter Fauntroy Papers II, Box 183 File 6. 11David M. Allender, “Community Policing: Exploring the Philosophy,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 73 no.3 ( March 2004): 19.; Timothy Roufa, “Community Policing vs. Traditional Policing,” Truth is Light (Blogger, December 26, 2017), https://www.thebalancecareers.com/traditional-policing-974687.

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1990s.12 The popularity of community policing was indicative of changing attitudes towards the homeless across urban America in the early 1990s. Since the homeless in the District were increasingly targeted as perpetrators of incivility (panhandling) and defined as drug addicts, they were not only viewed as the harbingers of crime and disruptive to the quality- of-life of downtown D.C. residents, but were also major targets of community policing.13 They were, in fact, the embodiment of changing times.

The signs of a shifting paradigm were there. By 1990, across the nation, there was clear evidence that public attitudes towards the homeless were not what they once had been. Just as the winter months had always inspired grand gestures toward the plight of the homeless, the spring of 1990 ushered in “a distinct cooling in official and public sympathy for the homeless.”14 In Atlanta, the Police Department began its campaign of arrests for public drunkenness, loitering, and obstructing traffic. This new draconian approach to public space management provoked the disappearance of street people from Atlanta’s downtown areas, out of sight of the city’s imposing convention hotels. In New York City, the federal court of appeals set an important legal precedent in the debate on begging and first amendment rights when it upheld its ban on panhandling in public transit. A local New York City court not only ruled that panhandling was not a form of constitutionally protected speech, but also that in some cases it could even be considered: “nothing less than assault.”15 This judgment was consistent with a study commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1988 which found that the majority of subway riders viewed begging as “intimidating, threatening or harassing.”16 Anti-panhandling sentiment was also growing in the District where merchants like Herbert Stanwood, owner of the Capitol Hill Exxon station on Pennsylvania Ave, said of the homeless: “I think they’ve had a real negative influence on the Capitol Hill commercial district. These are young, able-bodied guys. When you work 60, 70 hours a week, it’s hard to sympathize with someone who stands out there five hours a day with his hand out.”17

12 Gigi Anders. “2 Drug Warriors Honored in D.C.” Washington Post, January 18, 1990.; Athelia Knight, “Neighbors Walk Into Fear: Taking Back the Streets,” Washington Post, February 7, 1990. 13 David Whitman and Dorian Friedman, “The Return of Skid Row: Why alcoholics and addicts are filing the streets again,” U.S. News & World Report, January 15, 1990, 27-29; Timothy A Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City the Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 166. 14 Gwen Ifill, “Sympathy Wanes for Homeless: Funding Drop, Arrests Herald New Attitude,” Washington Post, May 21, 1990. 15 Ibid. 16 “Begging and Free Speech,” Washington Post, May 19, 1990.; George F. Will, “Beggars and Judicial Imperialism,” Washington Post, February 1, 1990. 17 Stephen Buckley, “D.C. Merchants Losing Patience With Panhandlers,” Washington Post, March 10, 1990.

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Reaction to homelessness panhandling was not limited to the growing ambivalence in public transportation and the business district but was also captured in hard data. According to the aforementioned 1990 ICH Report, there was a marked decrease in tolerance for the visible homeless, particularly for money solicitation, despite the relatively small numbers of street homeless engaging in this practice:

although panhandling by homeless persons is frequently mentioned as an increasing irritant, only a small portion of homeless persons panhandle. The most recent, nationwide study of homelessness by the Urban Institute, found that only about 17% of service-using homeless persons received any income from handouts (approximately 10-15% work for pay) – suggesting that fewer than one in five persons panhandles for funds.18 In a Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted in May 1990, results showed a marked decline in sympathy for the homeless. Of the more than one thousand respondents, fifty-eight per cent claimed they would be willing to pay more taxes to provide homeless shelters, down from seventy- one percent who said yes to the same question six months earlier.19 Additionally, the percentage of Americans who attributed the fact of being homeless with “circumstances beyond their control” was down to sixty-three per cent in May 1990 from seventy-five per cent in September of 1989. The Washington Post poll reported that only five per cent of respondents declared that homelessness was “the most important problem facing the country today.”20 Drugs (thirty-six per cent) and the environment (thirteen per cent) were clearly more pressing problems. Although most studies showed that substance abusers and the mentally ill represented two-thirds of these subpopulations of the homeless collectively, Lisa Mihaly, a homeless service provider for youngsters through the Children’s Defense Fund, reported a growing trend to label homeless individuals and families as “dysfunctional drug and alcohol addicts.”21

Scholar Brett Williams eloquently brought to light not only the the health disparaties in the District, but also the effects of mass incarcation and its connections to homelessness:

18 “The 1990 Annual Report of the Interagency Council on the Homeless.” rep. The City Council, (Washington, D.C.: February 1991), 25.; Martha R. Burt and Barbara E. Cohen, “America’s Homeless – Numbers Characteristics and Programs That Serve Them,” rep., vol. 89, 3 (Urban Institute, July 1989).; For the information on the homeless receiving handouts. See also: Rossi, Down and out in America,108-109. 19 ICH Report, 25.; Ifill, “Sympathy Wanes for Homeless.”; see also Jenice Armstrong, “ Dupont Circle Wants Relief From Beggars,” Washington Post, June 14, 1990.; In Just Times, the newsletter of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (November 1990).; E. Uzetac, “Frustrated by Homeless, U.S. Shows Compassion Fatigue,” Austin American-Statesman, December 4, 1990. 20 Ifill, “Sympathy Wanes for Homeless.”; see also Jenice Armstrong, “ Dupont Circle Wants Relief From Beggars,” Washington Post, June 14, 1990. 21 Ifill, “Sympathy Wanes for Homeless.”

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The growing inequality in the 1990s might have increased the measures of unemployment and poverty substantially during those years if not for incarceration. Once released from prison, former inmates often find it almost impossible to readjust or find work. As a homeless-shelter worker remarked to me during a conversation about displacement, “They’re not misplaced: they’re over here where I’m at. They drop people off right from the jail.” Washington’s drug laws are by necessity federal laws (since the District is not a state), and thus residents have experienced the worst of harsh and mandatory sentences that began in 1984 .22

Although incarceration clearly fed the homeless crisis, the diminishing efficacy of homeless activism in controlling the narrative of public compassion was the thin end of the wedge. Despite the success of events such as the Housing Now! March in raising public awareness about homelessness, the failure of public policy to get the homeless out of downtown streets fostered resentment. Donna Brazile, National Director of the Housing Now! March said: “People don’t like to deal with guilt each and every day of their lives. The public is fed up.”23 This crescent hostility was well-documented in poverty scholarship.

There has been a rich literature on public attitudes toward the homeless particularly in the 1990s.24 Sociologists Barrett Lee, David Lewis, and Susan Hinze Jones weighed in on the shift in public beliefs about the homeless overtime:

few issues manage to sustain full problem stature for an extended period, given the public's limited attention span, the media's tendency to cover a story past the saturation point, and-perhaps most importantly-the threat posed by alternative worries. Will the new homelessness compete successfully with the AIDS epidemic, abortion, gang violence, or some still-to-be-identified challenger? If not, we may witness a shift in national sentiment, culminating in the placement of the homeless among the ranks of the “undeserving” poor and reduced enthusiasm for ameliorative policies and programs.25 Homeless advocates had also built up an adversarial relationship with the business community which seemed overly focused on the protection of its advertising image, its tourist population, and against visual and physical contact with the homeless. In turn members of the business community like Bruce Burney, research director for the Central Atlanta Progress (CAP)

22 Williams, “Deadly Inequalities,”156. See also: Gowan, “The Nexus: Homelessness and Incarceration.”; 23 Ibid. 24 Bruce G. Link, Sharon Schwartz, Robert Moore, Jo Phelan, Elmer Struening, Ann Stueve, and Mary Ellen Colten. “Public Knowledge, Attitudes, and Beliefs about Homeless People: Evidence for Compassion Fatigue?” American Journal of Community Psychology 23, no. 4 (1995): 533–55.; Barret A. Lee, Chad R. Farrell, and Bruce G. Link. “Revisiting the Contact Hypothesis: The Case of Public Exposure to Homelessness.” American Sociological Review 69, no. 1 (2004): 40–63. 25 Lee et al., “Are the Homeless to Blame?”, 547.

119 group felt that “a 20-year wall [had] been built up between advocates and the business community.”26 This quote raises some interesting questions about the long-term effects of an adversarial relationship with marginalized groups. In order to end this acrimonious dynamic, homeless advocacy groups would need to change their relationship with local government and the business community to sustain their programs and improve their service capabilities.

In Hometown Washington, as the District moved from protest to professionalization, compassion for the homeless was coming further undone. By the early 1990s, it was clear that the house that Mitch Snyder built was crumbling. His fall was not the sole instigator of the waning compassion for the homeless but was rather an integral part of it. Indicators of CCNV’s inability to take the reins of a national movement could be seen as early as the 1970s, reflected in Snyder’s conflict with Holy Trinity Catholic Church when it decided to use funds for necessary renovation instead of using it to shelter the homeless as Snyder and CCNV members demanded.27 By 1988, there were already rumours that Snyder was losing interest in the movement and clear evidence that local providers were unwilling to work with him.28 His participation in the Housing Now! March, given the high profile he had always held in other direct action protests, seemed almost ceremonial.

The endless controversial attempts to quantify the homeless in the 1980s were won not by political activists such as Snyder whose estimates hovered around the three-million homeless people nationwide mark, nor did the Reagan administration win the argument with its HUD estimate of 250,000.29 It was rather the poverty researchers of the late 1980s who seemed to be closest to the generally accepted figure of 600,000 to one million range by the second half of the 1990s.30 It was precisely because of this ambiguity that Snyder and CCNV had an opportunity to be a part of the conversation on the size and the specific client characteristics of the homeless using their headquarters at the Federal City Shelter. However, Snyder and CCNV’s refusal to be a part of the March 1990 Census count and to set the record straight thereby ending the count wars gracefully, was a monumental political mistake. Federal Washington’s one night, nationwide

26 Ifill, “Sympathy Wanes for Homeless.”; See also: Holland, 296. 27 Marjorie, Hyer, “One Man’s Battle to Build A Shelter for the Homeless,” Washington Post, June 2, 1978. 28 Mary McGrory, “Sheltering a Costly Grudge,” Washington Post, February 25, 1986. 29 Joe Conason, “Body Count: How the Reagan Administration Hides the Homeless.” Village Voice, December 3, 1985. 30 Martha Burt, et. al. “Rethinking Policy on Homelessness: A Conference Sponsored by The Heritage Foundation and The American Spectator,” The Lehrman Auditorium, Washington, D.C, December 14, 1988 (Heritage Foundation, 1989): 42.; Gwen Ifill, “The House Mitch Built: Across America, the ‘Movement’ Still Has Vitality,” Washington Post, July 22, 1990.

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“Shelter and Street Night” of homeless persons found in proximity to some of the locations where they tended to congregate or dwell, would serve as a laudable first “attempt to physically count this hard to quantify population, and [...] provide some insight into its size, along with a variety of useful demographic, social and economic data.”31 Furthermore, Snyder was not a politician nor was he really interested in being the type of leader who consolidated a nationwide movement. To quote a national Coalition for the Homeless Board member: “He was visible to you all in Washington, because he had an immediate cause – the [D Street] shelter… But when it came to standing up and declaring himself as the head of the national movement, he didn’t.”32

The McKinney Act in 1987 was the anti-homelessness movement’s swan song of political relevance and national recognition. This institutionalization of the emergency shelter system was concomitant with the bureaucratization of homeless assistance services. Homeless scholar and activist Christine Elwell observed that “[h]omeless assistance went from a patchwork of programs and services to a major comprehensive plan to address the issue, albeit through emergency aid.”33 Moreover, due to the large amount of federal cash injections local governments were receiving across America “within a few short years. homelessness had finally gained legitimacy, as did its advocates.”34 Despite this new found legitimacy, Washington Post reporter Gwen Ifill noted an on-going dynamic of erosion of compassion towards visible homelessness which by the second half of the 1980s was reflected “in several widely-noted instances in New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and Washington, [where] government officials and private citizens […] expressed irritation at the presence of homeless people in public places.”35 She also noted that some of the difficulty in transforming homelessness into a national issue was Federal Washington’s slow reaction time when the “first signs of the problem began showing up on the nation’s streets in the early 1980s”.36

By 1990, the three-year-old McKinney Act was finally fully-funded and had served as a major driving force in the creation of the fledgling institution of homeless emergency shelter assistance for the Nation. As previously mentioned in Chapter One, the passage of the McKinney Act took place due to the immense political pressure from anti-homelessness advocates, scholar-

31 ICH Report 1990, 29. 32 Ifill, “ The House Mitch Built.” 33 Elwell, 163. 34 Ibid 35 Ifill, “ The House Mitch Built.” 36 Ibid.

121 activist, celebrities, and key congressional members. However, the recommendation of the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) that local solutions to the homeless crisis would be more effective were disregarded. These “Cassandras” warned that any long-term federal funding “would simply throw money at the symptoms while creating a new federal bureaucracy.”37 Locally, the McKinney Act did bring in a new infusion of funding to service provision. The new federal policy not only expanded services but also improved them by farming out its essential operations to non-profit agencies. Non-profit providers infused this new institution with a professionalized approach gleaned from a business management style they had previously applied to charity organizations and the delivery of human services. However, as advocates of the 1980s retired, the new advocacy leadership that dealt with this professionalized culture of homeless assistance was “less proactive about raising systemic issues.”38

Unfortunately, the advocates who tried to work with this new institution to provoke change were eventually disillusioned. Elwell posited that whereas “creative political and confrontational advocacy was largely personality-driven in previous decades, in the 1990s, the leadership moved in the direction of professionalization, becoming more conservative and focusing on a “different agenda.”39 This professionalization of assistance services to the homeless in the third ghetto was built on third sector intervention from entities such as non-profits which helped build what Charles Steffen calls the “homeless management complex.”40 Steffen argues that this complex was built on the following six essential elements: pathologization, the objectification and medicalization of homeless bodies, the privatization of homeless programs, marketization of performance criteria, and the proletarianization of an able-bodied homeless workforce.41 This combination of forces forged the inter-sectorial collaborations of the homeless assistance network which served the occupants of the third ghetto and laid the foundations for “the institutional outlines of neoliberal homeless management.”42 Protest for the rights of the homeless was gradually being taken over by the professionalization of homeless services which through the complex apparatuses and

37 Jay Matthews, “Heritage Group Criticizes U.S. Aid for Homeless: Report Recommends Local Solution,” Washington Post, April 28, 1985. Cassandra a mythological character cursed to speak the truth but not to be believed. 38 Elwell, 190. 39 Ibid. 40 Charles G. Steffen, “The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness: Class Power and Urban Governance in Neoliberal Atlanta, 1973–1988.” Journal of Social History 46, no.1 (2012): 171. 41 Steffen, 171-172. 42 Steffen, 171.

122 technologies of “governmentality” objectified the homeless into a “homeless problem” to be assessed and solved in the rising bureaucracy of homeless assistance.43

By 1990, the anti-homelessness movement had already begun losing ground in the fight to maintain shelter as a right, while the politicization of defining, counting, and caring for the homeless was gaining ground. The view that homelessness was a crisis to be solved by effective policy and professionalized services was gradually supplanting the perception of homelessness as a moral, rights-and-justice, or even an “attractive” issue.44 However, the communities that lived with the outcomes of these policies were ill-prepared to deal with community-based solutions that brought the homeless to their neighbourhoods. According to the ICH report:

Ironically, the same visibility that generated the original increase in concern and compassion for homeless persons now threatens to diminish that compassion and reduce the general public’s support for efforts to help homeless persons.[…] Homeless providers and homelessness organizations also report that public support and sympathy for homeless persons is declining in some areas (although it remains generally strong).45 According to Hopper and Baumohl, by the 1990s communities were forced to face the reality that homelessness was no longer an “emergency” or merely a “crisis-driven dispossession” but a longstanding representation of “residential instability.”46 The institution of homelessness which was firmly in place by the 1990s was the dénouement of what Hopper and Baumohl called “one of the chronically makeshift ways of life that occasionally ‘fail’ and ‘spill’ over into the pool of official’ homelessness.”47 Deinstitutionalization and the breakdown of the welfare state were two of these failing institutions which spilled into and fed the burgeoning institution of the shelter industry and the chronic need which lied behind the artifice of urgency.

As for the homeless, public sympathy for their plight was clearly waning and being replaced by swelling public outrage. The nation was returning to the old tropes that the homeless activists of 1980s held at least temporarily at bay.48This compassion fatigue was evident in the accelerated dismantling of Initiative 17.

43 Steffen, 171.; Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Pete Miller (Chicago, 1991) 87-104. 44 Bogard, Seasons Such As These, 186-189. 45 “The 1990 Annual Report of the Interagency Council on the Homeless,” rep., (Washington, D.C.: The Council, February 1991), 24-25. 46 Elwell, 187.; Kim Hopper and Jim Baumohl. “Held in Abeyance.” American Behavioral Scientist, vol. 37, no. 4, 1994, 522–552. 47 Elwell, 187. 48 Elwell, 184.

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The D.C. Emergency Overnight Shelter Amendment Act of 1990 A compelling policy question for the District and the Federal government in addressing homelessness in the Nation’s Capital is: Where do we go from here? Many observers, local and national have become alarmed by the emergence of what is being called a “shelter industry” fueled by state, local, and federal funds. From burgeoning emergency shelters to the grim reality of welfare hotels, no matter how the pie is sliced the taxpayers are footing the bill for a situation that is getting progressively worse. Diminishing the reality of homelessness not perpetuating it, should be the top priority of every policymaker and public administrator involved.49 “Where do we go from here?” Councilmember Winter’s question served as an introduction to her mission statement. Given the contents of her white paper on homelessness, the answer was clear: local government was now in charge of managing the homeless crisis and it must do more than just warehouse the homeless in emergency shelters. “No white paper would be complete” she ventured “without somewhat startling and controversial recommendations.”50 Whereas her entreaty to enact immediate legislation to create transitional and supportive housing seemed a logical solution to the “grim realities” of the emergency shelter, her amendments to Initiative 17 proved more controversial.

The final version of the D.C. Emergency Overnight Shelter Amendment Act of 1990, stipulated the grounds for denying shelter, limited the duration of a single person or family’s stay and required that the shelter resident make a financial contribution to shelter maintenance within their means. Those occupants who repeatedly refused to accept permanent housing, employment, or who did not enrol their children in school could be denied shelter access. However, the most controversial stipulation of the Act was the removal of the entitlement feature of Initiative 17, which guaranteed the right to shelter on demand. The council’s amendment also established certain features of continuity with the original initiative. The provision of medical treatment, counselling, and “other services for shelter occupants to enable them to become more self-sufficient,” would continue in conjunction with a more “responsible and compassionate” amended shelter program.51

Mayor Barry’s submission of the 1991 budget which proposed a total of $20 million to feed and house the homeless, lent a new urgency to enact statutory program requirements and

49 Nadine P Winter, “Helping the Homeless: An Analysis of the District Government's Response to the Homeless Population,” issue brief, Helping the Homeless: An Analysis of the District Government's Response to the Homeless Population (Washington, D.C., 1989), Gelman Collection copy in Nadine Winter Papers, ox 83, Folder 7. 50 Ibid., Recommendations section. 51 Editorial. “Ballot Question,” Washington Post, November 1, 1990.

124 spending caps to prevent runaway spending on homeless assistance services. In reality, due to the variability of the homeless population, estimates of the District taxpayer dollars for the 1991 budget went as high as $43 million. The District was also under pressure to pay $11,500 per day in fines since December 26, 1989, because of its failure to provide “adequate safe and sanitary overnight shelter for every homeless person who […] required it.”52 In a letter to her co- councilmembers, Winter expressed the urgency of passing the new legislation. Should the budget be set without its approval, Winter was convinced that “we will have, once again, supported by inaction what has become an almost careless habit of throwing money at yet another difficult and politically sensitive problem without regards to efficiency or a reasonable expectation of results.”53 In fact, since 1985, the cost of caring for the homeless had gone from $10.3 million (appropriated budget of $7.3 million) to $40 million in 1990 ($29.7 million appropriated).54 Beyond the financial considerations in passing the bill, Winter also felt it was necessary to execute the will of their constituents who showed a “high level of unsolicited commitment and support from a broad spectrum of community and neighborhood organizations and A.N.Cs (Advisory Neighborhood Commissions).”55 Winter believed the homeless deserved a comprehensive homeless assistance program and that the city could do better than the “outrageously expensive and cruel system of homeless handouts and homeless warehouses.”56

Conversely, what was cost-cutting for the city, meant budget cuts for the city’s homeless assistance providers. On March 19, the day the councilmembers were set to vote on the 1990 Supplemental Budget and for the budget for 1991, Ellen Rocks, Executive Director of The House of Ruth, wrote a letter addressed to the Councilmembers on behalf of her organization, a service provider which had been working with the D. C. Department of Human Service for the past ten years. In the correspondence, she provided a detailed account of how the cuts would impact their programs for pregnant women, housing, job search assistance for homeless women with newborns, assistance to battered families, and the chronically mentally ill. Was the District prepared to pay the high price of eliminating some of these programs? 57 Budget shortages like these would be

52 Nadine P Winter, “Memorandum to All Councilmembers: Discharge of Homelessness Legislation” copy in Winter Papers, Box 87, Folder 2. 53 Ibid. 54 “Ballot Question.” 55 Winter, “Memorandum: Discharge of Homelessness Legislation”; Pamela C Campanelli to Nadine P. Winter “In Support of Bill 8-156 as an Amendment to Initiative 17” (Washington, D.C.: Linden Association, January 23, 1990). Nadine Winter Papers box 87, folder 2. 56 Ibid. 57 Ellen Rocks to Councilmember H.R. Crawford, “Reconsideration of the Proposed Budget Cut” (Washington, D.C.: District Building, March 19, 1990). Nadine Winter Papers, Box 87, Folder 5.

125 cited as an argument against passing the bill. However, on the eve of the vote, the D.C. Federation of Civic Associations also wrote to the councilmembers and the mayor urging its recipients that: “it [was] time to modify Initiative 17 and to remove its yoke from our budget.”58 The budget for fiscal 1991 was voted in at $15 million, almost half of the $29.7 million appropriated for fiscal 1990.59

In a letter dated June 15, 1990, Councilmember Hazel Reid Crawford, articulated the frustrations of the community concerning Initiative 17:

What we now have is a law that requires the District to provide unrestrained services at the expense of our taxpayers and the establishment of numerous shelters and community-based facilities in already densely populated neighborhoods by judicial fiat. Our citizens are saying enough is enough.60 For those in favor of the Initiative, given the level of community pushback, it was a time to ask some serious questions. Did the District’s constituents still regard providing shelter on demand as a moral imperative? Would the cost of maintaining shelter-on-demand outweigh “the cost of increased police protection, medical care, and human suffering” that would ensue if the Initiative were nullified? By amending the right to overnight shelter, was the District covering up the mismanagement of its budget? What legal protection would the homeless have to hold the city accountable for shelter conditions without the shelter law? Additionally, the $3000 a month (per family) the city was spending on housing families in motels could have been more efficiently directed towards the renovation of vacant buildings for low-income families instead of amending the Initiative.61

On June 25, 1990, Crawford, sent the following memo to all councilmembers:

The consideration of this legislation, on an emergency basis, is necessitated by the fact that the District government is being held in contempt of court and being fined over $5,000 per day for not providing transportation to emergency overnight shelters and for not establishing trailers at various sites across the District in accordance with the order of the court that was issued in the Atchinson v. Barry case. If no action is taken on an emergency basis prior to the Council’s Summer Recess, it is anticipated that court fines may exceed $3 million dollars by the end

58 Ronnie L Edwards to Council of the District of Columbia, “Do What Is Best for the Residents/Taxpayers of the District of Columbia” (Washington, D.C.: District Building, March 18, 1990). Nadine Winter Papers, Box 87, Folder 5. 59 Editorial. “Ballot Question.” 60 Hazel Reid Crawford to Ted Weiss, Chairman of Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Committee, “Response to Letter Concerning Mismanagement in Programs for the Homeless In Washington, D.C.” (Washington, D.C.: Rayburn House Office Building, June 15, 1990). 61 Editorial. “Ballot Question.”

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of Fiscal Year 1990, exacerbating an already deteriorating financial situation for the District of Columbia government.62

Just before the vote, Sue Sinclair-Smith Director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless Inc. addressed this correspondence to the Councilmembers:

The Atchinson fines which form the basis for the claimed emergency are not new. They have been in existence for over six months, a long time within which [the] Council could have taken action. The only reason to have waited to introduce Bill 8-156 as an emergency act is to defeat the referendum process…There will be an emergency when the Bill takes effect and results in families and adults thrown out on the street…63 However, this letter was to no avail. In an emergency session held on June 26, 1990, the D.C. Council voted for the amended version of the D.C. Emergency Overnight Shelter Amendment Act of 1990, nullifying the city’s obligation to provide adequate overnight shelter to all homeless persons in the District requesting it – effective immediately.64

The vacuum left by Snyder’s suicide in July generated highly publicized speculation as to the future direction of anti-homelessness advocacy.65 His frustration with the direction homeless activism had taken and the “backlash,” and “psychic numbing” towards the plight of the homeless was documented in his own highly-publicized suicide note.66 In the wake of Snyder’s death, the press repeatedly commented on a waning public interest in the plight of the homeless, not just in the District but across the nation.67 It can be argued that the movement itself left a vacuum in the advocacy movement that was never filled. Indeed, of the many activists who participated in fighting on the battlefront of the homeless crisis, none had Mitch Snyder’s charisma and media savvy. Despite this crisis in leadership, activists in the District rallied to fight for the restoration of the right to overnight shelter, successfully getting Referendum 005 placed on the November ballot

62 Hazle R. Crawford, “Memo: Emergency Legislation Bill 8-156, to Councilmembers of the District of Columbia,” Nadine Winter Papers, Box 87 Folder 3. 63 Susie Sinclair-Smith, “Letter to the Councilmembers,” Winter Papers, Box 87 Folder 3. 64 The District of Columbia Right to Overnight Shelter Act of 1984 Amendment Act of 1990 To Establish A The Comprehensive Homelessness Assistance Program (CHAP Bill 8-156). 65 Jason DeParle, “Homeless Advocates Debate How to Advance the Battle,” New York Times, July 8, 1990. 66 Jason DeParle, “Mitch Snyder, Advocate for the Homeless, Dies at 46.” New York Times, July 6, 1990. 67 DeParle, “Mitch Snyder, Advocate.”; Chris Polar and Marcia Slacum Greene, “Mitch Snyder Found Hanged in CCNV Shelter: Note Laments Love Relationship,” Washington Post, July 6, 1990.

127 in September.68 However, another significant event occurred which helped tip the balance of the November referendum.

By the Fall of 1990, the Capitol City Inn was being demolished and the Pitts Motor Hotel was boarded up. Councilmember Crawford wrote: “This signals the end to excessive use of hotels as shelters.” He was one of many who sponsored the legislation that regulated use and required that families be placed in apartment-style units.69 In the mid-1980s, use of these hotels was necessitated by the need for additional beds in an already overstretched emergency shelter system. The poor conditions and dangers they posed particularly for children, provoked demands for the closure of ill-reputed buildings like the Capitol City Inn as early as 1988.70 Hearings were also held in 1990, exposing the deplorable conditions, grossly overpriced, and mismanaged Capital City Inn and Pitts Motor Hotel.71 On October 12, 1990, a D. C. Superior Court judge ordered that within ninety days the city was required to move families from the dilapidated welfare hotels to “apartment-style” housing. This preliminary injunction also issued the requirement for other wide- ranging improvements in shelter provision.72 This ruling, pronounced less than one month before the referendum vote, could not help but send an important message to the opponents of Initiative 17 who remembered the early association with the welfare hotels that were requisitioned in the name of the right to shelter. Warehousing the homeless in emergency shelters was no longer enough. It was time to provide cost-effective, comprehensive services and more long-term housing solutions.

On November 7, 1990, Referendum 005 that would have restored the right to overnight shelter on demand or what Citizens Against 005 co-chairman Dorothy Brizill said was an initiative that “would return the District to . . . an open-ended 'blank check' shelter policy” was defeated by a mere two percentage points.73 It carried a majority vote in Wards One, Four, Five, Seven, and Eight and lost by 1,000 votes in Wards Two and Six. The deciding vote came overwhelmingly from Ward Three – the ward with the largest number of registered voters. Ward Three’s plebiscite

68 Wheeler, “A Test of D.C. Policy on the Homeless.”; Linda Wheeler, “D.C. Puts Shelter Referendum on November Ballot,” Washington Post, September 6, 1990. 69 Patrice Gaines-Carter, “Motels for Homeless Close, ‘Nightmare’ Ends – for Some,” Washington Post September 1990.; Barton, Gellman, “D.C. Ordered To Provide Better Shelter: Families Must Be Moved Out of Hotels,” Washington Post, October 13, 1990. 70 Marcia S. Greene, “D.C. Urged to Close Capitol City Inn Shelter,” Washington Post, September 17, 1988. 71 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Mismanagement in programs for the homeless in Washington, D.C: hearing before the Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, 101st Cong., 2nd Session, June 12, 1990. 72 Gellman, “D.C. Ordered.” 73 Wheeler, “005 Felled By Voters in Ward 3.”

128 was clear: 15,727 voted against to only 8,694 for the referendum. However, the most telling statistic was the final tally which showed that of the 165,466 people who went to the polls, an estimated 40,000 did not vote on the referendum at all.74 Was this abstinence indicative of a growing ambivalence towards the homeless? What forms would the shifting attitudes towards the homeless take in closer proximity to residential areas and business districts? The next section endeavours to answer these questions.

Understanding ‘Nimbyism’: compassion fatigue, disgust, and disorder. In 1991, the Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing issued a report to President Bush and Secretary Kemp entitled: “Not in My Back Yard”: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing. The Commission brought the implications of NIMBY sentiment into sharp relief, describing it as:

frequently widespread and deeply ingrained – is so powerful it [NIMBY sentiment] is easily translatable into government action, given the existing system for regulating land use and development. Current residents and organized neighborhood groups can exert great influence over local electoral and land- development processes, to the exclusion of nonresidents, prospective residents, or, for that matter, all outsiders.75 However, further examination of this infamous acronym, particularly NIMBY syndrome as regards homelessness in Washington, D.C., requires a more thorough analysis than has been provided in past scholarship. Scholar June Kress’s skillful application of Michael Dear’s theory on the mechanics of NIMBY syndrome to the District merits review in relation to the District.

Dear offers two alternative approaches to community opposition. The first method is a collaborative approach where there is “cooperation between operator and host community.”76 In 1991 Mayor Dixon’s fight to put a fifty-bed emergency shelter in Ward Three is a perfect example of this first approach.77 The second approach, where Kress’s interpretation of Dear’s NIMBY syndrome theory was applied, is set in Ward Two in 1992. Her article “Homeless Fatigue Syndrome: The Backlash against the Crime of Homelessness in the 1990s,” examined the legal

74 Ibid. 75 Martin D. Abravanel et. al., “Root Causes and New Directions,” rep. ‘Not In My Back Yard’: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing (Washington D.C.: The Commission, 1991), 8.; See also: John C. Kilburn, Stephen E. Costanza, Kelly Frailing, and Stephanie Diaz. “A Paper Tiger on Chestnut Lane: The Significance of NIMBY Battles in Decaying Communities.” Urbanites 42, no. 2 (November 2014): 3–20.; Lois M. Takahashi, “The Socio-Spatial Stigmatization of Homelessness and HIV/AIDS: Toward an Explanation of the NIMBY Syndrome.” Social Science & Medicine 45, no. 6 (1997): 903–14. 76 Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome,” 292. 77 Sharon Pratt Dixon began her mandate as mayor on January 2, 1991.

129 activism and government-based strategies of a vocal minority of professionals and affluent residents in the host community in Ward Two. Additionally, she specifically related the events known as “The Foggy Bottom Incident.” This incident involved Seed Ministries, the service providers who eventually ran the eight-trailer emergency shelter at the Watergate apartments and who adapted what Dear would call an “autonomous” approach, operating independently of the host community. This thesis argues that understanding what Dear recognized as “NIMBY syndrome” and what Kress developed as “homeless fatigue” (an application of Dear’s NIMBY theory to Washington, D.C.) must be examined beyond the mechanics of community opposition and the narrative of compassion fatigue. By focusing exclusively on Dear’s approach, Kress missed the opportunity to articulate a wider range of operator approach to neighbourhood pushback.78 Part of what is lacking in both Dear and Kress’s arguments, is the role of disgust and the perception of disorder supported by more recent scholarship. The aim of this chapter is to integrate these two elements into the discussion of the changing attitudes towards the homeless in the early 1990s in the District.

Almost three decades ago, Dear argued that community opposition was constructed of specific “patterns and consistencies.”79 He postulated that important national events such as the deinstitutionalization of mental health facilities, the appearance of the homeless crisis, the restructuring of federal social welfare programs and service employment, drove the cyclical nature of community opposition. These “external events” served as the backdrop to intermittent periods of contentious reaction and inactivity as local host communities confronted marginalized communities.80 According to Dear, the internal rhythms of the community took place in three stages: youth when the proposed controversial measure was released to the public; maturity when the “battle lines” were clearly drawn; and old age, the stage of negotiation (often protracted), victory, capitulation, and eventual conflict resolution. Opposition arguments were usually the same threats to: “property values, personal security, and neighborhood amenities.”81 The tactics included restrictive covenants, letters to local politicians, media pressure, lobbying local representatives, zoning, and as extreme as vigilante action and punitive ordinances.82 Additionally, there were certain factors which facilitated a community’s decision to include or exclude a marginalized

78 Kress, 96. 79 Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome,” 290. 80 Ibid., 289. 81 Ibid., 290. 82 Ibid., 290-291.

130 group and its assistance services. Dear presented four: “client characteristics, the nature of the human service facility, the structure of the host community and local program considerations.”83

Table 3.1- Typology of elements structuring perception of threat 84

As regards the client characteristics, Dear posited that host community attitudes towards human service facilities for the clients were directly proportional to a “hierarchy of acceptance” ranked from “most welcome, mixed reviews and absolutely unwelcome (see Table 3.1).85 Homeless shelters fell into the mixed review category along with group homes, alcohol rehabilitation centers and facilities for the chronically mental ill. According to a national survey conducted by the Daniel Yankelovich group in 1989, a typical NIMBY advocate was described as affluent, male, well-educated, married, a white-collar worker, homeowner and either living in a large city or the nearby suburbs.86 Land use patterns in the inner city included industrial, commercial, and residential, among a wide variety of social groups. These groups might be owners renters, singles, or families. Dear posited that intolerance developed within this group was contingent on the balance between the dynamics of “authoritarian and restrictive sentiments” and “benevolence and a humanitarian view of the client and the human service facility.”87 None of this data are in dispute here. One of the objectives of this chapter is to consider the implications of

83 Ibid, 292-294.; 84 Lois M. Takahashi, 1997, 298. 85 Ibid, 292.; 86 Ibid, 293. 87 Ibid, 293.

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Dear’s findings to the burgeoning institution of homeless assistance service at the beginning of the 1990s, where geographical proximity, facility appearance, demographics, the level of client visibility, and culpability were some of the key factors in community opposition in the District.

Both the Barry and the Dixon administrations exacerbated the homeless crises which necessitated expanded shelter beds and services. Following the repeal of Initiative 17, Barry cut homeless assistance services by $19 million. Dixon’s administration did little to defuse the growing acrimony towards the homeless and its manifestations of local resident pushback. In fact, she continued cutting the number of shelter beds and closed shelters around the city. Furthermore, Dixon’s administration renegotiated contracts with for-profit shelter providers for homeless families which were charging more than $2500 a month per family.88 The Dixon administration’s poor track record on homelessness continued in 1991 when it decided to put a homeless shelter in Ward Three, the city’s most densely populated and largest concentration of voters. Community response underwent a “dramatic shift,” from one of “absolute Nimbyism” to a “roll up its sleeves and do something about the homeless problem” by the year’s end.89

Map 3.1: Map of Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter90

88 Editorial, “Shelter for Profit,” Washington Post, December 3, 1991.; Hilzenrath,“ Watergate Residents Sue to Block Homeless Shelter.”; Elwell, 234. 89 Rene Sanchez, “ For Dixon Impact of Homeless Shelter Decision to Go Beyond Ward 3,” Washington Post, November 20, 1991. 90 Ruben Castaneda, “Mayor to Open Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter,” Washington Post, November 3, 1992.

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How were civic leaders and community residents eventually persuaded to transform the Guy Mason Recreation Center located in a largely white and affluent neighbourhood west of Rock Creek Park on Calvert Street N.W. into a drop-in centre for the homeless known as Friendship Place?91 This thesis asserts that the creation of a day, drop-in centre instead of an overnight shelter was made possible due to the neighbourhood’s indigenous community leadership which led the strong civic response and the protracted legal battles with the city government. These civically engaged, affluent communities had the power and influence to make their own decisions about the homeless on their streets, irrespective of the non-equity of shelter distribution throughout the city.92

The NIMBY battles which took place in Ward Two also fit the pattern of the typical host community. However, unlike Ward Three they already had shelter facilities in their Ward, therefore their hostility was also linked to a sense of being disproportionally burdened with the city’s homeless crisis. Although Dear remains one of the leading authorities on NIMBY syndrome, Ward Two and Three’s experience with marginalized communities suggest the necessity of an examination of events beyond the mechanics of this syndrome and the integration of other factors. Examining the role of disgust and the perception of disorder in the contested residential spaces of these Wards explores the more visceral aspects of NIMBY syndrome beyond its logistical manifestation. What events led to community hostility towards homeless shelter construction in both wards requires further examination.

The fact that Mayor Dixon received strong electoral support in Ward Three, did not prevent community pushback when she decided to convert Guy Mason Recreation Center into a fifty-bed facility for homeless men. In fact, her decision to put a shelter in the District was largely motivated by the Atchison v. Barry decision, a court order by Judge Harriet R Taylor which required the District “to establish an emergency overnight shelter for 50 homeless persons” in Ward Three.93 By June 21, 1991, the Department of Human Services (DHS) formally applied to the Board of Zoning Adjustment to fulfil the requirements of the court order. Although the order was later vacated, DHS pursued its plans to build the shelter based on perceived need. The contradictory

91 Friendship Place is a drop-in center for supportive services such as medical and mental health services and referral services. It has been active since 1991. See also: https://friendshipplace.org/drop-in-and-clinic/. 92 Ruben Castaneda, “Mayor to Open Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter,” Washington Post, November 3, 1992.; Susan Irving, “Abandon the Guy Mason Proposal,” Washington Post, November 16, 1992.; Editorial, “22 Months and Counting,” Washington Post, November 8,1992.; Elwell, 266. 93 Barbara Hamer, “The Homeless and Ward 3,” Washington Post, September 1991.

133 messages emanating from the District building of local government left residents of Ward Three confused and frustrated with the “string of bureaucratic blunders,” and “the poor communication.”94 Ward-three residents were also forced to deal with the reality of its own homeless population. A vocal minority of residents “howling with rage” as a result of the decision, took immediate steps to block the project.95

Just hours after Dixon made the announcement of the plan for the recreation center conversion, some Ward-Three residents sent a temporary restraining order to the D.C. Superior Court which failed. Their legal defense team then filed a lawsuit against the District on the pretext that it had not received the legal thirty-day notice of the community of the shelter’s arrival. At an emergency meeting held the same week, neighbourhood leaders sent out a call for community residents to donate fifty dollars toward the resident legal fund. Additionally, they circulated 5,000 fliers. They also held a rally, selling “Save Guy Mason” T-shirts. Nick Friendly, a community resident, weighed in on the motivation for the rally: “People want to work with the city on the homeless, but they don’t want to give an inch at Guy Mason.”96 Residents also complained that placing the shelter in this residential area posed a threat to the safety of its residents; would force the neighbourhood to cancel activities for senior citizens; prohibit the use of the nearby playground; and become a permanent fixture of their ward. Acrimony towards the local government was palpable, as councilmember for Ward Three was booed when he attempted to reach a compromise with residents at this same meeting. 97 The community reaction to the new shelter followed Dear’s classic pattern. However, it was the decision of the local government that played a crucial role in blocking the installation of a homeless shelter.

A vote of four to one by the city’s Board of Zoning Adjustment December ruling in favour of the Guy Mason conversion into a fifty-bed facility still proved to be a significant obstacle to Mayor Pratt Kelly’s fight for more equitable distribution of homeless service provision facilities and services to each ward.98 The source of the impediment lay in the fact that the ruling came with certain stipulations. For example, each time the city opened a new shelter in other places of the

94 Ibid. 95 Rene Sanchez, “No Shelter From a Storm of Protest: N.W. Residents Press Legal Fight Against Guy Mason Homeless Plan,” Washington Post, March 9, 1991. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 Sharon Pratt Dixon married James R. Kelly III on December 7, 1991 and changed her surname to Kelly.; see also Martin Well, “Now She’s Mayor Kelly: Dixon Married , Changes Her Name,” Washington Post, December 8, 1991.

134 city it had to remove beds from the Guy Mason fifty-bed facility, two security officers had to patrol the site, and zoning officials had to review its ruling in two years’ time to determine if the shelter would remain open. The residential response had found ten beds from two churches and civic leaders were working with other ones to find eighteen more, proof that there was a modicum of community will. However, the proposed facility was inadequate to the actual needs on the ground. According to the results of the Community Council for the Homeless-led census done in the upper northwest quadrant of the District, there were between 50 to 100 homeless individuals who congregated near the Guy Mason Recreational Center in the evenings.99

NIMBY hostilities were prolonged as, given the court’s 1991 ruling, the community felt that it had not been allowed to solve its homeless problem as it saw fit. However, Ward Three residents had the means to continue the fight. Jim Nathanson (D-Ward 3) testified to this fact saying that Ward Three residents would continue to oppose the city’s on-going plan to transform Guy Mason into a homeless shelter or a hypothermia center.100 The community residents did eventually find their own solutions to Ward Three’s homeless population.101 The opening of Friendship Place in Ward Three, instead of a temporary fifty-bed shelter, stands in sharp contrast to the Anacostian community’s refusal to open a new shelter in 1985. As previously mentioned in Chapter Two, this poor Anacostian community refused the presence of a homeless shelter in their neighbourhood, on the grounds that it was already facing enough challenges. Conversely, the neighbourhood surrounding Guy Mason seemed willing to manage its much smaller homeless population through faith-based strategies but only at a distance from its residential areas. The allegedly dangerous homeless population and the “noxious” facility meant to assist them were deemed hazardous for the more vulnerable members of its community, namely children and the elderly.102

Behind the chronology of these events, lies an ambivalence towards community response to homelessness: a desire to help the homeless juxtaposed with the tangible sentiment of anxiety and a perceived dangerousness of homeless persons; concern for the homeless coupled with community response which was more coerced than voluntary; a will to help the homeless yet

99 Vincent McGraw and Pamela McClintock, “Mayor Faces Heat from Other Wards for Halting Shelter,” Washington Times, February 26, 1991. 100 Castaneda, “Mayor to Open Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter.” 101 Once the National Park Service gave its approval, the facility opened as a hypothermia center when temperatures dropped below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. It temporarily housed men in the basement. Stay would be limited to 7 pm to 7 am. The facility eventual became a homeless drop-in center and is currently known as Friendship Place. https://friendshipplace.org/who-we-are/about-us/. Accessed April 23, 2019. 102 Irving, “Abandon Guy Mason Proposal.”

135 persistent inaction from the city’s most affluent and politically influential ward. By November 1992, there were still no city shelter beds in Ward Three in contrast to the 624 shelter beds in Ward Two and only nine year-round beds were provided by churches in Ward Three. City efforts to open the Ward Three shelter stalled when community activists continued to oppose the conversion of the center. Its December first deadline to operate as a hypothermia center would not be met due to community pushback and bureaucratic entanglements with the National Park Service.103 Ward Three’s position can be partially explained by what scholars Sara Strauss and Andrew Tomback defined as “the race to the bottom effect” where local, support-service only, homeless assistance programs “[were] perceived not only as a disincentive for homeless people from neighboring areas to enter the locale but also as a method of “encouraging” resident homeless people to leave the area in search of better facilities in an effort to minimize their populations of homeless people.”104 Although the eventual conversion of the Guy Mason facility did not conform to Mayor Kelly’s project, perceived by opponents as a “warehouse-type homeless shelter,” the fact that it did eventually serve as a homeless service facility is evidence of Dear’s collaborative approach – albeit a limited one.105 This “collaborative” strategy was in stark contrast to host community pushback to homeless assistance provision in Ward Two (autonomous approach), as the city council attempted to impose homeless trailers on the host community of Foggy Bottom residents with outsourced service providers.

103 Castaneda, “Mayor to Open Ward 3’s First Homeless Shelter.”; Molly Sinclair, “D.C. Plan to Use Center for the Homeless Hits Snag,” Washington Post, December 5, 1992. 104 Strauss and Tomback, 556. 105 Irving, “Abandon Guy Mason Proposal.”

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Map 3.2: Site of Foggy Bottom Incident in Ward 2106 The events which led to what eventually became known as the “Foggy Bottom Incident” in Ward Two date back to January 1990, when owners of the Watergate Apartments and other residents of Foggy Bottom threatened to sue the D.C. government to block placement of eight trailers for the homeless. The facility, located at 27th and I Street N.W., which provoked such contestation was a series of seven trailers that temporarily housed fifty-four women and fifty-four men as well as a full-service health clinic and referrals to other social services.107 Seed Ministries, a shelter provider for other trailers in Mount Vernon Square, at Kendall and Oakie Streets, N.E., and Martin Luther King Avenue, SE., won the contract to manage the makeshift shelter facility at Watergate Apartments. However, a vocal minority of Watergate Apartment owners and other Foggy Bottom residents voiced concerns about protecting the aesthetic integrity and property value of the neighbourhood.108

Despite Seed Ministries’ best efforts to peacefully run this eight-trailer temporary shelter, to feed, and provide basic medical care, residents complained of an increase in harassment, vandalism, and crime. Opposition to these trailers was led by the Foggy Bottom Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) –an influential community-based elected council. Jack Evans, D.C. Councilmember for Ward Two, also sided with those against the trailers despite the fact that

106 Ruben Castaneda, “34 Arrested In Shelter Dismantling,” Washington Post, November 25, 1992. 107 David S. Hilzenrath,“ Watergate Residents Sue to Block Homeless Shelter,” Washington Post, January 24, 1990. 108 Hilzenrath,“ Watergate Residents Sue to Block Homeless Shelter.”

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Ward Two contained the largest concentration of homeless persons. By February 1992, the Foggy Bottom ANC voted against the city’s plan to renew Seed Ministries’ contract to provide shelter in the neighbourhood and set in motion the closure of the shelters. It was a period marked by frequent political protest, vigils, and arrests. By November 1992, the trailers and the homeless were being phased out of the site to other nearby encampments. Those with serious or persistent mental illness were allowed to stay until March 1993.109

Elwell analysed the impact this protracted confrontation had on homeless advocacy in the District: “Foggy Bottom culminated in the ultimate defeat of the political anti-homelessness movement […]and signaled a more conciliatory - and to some degree silent - era.”110 However, this thesis posits that the dismantling of the anti-homelessness movement in the District did not occur with the celerity of a “final confrontation.” Its disempowerment was rather as gradual as the erosion of public compassion which had begun with the passage of Initiative 17. Perhaps this erosion can be attributed to more visceral and primal reactions to marginalized communities such as the perception of disgust and the detection of stigma associated with homeless populations.111 Therefore, individual-level explanations and structural factors are insufficient to explain what mediates the discriminatory and behavioural dimensions of NIMBYism. Another significant factor which merits examination and has been underexamined in homeless scholarship is the issue of race.

Neither Kress nor Dear factor in the element of race and its association with white anxiety and dangerousness in the use of public space where the: “risk of being reduced to the perception and anxieties of others is only ampliﬁed by the vulnerabilities racial groups have in mainstream society.”112 As for NIMBY sentiment, “it’s more perverse manifestations reflect racial or ethnic prejudice masquerading under the guise of other concerns,” such as public health and safety.113 The stigma of race compounded by the burden of homelessness, and potential drug addiction and mental illness, intensifies the brunt of marginalization. Scholars Pamela Block, Fabricio Balcazar, and Christopher Keys explained that, Non-whites experience “segregation and discrimination

109 Elwell, 247. 110 Ibid. 111 Phelan et al., “The Stigma of Homelessness.”; Paul Rozin et al., “Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity: Comparisons and Evaluations of Paper-and-Pencil versus Behavioral Measures,” Journal of Research in Personality 33, no. 3 (1999): 330-351. 112 Tommy J. Curry, “This Nigger's Broken: Hyper-Masculinity, the Buck, and the Role of Physical Disability in White Anxiety Toward the Black Male Body,” Journal of Social Philosophy 48, no. 3 (2017): 323. 113 NIMBY report, 8.

138 independent of their disability. If we also consider the fact that poverty is a major source of marginalization and that most individuals of colour with disabilities are poor, then the experience of disability is only one more factor in an already oppressed existence.”114 Anacostians’ successful petition to prevent the construction of a new shelter in this black neighbourhood in 1985 (Ward Eight) was a victory in its on-going struggle against neglect by the federal and city governments, for better land zoning to build more apartments, and “to improve the quality and quantity of city services available to them.”115 Race is salient here as the high levels of poverty concentration located in the predominantly black neighbourhoods east of the Anacostia River in Wards Seven and Eight, translated into severe structural disadvantages such as inadequate levels of infrastructural support to address wealth, education, and health inequalities as well as unemployment.116 In addition to Dear’s arguments for the factors which influence NIMBY syndrome, Kress focused on the additional components of preconceived notions about crime, property values, and quality-of-life maintenance. She exposed society’s tendency throughout history to criminalize the poor during periods of crisis and civil unrest. She underscored the importance of class status and its influence on public attitudes toward the poor. She also presented the classic arguments made by community activists in opposition to human service facilities notably, the increase in crime, the decline in property values, and the disruption of quality of life.117 Indeed, there is a intuitively adversarial relationship between the housed and affluent in regards to the homeless population which operates to show how dominant communities engage and assert power over public and residential spaces. The association of extreme poverty, mental illness, and crime in Washington, D.C. date back to the nineteenth century proclivity to house the representatives of all three groups together. Focusing on these elements misses the opportunity to fully articulate the vulnerabilities of marginalized communities of the new homelessness in terms of two important considerations: the role of disgust and the factors that contribute to the perception of disorder.

Lack of proper healthcare and sanitation, high rates of illness experienced by the homeless living in shelters, skin problems, poor hygiene, which are associated with homelessness contribute to the public perception of the homeless as a pathogen threat. Political scientists Scott Clifford and

114 Pamela Block, Fabricio Balcazar, & Christopher Keys, “Pathology to Power: Rethinking Race, Poverty and Disability,” Journal of Disability Policy Studies 12.1 (2001): 18-39, 23. 115 Gaines-Carter, “Anacostians Complain.” 116 See also Williams, "Deadly Inequalities,” and “Gentrifying Water.” 117 Kress, 97.

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Spencer Piston at Boston University argue that “even homeless people who are completely healthy may implicitly trigger pathogen concerns among a wide swath of the public.”118 In fact, some researchers cautioned that the public might: ‘‘want to avoid homeless people because they are viewed as dirty, smelly, lice-ridden, or diseased’’119 Clifford and Piston argue that there are psychological mechanisms at play in the detection of potential pathogen threats. Emotional and cognitive response to these threats manifests themselves through disgust which can be triggered by such stimulus as tactile or olfactory cues. Avoidance and physical distancing are the behavioral manifestations of disgust where “[e]ven very brief contact with a disgust-eliciting object is sufficient for perceptions of contamination, highlighting the importance of avoiding contact with disgust-eliciting objects.”120

If we apply the notions of disgust and pathogen threats to the public policies that govern the nation’s urban core, city ordinances that minimize contact or interaction with the homeless, such as aggressive panhandling, sleeping in public, and loitering, show how the homeless are treated as disgust-eliciting objects and as pathogen threats. The notion of disgust also explains how affluent Wards of the District could simultaneously support paying taxes for homeless assistance services and experience compassion fatigue and even hostility towards homeless assistance provision in proximity to their own homes.121 Indeed, views of the District’s homeless as disruptions of efforts to “stabilize the residential areas and to promote a suitable environment for family life” are reminiscent of the outdated discourses of “deviance” and “social pathology” which continue into the twenty-first century through discursive approaches such as “risk talk” that rely on individual-level factors. 122

These two notions are not the only salient factors that mediate community opposition to marginalized groups. In “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of “Broken Windows,” Sampson and Raudenbush argue that there are objective clues of “disorder” based on cultural stereotypes, preconceived notions about what disorder is, reinforced by ambiguous information which creates implicit bias. Categories matter. Judgments as to what we

118 Scott Clifford and Spencer Piston, “Explaining Public Support for Counterproductive Homelessness Policy: The Role of Disgust,” Political Behavior 39, no. 2 (2016): 508. 119 Phelan et al., “The Stigma of Homelessness,” 323-337. 120 Clifford, Spencer, 507. 121 Clifford and Spencer, 509.; see also Rozin et al., “Individual Differences in Disgust Sensitivity.” 122 Irving, “Abandon Guy Mason Proposal.”; Judith Bessant, Richard Hill, and Rob Watts, “Discovering” Risk: Social Research and Policy Making (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2003), 4.

140 put into them are mediated by engrained “persistent beliefs linking blacks and disadvantaged minority groups to many social images, including but not limited to crime, violence, disorder, welfare, and undesirability.”123

What drove Wards Two and Three to perceive the homeless as a disruption of neighbourhood aesthetics, threats to property values, public safety, and general quality of life, goes beyond the mechanics of community profiling, the protocol of community opposition, and the structural barriers that create the social and political reality of host communities and the service dependent ghettos which contain the subjects of their opposition. Disgust and disorder are the more intractable components of this confrontation. What measures of inclusion are then possible for clients living near or in host communities? This chapter suggests that the application of a few of Dear’s solutions such as “community boards which rely on indigenous leadership, community outreach, community education, and community-based incentives,” may encourage interaction and communication with clients such as the homeless to become informed observers and hosts.124 Perhaps in this way reason may curtail the proclivity towards cultural stereotyping and reactions of disgust in the face of difference.

In the early 1990s, public attitudes towards the homeless in the District seemed to contradict the conclusion of the1990 Annual Report of the Interagency Council on the Homeless. The ICH Report articulated the notion of tolerance through contact and education stating: “the more people learn about the homeless and who they really are – especially by interacting with homeless persons and directly helping them – the more compassionate and willing to help they become.”125 This contradiction seemed all the more glaring, given the clearly diminished compassion for visible homelessness evident in residential areas. It was not a time for tolerance but rather removal tactics for affluent neighbourhoods in the District which increasingly viewed street homelessness as a quality-of-life infringement.

123 Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’” Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 320.; Broken windows here refers to the theory that asserts that visible indicators of crime, anti-social behaviour, and civil disorder foster urban conditions that exacerbate disorder and petty and serious crime. See Chapter Four of this thesis. 124 Dear, “Understanding and Overcoming the NIMBY Syndrome,” 295. 125 “The 1990 ICH Report,” 25.

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Conclusion:

Claimsmakers of the 1980s and the 1990s in the nation’s capital who sought to bring the plight of the homeless to the public on a local and national level observed their local struggle impact other cities across the country from the unique vantage point their proximity to federal institutions provided. Whereas local struggles to educate the public about their moral and civic duty to help the homeless eventually played out in the national arena, the right to overnight shelter did not. Opponents to the Initiative won the political debate, but both sides saw their leaders diminished and embroiled in personal and political scandals. The countless legal battles, tiresome squabbles over the number of homeless, the lack of financial accountability and coalition building, and the loss of Mitch Snyder in July 1990, pushed the CCNV community further to the fringes of legitimacy as political actors capable of effecting major structural changes for the homeless. Although they had succeeded in establishing a 1,350-bed, unisex emergency shelter and participated in the Housing Now! March in 1989, their gradual abdication of leadership on homeless issues reached its apex by the end of the decade. Conversely, Mayor Barry’s and Mayor Kelly’s inaction and missteps as well as the Department of Human Services’ numerous corruption scandals contributed to the grossly insufficient, city-run homeless services.126 On the path to find solutions to homelessness both sides had become part of the “problem.”

Although born of the triage of the deserving and undeserving poor, the dismantling of mental health institutions, the Welfare State, and “the struggles between planners and politicians, racists and liberals, ethnics and institutions” of the second ghetto, the third ghetto of institutionalized emergency shelter system of 1990s has a story all its own.127 Ironically, this burgeoning institution which emerged from the shadows of the 1980s, with the aim of solving the homeless crisis, succeeded only in creating an elaborate maze of expanded human services. Through pressure from local activists and under the mandate of local and federal legislation passed in the 1980s, local government began to assume responsibility for the care of the homeless in Washington, D.C. However, in the early years of the 1990s, the lack of a service enriched approach to homelessness and ineffective public policies hindered the development of adequate wraparound services for the alcohol and drug dependent and mental ill homeless populations. This

126 Elwell, 170, 174. 127 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 258. 142 shortfall fed the need for new solutions such as services adapted to individual needs and the abandonment of the “one size fits all” approach.128 The service dependency and the professionalization of emergency assistance to the homeless of the third ghetto was the product of the aspirations of a broken American dream, transformed into a spurious association of poverty, race, place, and marginalization. By the 1990s, the third ghetto of the new, visible, homelessness located in “the invisible walls” of Kenneth Clark’s ‘dark ghetto’ and exemplified in Massey and Denton’s ghetto of cultural and social deterioration of America’s urban core, had become institutionalized with professional actors of its own.129 An important feature of this new institution was the narrowness of its vision: focusing exclusively on the symptoms and the needs of the homeless population that could be treated through emergency services. “Funding streams, hard data, and reporting requirements” contradicted this trend, justifying the need for a continuum of services to deal with more individualized, conditions of disability in the homeless population. 130

By 1990, the fully funded McKinney Act set the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto further down the path towards its institutionalization. As homeless activists, non-profit organizations, and faith-based networks became part of the service network to the homeless, service provision became increasingly professionalized. Yet neither of these phenomena removed visible homelessness from the streets of Washington, D.C. as new legislation and professionalized services did not lead to the provision of a sufficient amount of shelter beds.

In the Second Ghetto, Hirsch argued that containment of poor African Americans in public housing of the second ghetto was a means to isolate them from downtown business districts.131 This thesis argues that this same dynamic of containment and isolation also existed in the third ghetto, as the homeless were isolated from contested spaces such as local businesses, public facilities, and private residential areas, in the emergency shelter system. This third ghetto served the dual purpose of getting the residual visible homelessness of the1990s off of the street and out

128 Elwell, 116 ; Kim Hopper, "More Than Passing Strange: Homelessness and Mental Illness in New York City," American Ethnologist 15, no. 1 (February 1988): 163. 129 Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (Wesleyan University Press Middletown, 1965).; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 130 Elwell, 188; see also Vincent Lyon-Callo, "Constraining Responses to Homelessness: An Ethnographic Exploration of the Impact of Funding Concerns on Resistance," Human Organization 57, no. 1 (1998): 2.; Hopper, Reckoning with Homelessness, 183-4.; Michael Owen Robertson, "Interpreting Homelessness: The Influence of Professional And Non-Professional Service Providers," Urban Anthropology 20, no. 2 (1991):141- 153; Vincent Lyon-Callo, Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry (Toronto: UTP, 2008). 131 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 212 -258. 143 of certain economic and residential areas, subduing NIMBY tension and pandering to local business interests. The fourth and final chapter will take a critical look at the on-going erosion of public compassion for the homeless and an increase in backlash towards the homeless service providers and the homeless themselves as symptoms of a larger issue of control over contested spaces at the end of the twentieth-century. This struggle for power over designated, public spaces manifested itself through federal housing initiatives which encouraged displacement (HOPE VI), the criminalisation of homeless activity, and the containment of visible homelessness in the emergency shelters of the third ghetto, away from Downtown business interests, coveted residential areas, and public facilities in preparation for the Downtown Renaissance in the District Columbia of the twenty-first century.

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Chapter 4 – Partnership, Privatisation, and Power in Washington, D.C.

Efforts to aid the precariously housed in the “kinder gentler nation” of the Bush administration came in a very particular form. The Urban Revitalization Demonstration (URD) program later renamed HOPE VI and introduced by Congress in 1992, which provided for the rehabilitation and demolition of severely distressed buildings, was further tested and implemented in cities such as Washington, D.C. during the succeeding administration. Additionally, during the first year of the Clinton administration, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros officially waged a “New” War on Homelessness aimed at federal government inefficiency.1 These events were endemic of major sea changes in poverty governance of urban regimes and the ghettoes within them. This chapter asserts that the examination of the second and third ghettoes in Washington, D.C, exposes conjunctures in the processes and conditions of privatisation, displacement, and power over contested spaces occupied by public housing residents and the homeless.2 The connections between public housing and homelessness in America’s urban cores at the end of the twentieth century have been underexploited. Traditionally, urban scholars have examined these two forms of housing precarity separately or sequentially. This direction of analysis has created parallel discursive subcategories under the banners of the undeserving poor, the underclass, gentrification, white suburbanization or urban segregation.3 Fortunately, current scholarship of inner-city poor communities at the end of the twentieth century has also begun to focus on the proliferation of public-private partnerships (PPPs).4 The connections between housing precarity in both the second and third ghettoes are brought into sharp relief in the discussion of these PPPs as a fundamental component of neoliberal practices and policies of the 1980s and 1990s. It is the aim of this chapter to manifest this connection. Despite the fact that urban research

1. Henry Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep: Yetta Adams’ Story and the New War on Homelessness,” Washington Post, December 5, 1993. 2 There are three phases of Hirsch’s ghetto-formation model: 1880 -1933, 1933 -1968, 1968 -present. The second ghetto in this chapter refers to the third phase.; See also: Amanda Irene Seligman, “What Is The Second Ghetto?,” Journal of Urban History 29, no. 3 (March 2003): 274. 3 Katz, The Undeserving Poor.; Katz, Improving Poor People.; Blau, The Visible Poor.; David A. Snow and Leon Anderson, Down on Their Luck: a Study of Homeless Street People (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).; Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton University Press, 2007).; Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 4 Holtzman, “Shelter is Only a First Step,” 886-910.; Steffen, “The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness,” 170-196.; Johanna Bockman, “Removing the Public from Public Housing: Public-Private Redevelopment of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings in Washington, DC,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 2018, 1-21.

145 has taken this necessary first step in the examination of PPPs, it has not sufficiently historicized the broader issue of spatial power and its relationship to housing precarity.5 Although Hirsch’s notion of positive power as a “wedding of private interest and public power” captures the fundamental dynamic of PPPs, the application of George Lipsitz’s “white spatial imaginary” to PPPs extends the structured advantages of whiteness to past and present discrimination in residential spaces along racial lines.6 Indeed, in the history of housing, discrimination was exacerbated “by the rise of planned-unit developments, condominiums, cooperative apartment houses, planned unit developments of single-family house and other mass- produced and corporate-sponsored common interest developments” through laws and restrictions that put public mechanisms at the service of private property value for “exclusiveness, exclusivity, and homogeneity.”7 This chapter addresses the privatisation of public services in the second and third ghettoes which led to the abdication of federal oversight and the denial of the right to the city, through isolation and displacement of public housing tenants and “processes of containment, constriction and compression,” of the homeless.8 Although efforts to displace the homeless and public housing tenants from certain public and residential areas in the District began to take shape in the “downtown revitalization,” of the 1990s, PPPs have been a part of urban governance since after the Second World War. Washington, D.C. has had a long history with PPPs in housing solutions. Its urban renewal projects between 1954 to 1968, employed private actors such as developers, construction companies and architects to build public housing for low-income families and the displaced. Although the names of the District’s housing authorities changed over the years, the source of its funding did not, as the District used bonds from private banks to build public housing.9 The DC Housing Authority (DCHA) enlisted “private firms to demolish existing buildings, private architects to design public housing, private construction firms to build it, and private companies to make repairs and

5 Defined here as the power to decide housing outcomes for, to have access to, and to occupy a given space. 6 Hirsch, 213.; George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no1 (January 2007): 13. 7 Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race,” 13. 8 Leonard C. Feldman, Citizens without Shelter: Homelessness, Democracy, and Political Exclusion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 42.; See also Samira Kawash, “The Homeless Body,” Public Culture 10, no. (January 198): 329-330. 9 Founded in 1934 The Alley Dwelling Authority was renamed the National Capital Housing Authority (NCHA) in 1943. When the NCHA was abolished in 1987 it as replaced by The DC Department of Public and Assisted Housing (DPAH). The DPAH was in turn replaced by the DC Housing Authority (DCHA) in 1994. This chapter adheres to the definition of PPPs as defined by T. Brown and N. Yates, “Public-Private Housing Partnerships,” International Encyclopedia of Housing Studies and Home, 2012, 448-449.

146 landscape sites.”10 Despite not being at the “vanguard of public housing transformation” like the housing authorities in Chicago, and New Orleans, the DCHA had also made commitments to transform public housing and bring more affordable housing to low-income families.11 However, the realities of “crime, race, gentrification/redevelopment initiatives,” and mismanagement precipitated the fall of their respective housing authorities into receivership.12 More significantly these factors were fundamental to the dismantling of public housing in Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. where the “policy paradigm” of “displacement, dispersal, and demolition” was characteristic of the early 1990s.13

HOPE I, II, and III’s project to privatise public housing by offering the possibility of low- income residential homeownership did not fall in line with ambitions to increase the District’s tax base, halt white and black middle-class flight, and to improve the housing market for this taxpaying community once the suburbanization trend had been reversed. Hope VI aimed to rectify this deficiency. Under HOPE VI, funding would be provided for the rehabilitation and demolition of severely distressed buildings. Public housing authorities (PHAs) were given several options to replace these units: with conventional public housing units, housing available for resident homeownership, or Section 8 rental vouchers which were dispersed to displaced residents.14 To facilitate the creation of mixed-income developments, and the distribution of supportive services, cooperation between “PHAs, nonprofit organizations, the private sector, and residents,” PPPs were essential.15 This chapter will examine the revitalization of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings begun in 1988. Analysing its partial demolition and renovation provides an opportunity to engage how the project to create a mixed-income community marginalized and displaced the majority of the previous low-income tenants and all the homeless squatters of this Capitol Hill housing project in the Reagan/Bush Eras.

10 Bockman, “Removing the Public from Public Housing,” 1. See also: Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit.; Gillette, “Renewal, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment,” in Between Justice and Beauty, 170-189.; Benjamin Holtzman, “Public-Private Governance of Homelessness in the 1980s,” in On the Margins in Reagan’s America at the 133rd American Historical Association Annual Meeting (Chicago: 2019). 11 Edward G. Goetz, New Deal in Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 76. See also: D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: the Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 12 Goetz, 76. 13 Ibid., 77. 14 U.S. Congress. Department of Veterans Affairs and Housing and Urban Development and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, 1993, (PL 102-389). H.R. 5679, 102nd Cong., October 6, 1992, 106. https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/102/hr5679 15 National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing (NCSDPH) rep., The final report of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing: A report to the Congress and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. (Washington, D.C.: The Commission, 1992), 31.

147

Public housing tenants and the homeless fared no better during the Clinton years. A self- styled “New Democrat,” President Clinton aimed to strengthen community institutions through the investment of federal funds in distressed communities while simultaneously advocating for fiscal responsibility and against over-dependence on federal largesse. PPPs were essential components of this equation.16 The Clinton administration’s means to achieve this delicate balance was its signature “third way”: an enterprise zone/community development bank proposal and community policing plans.17 Both projects would have a profound effect on low-income housing and urban homelessness. Although trends in poverty governance in the neoliberal District of the 1980s and 1990s meant deregulation in the public housing of the second ghetto and rapid criminalisation of homeless bodies in the third, privatisation of public services would become their common trajectory. The tragic death of a homeless black woman and mother named Yetta Adams at a bus stop across the street from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) building on November 29, 1993, prompted HUD Secretary Cisneros to later declare a New War on Homelessness.18 This war was an on-going process of bureaucratisation of homeless assistance services for the inhabitants of the third ghetto, against a backdrop of their criminalisation and displacement from downtown and residential areas. This process took the form of $20 million in federal funds for the D.C. Initiative to End Homelessness, a model demonstration program in Hometown Washington as well as a piloted Continuum of Care model in twenty other cities, which was designed to address the homeless problem more comprehensively.19 Unfortunately, the initiative never lived up to expectations. The New War on Homeless should be remembered not only for its policy ambitions but also for what it did not accomplish. The Clinton administration’s War on Homelessness did not: improve conditions in the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto, protect the rights of the homeless, implement homeless prevention initiatives, nor succeeded in ending homelessness.

In the 1990s, homeless policy focused exclusively on managing the homeless within the existing emergency shelter system leaving a vacuum for increasingly punitive policies and the

16 Biles, The Fate of Cities, 318. 17 Ibid., 322. 18 Yetta Marie Adams was found dead, slumped on a bus shelter bench near the Department of Housing and Urban Development Building in the 400 block of 7th street SW on Monday, November 29, 1993 at 9 am. She went there after missing the curfew at the Calvary Homeless Shelter located at 1217 Good Hope Road SE, Washington, D.C. 20020.; See also: Susan Baer, “Homeless woman dies near HUD, becoming symbol: Cisneros says more must be done to help,” Baltimore Sun, December 1, 1993. 19 Elwell, 200. 148 displacement of the homeless from residential areas and public spaces. This third ghetto was in part a product of the demolition of public housing and the failure to build new affordable public housing units and transitional and permanent supportive housing for the homeless.20 This vacuum was filled by imposing “order maintenance” through community policing and privatising public spaces which succeeded in displacing the homeless from the economic and residential areas of the District. By the end of the millennium, neoliberal policies of workfare, revitalization, and self- sufficiency steered poverty governance towards institutions which exerted tighter control over access to public and residential areas, through zoning, city ordinances, and zero-tolerance policing. This dynamic of displacement encouraged the on-going influx of affluent suburbanites into the District and laid the groundwork for large-scale development projects of the “Downtown Renaissance” at the beginning of the twentieth century.21

This final chapter is organized in three sections. The first section acknowledges public housing precarity and how Hope VI exacerbated this insecurity by displacing public housing tenants and homeless squatters from the Ellen Wilson Dwellings. Section two discusses the Clinton administration’s New War on homelessness and the implementation of the DC Initiative as a neoliberal solution to the homeless problem. Section three illuminates the broad context of spatial power through the examination of criminalisation of homelessness which prevailed before and during the Control Board Era in conjunction with the imminent large-scale, downtown development of the twenty-first century.22 Ellen Wilson Dwellings: A History of Displacement In the wake of the decay which spread across America’s urban cores, it was time to ask the right questions: “How is it that homelessness and abandoned houses coexist in many of our cities? Furthermore, how is it that the homeless so nearly mirror the social characteristics of the “underclass,” and are mainly drawn from the very neighborhoods in which abandonment dominates the landscape?”23 Urban scholar David Bartelt asked these two important questions

20 Transitional and permanent supportive housing, which would become foundational components of the Housing First programs of the twenty- first century were still housing formulas in their infancy in late 1980s thanks to Tanya Tull who created the first Housing First program in Los Angeles in 1988. These housing solutions were formalized through the Housing First model as developed by Dr. Sam Tsemberis founder of Pathways to Housing in New York City in 1992. 21 Paul Schwartzman, “Downtown Is Enjoying Renaissance, Report Finds,” Washington Post, November 29, 2007; See also “Downtown “Renaissance -Development and Homelessness https://whosedowntown.wordpress.com/downtown-renaissance-development-and-homelessness/ 22 The Control Board Era (1995-1999) refers to the four-year period when a control board was created under the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Act of 1995, to save the District from a fiscal crisis. This board was invested with the power to address D.C. government mismanagement and inefficiency.; See also “Democracy or Distrust?,” 2051. 23 David W. Bartelt, “Housing the Underclass,” in The Underclass Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 118.

149 weighing in on the issue of housing the underclass and the “malign neglect” of the Reagan Years.24 Revisiting urban regimes and the reasons for this abandonment of the residual city remains salient.

Embedded liberalism was “a form political-economic organization” which indicated “how market and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints.”25 As the institutional framework of this political-economic organization so carefully constructed in the wake of the Second World War began to breakdown, a dynamic emerged which would have a profound effect on America’s inner cities. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, policymaking practices in urban regimes shifted from “managerialism” to “entrepreneurialism” governed by the parameters of good business practices, and the quest for “highly mobile capital.”26 Neoliberalism transformed urban governance into a political project which David Harvey defines as a means “to re-establish the conditions of accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites.”27 This political-economic rationality aimed at the “deregulation, privatization and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision” and created policies and practices designed to “dismantle welfare states and privatize public services.”28 The crisis of new homelessness of the 1980s emerged concomitantly with the neoliberalisation of urban governance.29 PPPs were touted as a means “to promote economic growth, mobilize resources across sectoral lines …tap the creative synergies of “network governance,” and the promotion of corporate sector “class-driven urban agendas.”30 Downtown economic revitalization of the nation’s urban cores was high atop the list of its priorities, where PPPs were used to leverage public resources to expand services to those living in what Marcuse calls “the gentrified and luxury housing spots in the quarters of the residential city.”31 However,

24 Ibid., 154. 25 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 11. 26 Charles G. Steffen, “The Corporate Campaign against Homelessness: Class Power and Urban Governance in Neoliberal Atlanta 1973-1988,” Journal of Social History 46, no. 1 (2012):170. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shs031.; David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71 (1989): 3-17. 27 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19.; see also Robert A. Beauregard, “Public-Private Partnerships as Historical Chameleons: The Case of the United States,” Partnerships in Urban Governance, 1998, 52-70. 28 Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism,3. Brown, “American Nightmare,” 693.; See also: Gary Gerstle, “The Rise and Fall (?) of America’s Neoliberal Order,” Transactions of the RHS 28 (2018): 241-64, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0080440118000129. For a broader view of politics, economic theory, and social issues such poverty, at the end of the twentieth century in America, see also: Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012). 29 Steffen, 171. For other scholarship on urban governance in the new homeless era, see also: Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, on the Road: The Homeless in American History (New York, 2002), 239-247; William Sites, Remaking New York: Primitive Globalization and the Politics of Urban Community (Minneapolis, 2003), 31-68; Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City (San Francisco, 1993).; Alex S. Vitale, City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (New York, 2008), 93- 114; Kerr, 200-243. 30 Steffen, 171. 31 Marcuse, 196.

150 the neoliberalisation of America’s urban cores was achieved at the expense of the inhabitants of the “tenement and abandoned” cities or more precisely the social and homeless housing of the second and third ghettoes.32 PPPs played a key role in this residential redevelopment. The construction, transformation, and eventual demolition of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings was a perfect example of this dynamic which was forged in the crucible of race, space, and the politics of place. Capitalism in the post-Reagan Era entered into a dialectical interaction of what Henri Lefebvre identified as “representational space and representations of space.”33 The paradox of these notions of space was brought to the forefront in the revanchist city of “the end of the 1980s boom” which “crystalized the effects of a decade of deregulation, privatisation, and emerging cuts in welfare and social service budgets.”34 Bartelt’s answer to the questions concerning the homeless further elucidates the motivation behind this trend:

If you are a housing investor in many inner-city communities, low-cost housing is no longer a viable business proposition. Leaving aside the relatively few examples of gentrified neighborhoods, the levels of abandonment and demolition show that the housing market certainly does not extend to these communities. They are beyond the threshold of the market.35 In Washington, D.C., Lefebvre’s dialectical interaction played out in the confrontation of city- planner and local, residential, activists’ objectives to transform Ellen Wilson Dwellings into a mixed income community (representational space), attenuating the voices of the former tenants and the squatting homeless of the dwellings who wished to use the space for its original purpose – to house lower-income communities and the homeless (representations of space). The Ellen Wilson Dwellings emerged from the alley communities of Capitol Hill around what was then called Navy Place. The controversial name change came from a particular brand of activism. The housing reform movement, instigated by citizen groups had their first Congressional victories as early as 1894 when restrictions on alley construction were put into place. An alley survey issued in 1904 on the state of alley housing, convinced President Theodore Roosevelt to take further action and encouraged Congress to take their own surveys. One such survey was conducted in 1912 and documented in the Directory of Inhabited Alleys, Washington, D.C. One of the largest areas of alley housing was recorded in what would be today’s Capitol Hill

32 Ibid. 33 Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 291. 34 Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 44. 35 Bartelt, 156.

151 neighbourhood. “Navy Place” (which became Ellen Wilson Place) with its some eighty dwellings was one of the largest alleys.36 A newly revived housing movement later named this alley community after First lady Ellen Wilson for her role in passing legislation that would bring alley dwellings to an end. This was a controversial appellation as both she and her husband were considered white supremacists in the African American community, in a city that was becoming increasingly black. The fate of the Capitol Hill alleys was postponed until after World War I and picked up by New Deal reformers including another first Lady – Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1934, the Alley Dwelling Authority was created with the purpose “to provide for the discontinuance of the use as dwellings of the buildings situated in the alleys of the District of Columbia.” 37 On July 1, 1944, no alley houses were to be inhabited. By 1941, the transformation of the “ramshackle living quarters” of the alley dwellings was implemented as a series of slum clearance policies.38 The Ellen Wilson Dwellings was built in 1941 as a segregated white housing project which displaced more than 300 low-income African Americans for its construction. However, the official desegregation of public housing in 1953 encouraged the steady return of African Americans residents.39 By the 1960s, the demographics inside the Ellen Wilson Dwellings, which was increasingly black, began to contrast dramatically with the white middle-class families that began to move into the historic old homes on Capitol Hill and buy homes from the black families who lived in them.40 By the 1970s, the demolition of five buildings displaced an estimated 230 inhabitants to make room for the Southeast-Southwest freeway. In addition to the dirt and noise pollution, the freeway isolated Ellen Wilson’s southern tip creating a “kind of dead-end no-man's-land that attract[ed] crime.”41 Neglect and maintenance diminished on this southern tip, sending the buildings into an irreversible state of disrepair. By the time the units were cleared in 1988, a local resident recalls that many of the tenants had been replaced by drug dealers and prostitutes and the apartments themselves had been taken over by looters who first began stealing aluminum windows, then

36 Thomas Jesse Jones, Directory of Inhabited Alleys, Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C.: McCormick, Noble, and Schaick, 1912), 19. 37 Nina Tristani, “History: Capitol Hill Alley Dwellings,” Hill Rag, March 8, 2018, https://hillrag.com/2018/03/08/capitol-hill-alley-dwellings/ accessed, April 30, 2020. 38 Gerald G. Gross, “Housing and Welfare Leaders View Result of Slum Clearance,” Washington Post, October 26, 1941. 39 Johanna Bockman, “The Repetition of Displacement at the Ellen Wilson Dwellings,” Arthur Capper, accessed September 12, 2019, https://arthurcapper.omeka.net/items/show/113 40 Laura Lang, “Dream City”, City Paper, April 16, 1999. 41 Ibid.

152 moved on to the plumbing, and finally the copper wire, giving the buildings an air of “Beirut after the bombings.”42 Promises were made to the estimated 129 families living in the 134 units of the 13-building complex located on 5.3 acres of land near Sixth and G Streets S.E., who were vacated in 1988. According to DCHA figures, most of these families were either placed in other public housing projects or given Section 8 rental vouchers to be applied towards apartments in the District. Once the housing complexes were vacated the Department of Public and Assisted Housing (DPAH) aimed to return the tenants to rehabilitated units. 43 The complex remained empty with the exception of the squatters (thirty-five), vagrants, and drug users who slipped through fences which surrounded the project on the Sixth, Seventh, G, and I streets S.E.44 However, the Ellen Wilson Dwellings fell prey to “bureaucratic entropy” until a revived interest in its fate during the 1990s set in motion a series of events that led to its demolition in 1995 and the construction of a new development renamed Townhomes on Capitol Hill (TOCH) in its place.45

The evolution of the HOPE VI program, which was galvanized by a combination of government and developer initiatives, has been widely documented in recent scholarship.46 Early on in the Clinton administration, HUD Secretary Cisneros imposed his vision of the program, consulting with experts in finance and real estate management to employ “market dynamics” to restructure public housing.47 Cisneros believed that merely renovation and reconstruction were cosmetic changes and an exercise in futility. He believed that to affect real change PHAs should “change whole neighborhoods” by replacing public housing complexes altogether and that doing

42 Ibid.; In 2001, the District received $34.9 million HOPE VI grant for Arthur Capper/Carrollsburg, housing project or “Capers” on Capitol Hill, Southeast. As a result, 707 units were demolished. In 2007, the new Arthur Capper Seniors Building opened with 162 units.; See also "Arthur Capper Public Housing Oral History Project”: https://arthurcapper.omeka.net/ 43 Ibid. 44 William Powers, “A Housing Complex D.C. Forgot,” Washington Post, August 22, 1992. 45 TOCH opened in January 1999 and was fully occupied by February 2000. In 1995, HUD terminated the one-for-one replacement of public housing units in new mixed-income developments rule, resulting in the demolition without replacement of over 220,000 units of public housing by 2008, and the sale and the conversion of thousands of units. However, only thirty-four constructed units were reserved for low-income families as opposed to the 203 units in the former site, decreasing the number of low-income households by 83%. The District received a $34.9 million Hope VI grant for the Capper/Carrollsburg housing project which closed in 2001 and re-opened as the Capital Quarter.; Lawson Clark, 86.; See also Faye Harrison “Life Stories, Grassroots Activism, Theatrical Performance.” file:///C:/Users/Nicole/Desktop/an.2007.48.7.19_dramaticperformance.pdf 46 Bockman, “Removing the Public from Public Housing,” 1-21.; Goetz, New Deal in Ruins.; Bruce Katz, “The Origins of HOPE VI,” in From Despair to Hope: HOPE VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in America’s Cities, ed. I Engadhl and Henry G. Cisneros (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 15-29; Susan J. Popkin, Bruce Katz, and Mary K. Cunningham, “A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, 2004); Y. Zhang and G. Weismann, “Public Housing’s Cinderella: Policy Dynamics of HOPE VI in the Mid-1990s,” in Where Are the Poor to Live? Transforming Communities, ed. Larry Bennett, Janet L. Smith and Patricia A. Wright (Armonk: Taylor and Francis, 2006), 41-67. 47 Henry Cisneros, “A New Moment for People and Cities,” in From Despair to Hope: HOPE VI and the New Promise of Public Housing in America’s Cities, eds. I Engadhl and Henry G. Cisneros (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 11

153 so would attract residents who could pay market-rate prices.48 Although many of the efforts of the Clinton administration to assist the poor were guided, in principle, by the goal of helping disadvantaged communities, some of the solutions only exacerbated the problem such as the administration’s welfare and criminal justice reforms. In the same vein, the HOPE VI revitalization program was cloaked in the rhetoric and good intentions of social justice. In reality, the politics of place obscured the objective to assist “distressed communities” by merely displacing and privatizing former public housing stock for the benefit of high-end consumption. Congress first introduced Hope VI as the Urban Revitalization Demonstration (URD) program in 1992. This housing program was composed of data provided by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing. The commission’s definition of “severely distressed” public housing was based on three resident-focused criteria: “residents living in despair and generally needing high levels of social and supportive services; physically deteriorated buildings; and economically and socially distressed surrounding communities.”49 Based on the findings of this commission, URD program set itself apart from its predecessors (HOPE I, II and III) in three ways: first through the demolition of the aforementioned “distressed areas”, second the creation of “mixed income developments,” which incorporated the surrounding neighbourhoods, and fostered the creation of new partnerships between “PHAs, nonprofit organizations, the private sector, and residents.” 50

HUD Secretary Cisneros was acutely aware of the scholarship published during the early 1990s which laid bare, “racial and economic segregation” and historical discriminatory practices which led to amenity poor minority neighbourhoods traditionally found around public housing projects.51 Renaming the project HOPE VI was not just superficial rebranding for Cisneros but a clarion call for a new approach to saving public housing from all-out privatisation and where “poverty deconcentration and income mixing” were fundamental objectives.52 The Ellen Wilson Dwellings was selected as one of the fifteen HOPE VI grantees in 1992.53 Cultural Anthropologist and urban scholar Dr Sherri Lawson Clark identified four major ways in which the implementation

48 Cisneros, “A New Moment for People and Cities,” 2009, 7 49 Popkin, Katz, and Cunningham, “A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges,” 8. 50 National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, 16, 31. 51 Research Findings and Policy Challenges, 8. See also Massey and Kanaiaupuni 1993; Bickford and Massey 1991. 52 Cisneros, “A New Moment for People and Cities,” 2009, 4.; A Decade of HOPE VI: Research Findings and Policy Challenges,”14. 53 The Ellen Wilson Dwellings received an Implementation Grant of $25 million in 1993 and another of $75, 956 in 1995 even though the District’s Department of Public and Assisted Housing (DPHA) had fallen under receivership by May 1995. Sherri Lawson Clark, Where The Poor Live: How Federal Housing Policy Shapes Residential Communities,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 31, no.1 (2002), 71.

154 process of Hope VI to the Ellen Wilson Dwellings was unique. First, the site was vacated prior to the grant unlike other public developments slated for revitalization or demolition. Second, by 1995 the District’s DPHA was in receivership “due to a large number of severely distressed developments, long waiting lists, and overall lack of management.”54 Third, the location was divided into two distinct racial and class demographics. Finally, a group of neighbourhood activists and not the PHA took charge of the HOPE VI grant implementation and distribution, of the grant.55

Sociologist and urban scholar Dr Johanna Bockman documented the transformation of the dwellings into a site of political activism. She examined how public housing tenants became a part of a “large political constituency” fighting against displacement and hostile business sector actors and neighbourhood groups through grassroots organizing and legal advocacy. Indeed, community activist groups like the Coalition to Save Ellen Wilson and the Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals (CHAMPS) from the business sector, banned together to form a larger entity known as Ellen Wilson Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation. This community development corporation (CDC) spearheaded the passage of the HOPE VI grant program in the void left by DPHA’s mismanagement. Its leadership was composed of the local homeowners, real estate agents, and local bankers who ultimately exacerbated the acrimony towards the Ellen Wilson Dwelling tenants and the onsite homeless.56 However, the involvement of the squatter community in the fight to remain at the Ellen Wilson Dwellings has been insufficiently documented. Revisiting the eventual demolition of the thirteen-building complex of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings from the perspective of the squatters is significant for two reasons. First, it highlights the changing community attitudes towards the homeless and their conflation with signs of urban disorder and decay. Second, it brings homeless vulnerability to displacement from residential areas and local government practices of homeless removal into sharp relief.

The adversarial relationship between homeless advocacy groups and the District’s local government continued under the Kelly administration, not just in the affluent neighbourhoods of Wards Two and Three, but also in the residual city, in locations such as the Ellen Wilson Dwellings. Although the complex fell into disrepair and shut down due to sky-high maintenance and repair costs, over the years, many homeless people continued to live there. For example, one

54 Lawson Clark, 71. 55 Ibid. 56 Bockman, “Removing the Public from Public Housing,” 4-7.

155 of the inhabitants, Michael Burgess, supported himself with unskilled jobs such as washing cars and shovelling snow since the closure of complex in 1988.57 What was the solution for homeless people like Burgess? How could he at once acquire marketable skills and afford lodgings? By 1992, the clandestine movement which emerged from a small contingent of squatters determined not only to occupy the abandoned complex but to provide job training in building renovation arose out of necessity and ingenuity. The Washington Times which provided extensive coverage of the short-lived four-and-a-half month protest portrayed the confrontation as a political coup attempted by a ragtag group of homeless veterans mostly recruited at the CCNV shelter: “If the 1960s saw the nation take on an unsuccessful War on Poverty, this operation is the 90’s version: a guerilla strike.”58 Janet Naylor, author of one of the articles in the series, laid out its mission:

The group – which numbered about 20 on Saturday but dwindled to just a handful yesterday – is beginning its own comprehensive rehabilitation of the dilapidated, closed-down public housing complex. It’s a seat-of-the-pants operation that planners hope will result in 34 livable apartments.59 The possible fate of the Ellen Wilson complex took on two diametrically opposite trajectories. Cecil Byrd, a Vietnam veteran, resident of the District’s Southeastern ward, an experienced rehab trainer, and leader of the group, declared that “he and his workers [would] continue their efforts until they either [got] the contract for Ellen Wilson or some similar project.”60 As homeless veterans such as Steve Smock began to spread the word about the rehabilitation project at Ellen Wilson, the Director of the District’s Public and Assisted Housing agency, Ray Price, assured the public that the city was reaching “the final stages of negotiating a deal to renovate the complex.” Over the course of the next four months as the squatters continued to diligently work on the complex, District officials played good cop/bad cop, oscillating between threats to board up the building and eviction, and promises of job placement in other housing renovation projects.61 On October 1, 1992, the city, finally carried out its threats as “more than a dozen homeless people were evicted from their makeshift living quarters… when D.C. housing

57 Claudia Rosenbaum, “Wilson squatters refuse to move out,” Washington Times, October 5, 1992. 58 Janet Naylor, “Homeless vets have strategy, take complex,” Washington Times, June 1, 1992. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid.” 61 Janet Naylor, “Renovators vow to keep working,” Washington Times, June 2, 1992.; Janet Naylor, “Get out, city orders homeless renovators,” Washington Times, June 17, 1992.;

156 officials and police forced their way into the Ellen Wilson Dwellings and ordered squatters out of the project.”62 However, many of the squatters would simply return.63

Squatters like Eric Ellis speculated that the impetus for the eviction came from two possible sources. The first potential source was the disapproval over Richard Webster’s bid for advisory neighborhood commissioner. Webster was a fellow squatter and member of the Committee for the Restoration of the Ellen Wilson Development (CREWD) The second source was from local neighbourhood-resident pressure.64 Negotiation with the remaining squatters, who had barricaded themselves onto the complex’s roofs, came to a head in October. These remaining squatters were evicted even as their representatives negotiated with Mayor Kelly.65 In order to address the evicted squatters’ concerns, Mayor Kelly appointed a taskforce which would include representatives of the city Department of Public and Assisted Housing, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the former squatters at Ellen Wilson, community representatives, and the mayor’s office. However, local support for the squatters from Capitol Hill residents and local radio and print media pundits did not deter Mayor Kelly from making her priorities clear, stating to The Washington Times that “no decision would be made without consulting residents who live in the area. … The buildings will stay vacant until the city, neighbors of the complex, and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development agree on a plan for the apartments.”66 Despite their eviction and continued efforts to negotiate building renovations, the veterans, unrecognized members of the residential community, were “quickly marginalized from the decision-making process.”67

Mayor Kelly’s relegation of the homeless squatters of the Ellen Wilson Dwellings into the local bureaucracy of sympathetic rhetoric and dismal of results was endemic of her general approach to homelessness. Under pressure from Carol Fennelly, spokeswoman for CCNV and other advocates for the homeless, the Kelly administration was compelled to create a coherent policy on homelessness. Mayor Kelly put together a task force on homelessness which was “charged with finding ways to shelter homeless people…and analyzing homelessness in the

62 Kevin Bell, “D.C. Evicts homeless people from abandoned city project,” Washington Times, October 2, 1992. 63 Claudia Rosenbaum, “Wilson squatters refuse to move out,” Washington Times, October 5, 1992. 64 Kevin Bell, “D.C. Evicts homeless people from abandoned city project,” Washington Times, October 2, 1992.; Claudia Rosenbaum, “Wilson squatters refuse to move out.” See also Linda Wheeler, “Squatter Seeking a Voice,” Washington Post, October 1, 1992. 65 Claudia Rosenbaum, ”Squatters take over SE roof – Spurn eviction from Dwellings,” Washington Times, October 6, 1992.; Linda Wheeler, “Standoff With Squatters Is Broken: Promise of meeting Gets Protesters to Abandon D.C. Building,” Washington Post, October 10, 1992.; Linda Wheeler, “Kelly Fails to Satisfy Squatters,” Washington Post, October 14, 1992. 66 Claudia Rosenbaum, “Wilson squatters refuse to move out,” Washington Times, October 5, 1992. 67 Bockman, “Removing the Public from Public Housing,” 10. 157

District.”68 On October 20, 1992, Mayor Kelly gave a summary of the key elements of the resulting report:

Number one, the view is that everybody in the community must share in this responsibility that no one [or] two communities are to be the only ones dealing with the issue. Two, that we must begin to break the cycle of dependency. […] the approach that many states, city and local governments have pursued has been basically a band-aid approach to providing shelter and that is it. Third, there has got to be better coordination and particularly the coordination between the Department of Human Services and the Department of Public Housing because clearly, we have housing that could be made available to our homeless population.69

Kelly’s vision for the solutions to the homeless crisis exposed the organization of a bureaucracy in chaos. Even as her press conference laid out its solutions, discussion of “scarce resources from the federal government” prepared her constituents for absolution from the failure of their implementation.70 Urban scholars Dear and Wolch, documented the implications of under-funded programs for poor populations in need:

The increasing demand for service supports and the long-term economic situation have crucial implications for the service-dependent population, particularly the homeless. Unless more resources are devoted to social spending, continued attacks on existing levels of welfare and human-service support are more likely than increased spending.71

Kelly’s solution to the inevitable lack of funds was the return to community-based solutions by relying on those already on the frontlines of the problem such as non-profit organizations, churches, and synagogues to work together more efficiently. However, this press conference was above all a political speech, a discussion of the apparatus that served the homeless, more than the homeless themselves. “To break the cycle of dependency” employed five times during her short speech was the catch-all phrase, designating: the elimination of the “band-aid” approach to shelter provision, identification of at-risk individuals and families, service provision for already homeless persons and better coordination of those services, shared responsibility for providing social service

68 “Dixon Forms Taskforce To Tackle Homelessness,” Washington Post, Oct 22, 1991. Sharon Pratt Dixon married James R. Kelly III on December 7, 1991, and changed her surname to Kelly.; see also Martin Well, “Now She’s Mayor Kelly: Dixon Married, Changes Her Name,” Washington Post, December 8, 1991. 69 Sharon Pratt Kelly. “Press Conference by Mayor Kelly on the Results of the Taskforce Study,” Advisory Task Force on Homelessness (ts. October 20, 1992), DCAAP.0021 Collection Number 228 Cassette, Box 70 Folder 15, Sharon Pratt Kelly Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 70 Ibid. 71 Dear and Wolch, Landscapes of Despair, 202.

158 in each Ward, and the preservation of “the sense of community.”72 This dependency talk contributed to a pernicious bureaucratization of homelessness where the homeless were not spoken about as much as the apparatus which inadvertently exacerbated service dependency, through the institutionalization of homeless emergency sheltering services. This same rhetoric imbued the policies of the war on homelessness waged by the Clinton administration.

The War on Homelessness in Washington, D.C. As America moved into the Clinton administration, it was becoming painfully obvious that the anti-homelessness movement was losing the public relations and optics battle for homeless rights in Washington, D.C. Indeed, progress had become stagnant, despite a year of confrontations with homeless advocacy groups and squatter/veterans, as well as the various reports and task forces assigned to the purpose. The death of one woman brought to light the bureaucratic entropy that had become the fate of homeless assistance services. The highly-publicized declaration of the administration’s New War on Homelessness would be the consequence. Consistent with the movement to “reinvent government,” the accelerated rollout of a model demonstration program known as the D.C. Initiative, was its ambitious solution. This program was created as “a two-year plan meant to turn the District of Columbia into a national model for serving homeless people.”73

The War on Homelessness declared by the Clinton administration in 1993, only reinforced the process of containing the homeless in the service-dependent ghettoes of a burgeoning bureaucracy. In an article published in The Washington Post on December 5, 1993, entitled “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep: Yetta Adams’ Story and the New War on Homelessness,” written by HUD Secretary Cisneros wasn’t so much a declaration of war as an indictment of “a system that evolved haphazardly to treat the symptoms of homelessness and failed to address underlying causes.”74 Whereas waging a so-called second war on poverty was a stated goal of HUD Secretary Kemp’s mandate during the George H.W. Bush administration, the New War on Homelessness would become an official objective of the Clinton administration. However, the war was not waged against homelessness as much as the pernicious bureaucracy which had allowed Yetta Adams to

72 Kelly 1992 Press Conference. 73 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, The D.C. Initiative: Working Together to Solve Homelessness, Executive Summary (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1993), 2.; Editorial, “Housing Secretary Eulogizes A Woman Who Died So Near,” New York Times, December 10, 1993. 74 Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep.”

159 perish on its doorstep. Yetta was not the motivation for the administration’s rollout of solutions, but her tragic death did “ underscore the urgent need to move forward with programs waiting for launch dates.”75 For example, District Councilmember Chairman David Clark asked Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly to expedite its new plan: The D.C. Initiative.

The D.C. Initiative to End Homelessness, a model demonstration program in Hometown Washington as well as a piloted Continuum of Care model in twenty other cities, was designed to address the homeless problem in a more comprehensive manner with a total of $20 million in federal funds.76 The Continuum of Care (CoC) Program as defined by the HUD was conceived to encourage a “communitywide commitment” to the aim of ending homelessness; provide funding streams for non-profit providers, and state and local governments to rapidly “rehouse homeless individuals and families”; facilitate the access and use of mainstream programs for the homeless; and “optimize self-sufficiency among individuals and families experiencing homelessness.”77 More precisely “a continuum of care” consists of three basic components: outreach/assessment, transitional housing combined with rehabilitative services, and placement into permanent housing.”78

Key priorities for the D.C. Initiative were accountability for the expenditure of federal funds, local government fund-matching and the coordination between public and private entities such as: “government agencies, community-based, non-profit service providers and the business and foundation communities.”79 The District committed to spending $14.8 million a year over three years on homeless assistance services.80 As reported by The New York Times: “the plan would shift the city's emphasis from patchwork emergency shelters toward long-term social services and permanent housing.”81 The goal of that Initiative was to create a federal, local, and private partnership to provide a continuum of care for homeless people. The initiative would re-examine the cost-effectiveness of the District’s budget on the emergency shelter system, an investment that reached as high as $40 million in 1989. Moreover, in lieu of Yetta Adam’s tragic death, Secretary

75 Ibid. 76 Elwell, 200. 77 “The Continuum of Care (CoC) Program,” HUD Exchange, accessed March 18, 2020, https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/coc/. 78 “D.C. Initiative Executive Summary,” 2. After awarding individual agencies in 1994, the HUD required that communities submit single comprehensive CoC applications in 1995. 79 Henry Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep: Yetta Adams’ Story and the New War on Homelessness,” The Washington Post, December 5, 1993. 80 Kelly Sweeney “Don’t Leave the Homeless Out in the Cold,” Washington Post November 24, 1996. 81 Editorial, ‘Housing Secretary Eulogizes A Woman Who Died So Near.”

160

Cisneros took the unusual step of bypassing the District government, his initiative partner, to allocate $250,000 in federal funds directly to homeless advocacy groups “for vans, drivers, an updated homeless hotline, and more shelter beds and outreach workers.”82

In the District, federal funds were designated for the initiative in hopes of stimulating local change and generating a novel way of thinking about homeless solutions that let localities determine how to address its homeless problem in the most comprehensive manner. The CoC program would be created through a federal, local and private partnership. Historically, these kinds of partnerships are particularly challenging for polities governed by Black Urban Regimes (BURs) in cities like Washington, D.C. where to cite Adolph Reed: “the relation between the main components of their electoral and governing coalitions is often zero-sum; gains for the predominantly black electoral constituency are experienced as losses by the corporate-led governing coalition, and vice versa.”83

At its inception, the initiative’s PPPs were considered an opportunity to achieve three major goals. The first was to eliminate the adversarial relationship the city had previously cultivated with advocacy groups. The second aim was to overhaul homeless services in the District. The third objective was to give more autonomy to local infrastructure to manage its own homeless relief.84 Due to the District’s history of mismanagement, the HUD refused to give funds to the city government. The Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness (TCP), an independent non-profit corporation whose mission was the improvement and coordination of services in the District, was the public-private entity charged with the distribution and management of federal and distribution of (CoC) start-up funds for the CoC outreach and assessment, transitional housing, permanent housing, and supportive services. HUD would disburse $7 million per year over three years, a pay-out far below the $22 million the District had recently spent on homeless services. In the hopes of mitigating the city’s poor relations with the Advisory Neighborhood Commission’s (ANCs), reducing NIMBY antagonisms, and community support, the TCP was favourable to finding local demonstration projects.

82 Editorial. “HUD-D.C. Initiative - Day 180,” Washington Post, December 7, 1993. 83 Adolph L. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 88. 84 Elwell; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “The D.C. Initiative: Working Together to Solve Homelessness, Executive Summary” (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1993), 10.

161

The implementation of CoC programs in 1994 was significant, as it marked an important milestone in the institutionalization of homeless assistance services and a new phase in the making of the third ghetto.85 The CoC’s misguided how the services were delivered rather than “what the services do or do not do” focus on exposes the nefarious effects of bureaucratising homeless service provision.86 Lyon-Callo argues that the “continuum of care system became a neoliberal continuum only as a focus on individualized, market-based views of the social replaced the notion of a governmentally supported social safety net.”87 One of the most important mechanisms of this program was the use of case management technologies. Social workers used this system as a means to help clients choose the right direction for their lives through the use of such tools as money management, educational, or vocational programmes.88 In the District, the case management system was seen as a remedy for “dead-end” warehousing that frequently occurred in shelters like the Federal City Shelter. This CCNV-run shelter had not only gained a reputation for “being chaotic and violent,” but also as a place where quite a few residents were allowed to stay for years without case management care or any plan to reclaim their autonomy.89 One of TCP’s objectives was to redress this tendency to warehouse in emergency shelter provision. Despite TCP’s efforts to make homeless assistance wraparound services more efficient, the initiative itself contained a few fundamental flaws. Well before Yetta’s death across the street from their offices, at a subcommittee hearing in April 1993, the HUD had already declared its intentions to: “force a new working partnership with state and local governments with non-profit organizations, the private sector and … [its] entire national community to meet the needs of … homeless people.”90 However, at that same hearing then St. Paul, Minnesota Mayor James Scheibel submitted a report entitled “Beyond McKinney: Policies to End Homelessness, which addressed the fundamental causes of homelessness and offered solutions such as: ensuring affordable housing, adequate income, social services and prohibiting discrimination. The report’s civil rights component which sought to protect the

85 Elwell argues that the Housing First model is the beginning of homeless assistance service institutionalization. See also Elwell, 299. Washington, D.C. adopted its first Housing First Model in 2004. This chapter posits that the adoption of the Housing First model is part of an on- going process of institutionalization begun in the 1990s and officialised by the implementation of CoC programs. 2004 to the present also marks the fourth phase in the periodization of the third ghetto, the first being 1977 to 1987 and the second 1987 to 1994, and the third 1994 to 2004 which began with the implementation of the CoC program in the District. 86 Lyon-Callo, Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, 12. 87 Ibid. 88 Craig Willse, “Neo-Liberal Biopolitics and the Invention of Chronic Homelessness,” Economy and Society 39, no. 2 (2010): 165. 89 Elwell, 273. 90 U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Homelessness in America: hearing before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Development of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, 103rd Cong., 1st Session, April 23, 1993, 12.

162 homeless from “bureaucratic disentitlement,” was conspicuously absent from the D.C. Initiative.91 Indeed, the Initiative, which lacked an official integration of a social justice component that would have helped at least highlight the systemic flaws it mentioned, merely reinforced the institutionalization of emergency shelter provisioning, extended bureaucratic entanglements, and did nothing to “ensure the right to vote, remove [social] barriers, ensure representation and prohibit “anti-homeless laws” for the homeless.”92 Additionally, since its inception, Washington Post regularly chronicled the disappointing performance of the initiative citing it “never lived up to its billing.”93 Although the CoC program is still in place today, the D.C. Initiative: “never became a model for national replication.”94 However, in the five years of its existence, the D.C. Initiative was able to make inroads in addiction treatment, health and respite care and outreach services. Yetta’s tragic death also brought to light the plight of the homeless in the press giving activists, politicians, and service providers a platform to voice the concerns of a major paradigm shift in public attitudes towards the homeless. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) released a report which found an increase in “hostile government” responses to urban homelessness.95 Cisneros confessed that in some cities more people seemed to be showing anger at the homeless. Condemning this senseless rage, he argued that: “No one wants to sleep on park benches, in shelters or on cold grates. We must stop for a moment in our tendency to blame the poor.”96

The NLCHP director, Maria Foscarinis, reported that in cities such as San Francisco, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., local governments had begun fighting against homeless activity by establishing laws against “aggressive panhandling, passing ordinances that prohibited sleeping or camping in public places and increasing penalties for urinating in public.”97 Some cities even created designated “zones or pods” in secluded areas to confine homeless people.98 Foscarinis also added that under these new ordinances more than 3,000 homeless people had already been arrested.99 In the District of Columbia, while many of the remaining actors in the anti-

91 Ibid., 254. 92 Ibid. 93 Editorial. “D.C. Initiative Day 1,221,” Washington Post, January 24, 1997. 94 Editorial, “Homeless Initiative Sunset,” Washington Post, April 1, 1999. The D.C. Initiative expired on March 31, 1999. 95 Brown, “D.C. Homeless Woman Buried.” See also: The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, The Right to Remain Nowhere: A Report on Anti-Homeless Laws and Poverty and Litigation in 16 United States Cities (Washington D.C. 1993). 96 Brown, “D.C. Homeless Woman Buried.” 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid.

163 homelessness movement were professionalized into the homeless assistance bureaucracy or tamed through police power and community backlash, the local government outsourced homeless assistance services to private entities thereby abdicating governmental oversight. The homeless – on the other hand – were caught in a dynamic of increasingly “punitive energies of urban revanchism” that restricted access to designated public and residential areas and paved the way towards downtown revitalization projects for the “new urban renaissance” of the twenty-first century.100

Privatisation, Partnership, and Power in Washington, D.C. One of the most challenging aspects of examining homelessness at the end of the twentieth century in the District of Columbia, is defining the city itself. Is Washington D.C. the sum of its symbols as: a “northern charm and southern efficiency” (John F. Kennedy), a “bourgeois town” (Huddie Ledbetter), a “Chocolate City” (Parliament) or the “crime capital of the world” (President Nixon)?101 Throughout the city’s history as the nation’s capital, the symbols and clichés Washington, D.C. has offered its residents have been either vigorously upheld as a matter of pride or combatted as a source of invasion of this “model city.” For the homeless communities living on the geographical peripheries of the streets or in the third ghetto and “carry[ing] the image, and stigma, of their marginality,” downtown and residential areas of the 1990s were becoming increasingly contested spaces delineated by those with the political power and cultural status to exclude these marginalized communities from them.102 PPPs with non-governmental agencies, privatization, marketization, and the deregulation of public services were becoming increasingly accepted practices in homeless service provision. Neoliberal forces in the Clinton administration rallied to make “a strategic effort aimed at restoring the profitability of business and capital” while instigating “a political, social, and economic rejection of the social welfare state and the social contract more generally.”103 It is here, within the larger framework of neoliberal governance of the 1990s, that homelessness should be examined – in the District as a neoliberal city.

Where does homelessness fit into this larger framework of the neoliberal city? Urban scholars Brenner and Theodore argue for the existence of a dialectical opposition between the

100 Steffen, 171.; Timothy A. Gibson, Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004),155. 101 Williams, Upscaling Downtown, 7. 102 Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2001), 3. 103 Taylor, 231. 164 destructive and creative forces inherent in neoliberalism.104 Additionally, Hackworth posits that “neoliberal destruction consists of removal of Keynesian artifacts [such as] public housing, public space, redistributive welfare policy, and institutions such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”105 However, neoliberal creation constitutes either the construction of new institutions or the mobilization of pre-existing ones for future use in neoliberal projects such as workfare stipulations in welfare reform and PPPs.106 Scholars Peck and Tickell pinpointed two other important components of neoliberal development known as the “rollback and rollout phases.”107 In this process, Keynesian policies and artifacts are undone and supplanted by “more proactively neoliberal practices and ideas.”108 Nation-state power to control public institutions, which serve as “a buffer between the localities and the machinations of a global economy” is gutted.109 Hackworth’s argument in this evolutionary process which postulates that: “the reduction of national interventions in housing, local infrastructure, welfare and the like, localities are forced to finance such areas themselves or to abandon them entirely” is amply sustained here.110 Many homeless families receiving AFDC benefits in the abandoned city of the 1980s were forced to turn to welfare hotels. These iterations of the for-profit homeless business epitomized the rollback phase of neoliberal development.111 Conversely, the CoC program under the Clinton administration –discussed in the previous section –is a perfect example of the roll out phase.

How do we contextualize welfare recipiency for families found in either the public housing system of the second ghetto or the welfare hotels of the third, in a broader framework of neoliberal discourse? To answer this question, it is important to understand what is meant by the term “discourse.” Sean Phelan argues that discourse is “a stable articulation of [both] linguistic and extralinguistic practices… [and] is integral in different objects, institutional regimes, practices, subjectivities, and dispositions.”112 Urban scholar Matthew Ruben posits that given the fact that race, class, and concomitant political-economic processes are equally important in comprehending and struggling against neoliberal development: “it’s not surprising to see neoliberal discourse and

104 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism,’” Antipode 34 (2002): 349-79. 105 Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007),11. 106 Ibid. 107 Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34 (2002): 380-404. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Nicole Gipson, “Making the Third Ghetto: Race and Homelessness in Washington, D.C. 1977- 1989” (unpublished). 112Sean Phelan, Neoliberalism, Media and the Political (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 34-35.

165 policy promoting individual responsibility, self-help, and market discipline as a way of obscuring class inequalities by the modern urban landscape of uneven development.”113 Consequently, the way that dependency talk, self-help rhetoric, and market-based solutions were used to speak about and care for low-income single-parent families during the 1980s would have real-world consequences on the rollback of public assistance funding streams, low-income housing availability and construction, and the roll-out phase of welfare reform in the 1990s.114 However, family homelessness in the last two decades of the twentieth century was not only a matter of discourse but occurred within the lived and racialized spaces of black urban regimes. Therefore, examining the racialization of space in housing precarity and the social inequalities it generated and perpetuated are key to understanding the District as a neoliberal city.

Theorizing urban homelessness within what George Lipsitz calls “the national spatial imaginary” connects the third ghetto of the 1990s in the District to the issues of “race, place, and power.”115 Lipsitz argues that within “the privileged moral geography of the contemporary national landscape,” “exclusivity and augmented exchange value,” operate as central mechanisms of what he calls the “white spatial imaginary.”116 Historically, segregation and systemic discrimination relegated African Americans to a limited housing market and fewer housing opportunities which forced them to live in neighbourhoods controlled by restricted covenants, zoning, aggressive policing, and disinvestment, making control of property exchange value unattainable.117 As presented in Chapter One, within Lipsitz’s “black spatial imaginary” occupants of these spaces who were limited to this homogenized, underprivileged spatial context made do through kinship or more informal networks.118 However, non-normative populations like the homeless of the late twentieth century had limited or no access to either of these spaces. African American homelessness in the black spatial imaginary meant that informal networks had either partially or totally broken down or were nonexistent. In the white spatial imaginary of the neoliberal city, the homeless were relegated to the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto. As discussed in Chapter Three, in urban regimes across America changing public attitudes towards the homeless impacted a disproportionately high amount of African American homeless bodies which

113 Matthew Ruben, “Suburbanization and Urban Poverty under Neoliberalism,” in New Poverty Studies: Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States, ed. Judith Goode and Jeff Maskovsky (New York: New York University Press 2001), 463. 114 Lyon-Callo, Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance, 11. 115 Lipsitz, 10. 116 Lipsitz, 13, 15. 117 Ibid., 14. 118 Ibid. 166 experienced increasingly restricted access to local spaces of privilege such as residential areas, local business districts, and downtown public facilities – to what end? Hirsch’s notion of “positive power” developed in the Second Ghetto provides an excellent framework to analyse the third ghetto.

In the Second Ghetto, Hirsch defines positive power as a “wedding of private interest and public power,” where the larger forces” of downtown interests and some powerful institutions” relegated an undesired, poor, black, and powerless population to the public housing of the second ghetto as a means to isolate and objectify them through an unrelenting “process of urban [postwar] reconstruction.”119 In postwar Chicago, segregation was the primary mechanism that contained the so-called imminent threat of black urban violence and secured a fearful white population in the comfort of safe homogenized neighbourhoods.120 Comparatively, the “pockets of local resistance” which Hirsch describes as agents of “negative power” that were powerless to stop the postwar reconstruction program, were epitomised by the D.C. homeless activists of the 1970s and 1980s. This force of negative power became increasingly disempowered in the 1990s and subject to the rise of the neoliberalisation of urban regimes and the positive power which worked through PPPs, privatisation, and police power. In the neoliberal city of Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, the homeless, who were unable to access affordable housing, were condemned to the “open penitentiaries” of the third ghetto, enduring the carceral conditions inside emergency shelters and a system of predatory petty law enforcement outside, as they tried to occupy public spaces.121 This brand of intense enforcement disproportionally targeted the homeless, cited for petty/quality-of-life crimes such as panhandling, talking back to police officers, loitering, littering, jaywalking, and refusing to move along.122 Their systematic citation for petty crimes, constitute what Don Mitchell describes as “the privatisation of public space” which became “reserved …solely for commodified recreation and spectacle.”123 In addition to the “structural changes in the economy, a tightening housing market, the recessionary periods, and stagnating or declining industries” facing poor communities at the end

119 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 213, 215. 120 Ibid., 215. 121 Kerr, 200. 122 As defined by the author of this thesis. 123 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: NY: Guilford Press, 2014), 142. Don Mitchell, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020), 5. See also: Jennie M. Simpson, “Policing the New Downtown: The Costs of Community for Homeless Persons and Individuals With Mental Illnesses In Washington, D.C.,” (PhD diss., American University, 2011).; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Version, 2006), 232 - 236. 167 of the twentieth century, this commodification of space also exacerbated social inequality for marginalized groups such as the street homeless.124 Homeless activity outside the designated areas and service facilities of the third ghetto became increasingly restricted by corporate and resident legal activism that criminalised homeless bodies through the use of police power. Homeless disempowerment was also exacerbated by the on-going dynamic of black flight into Greater Washington D.C. which continued to isolate the homeless in the third ghetto well into the twenty-first century (see Table 4.1). Two waves of ethnic flight – the middle class in the 1980s and low-income black communities throughout the nineties – created “hypersegregated” populations which either continued to move into Greater Washington or remained behind the racial divide which separated black and white communities in Washington D.C. well into the twenty- first century (see Map 4.1).125 The pattern of racial groups in the District, represented in Table 4.1 would suggest that Congressional intervention had not discouraged the on-going influx of White, Asian and Hispanic communities, but did not reverse Black middle-class flight. This trend also suggests that for many of the District’s African Americans, the right to the city was best exercised in the option to leave it. A right for those with means and an obligation for other African Americans driven from the city to the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia by the third wave of gentrification in neighbourhoods like Shaw/U Street, the ground zero of the 1968 uprising.126 This wave of gentrification fuelled the intensification of anti-homeless policy in the District.

124 Kusmer, Down and out on the Road, 241.; Street homeless is defined here as the homeless actually living on the street who find themselves on the street during the day and regularly sleep on the street at night. This group is shelter averse, often choosing to sleep on the street rather than sleeping in the homeless shelters which could be unsanitary, drug-infested, and dangerous with a highly bureaucratic ground staff.; See also Snow Anderson, Down on Their Luck.; Raspberry, “Homeless by Choice.”; Rita Diaz, “Shelter Factsheet: Street Homelessness,” Shelter England,2006, https://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/48458/Factsheet_Street_Homelessness_Aug_2006.pdf 125 Kilolo Kijakazi, et al., The Color of Wealth in the Nation’s Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University; Washington, DC: Urban Institute; New York: The New School; Oakland, CA: Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 2016), 29-30. 126 Hyra, “The Back-to-the-City Movement.”; see also Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: a History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital 9 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

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Table 4.1 Source: William H. Frey’s analysis of 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses data.127

Map 4.1: Persistent Racial Divisions in D.C. White/Black Concentration 1990 and 2010128

127 William H. Frey, “The New Great Migration: Black Americans’ Return to the South 1965 -2000,” rep. Brookings (Washington, D.C., May 1, 2004). https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/20040524_Frey.pdf. Accessed March 16, 2020. 128 Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2015/03/24/segregation-and-concentrated-poverty-in-the-nations-capital/

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Whereas middle-class black flight represented an opportunity to access a previously unattainable suburban life, the homeless remained trapped within the city, tethered to the premises of the third ghetto and homeless assistance service dependency. However, the District’s homeless were not only vulnerable to living in increasing marginalization but also the increasingly punitive policies applied to their behaviour such as “aggressive panhandling.”

Poverty scholar Forrest Stuart documented the sharp turnaround in urban policing across America, which “placed homelessness and homeless people squarely within the criminal justice crosshairs.”129 There is a wide swath of social scientists providing a range of scholarship in the fields of sociology, criminology, geography, and law which have chronicled this ratcheting up of punitive policing towards the homeless as proof “of a broader shift in contemporary punishment and poverty governance.”130 A perfect example of this intensification could be found in New York City where the gradual attention to graffiti vandalism was replaced by the crackdown down on the homeless.131 Through his Quality of Life Initiative introduced in New York City in 1993, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’ unabashedly cited “broken windows” as the theoretical foundation for the “zero tolerance” policies used by the New York Police Department.132 Other cities were quick to look to New York City as a model for their own policing policies. They include Chicago, Tampa, and Washington, D.C. However, before analysing quality-of-life policing’s impact on street communities, it is important to understand the premises behind broken window theory and how it became foundational to the crackdown on petty crime in urban regimes like New York City.

In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson published an article in The Atlantic which received considerable attention in both the policing and non-policing world: “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” 133 It began by describing a New Jersey initiative called the “Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program” which was designed “to improve the quality of

129 Stuart, Forrest. “On the Streets, Under Arrest: Policing Homelessness in the 21st Century.” Sociology Compass 9, no. 11 (2015): 941. 130 Forrest, 942.; See also: “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States.” Antipode 29 no.3 (1997): 303–335.; Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 131 Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City, 114. 132 T. Erzen, “Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Win Dows: Policing Disorder in New York City,” ed. A. McArdle and T. Erzen, in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 19-49. 133 In 1966 James Q. Wilson was appointed the chair of President Johnson’s Task Force on Crime, a team which worked with the Department of Justice on early drafts of the Safe Streets Act. Nixon later appointed him to his Model Cites Task Force in 1969 and under the same administration, was appointed the chairman of the Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention. Through this commission, Wilson helped steer the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement –“the vanguard of the administration’s war on street-level pushers”. Finding the War on Poverty programs “irrational” and “wasteful”, Wilson helped guide national law enforcement from prevention to deterrence and incapacitation Police offices were not only obliged to fight crime but to ensure domestic order by staring down “potential” crime.

170 community life in twenty-eight cities.”134 The target of this quality-of-life beat policing was not necessarily the criminal but the “disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers and the mentally disturbed”, their crime: disruption of public order. The Atlantic article describes their modus operandi:

Drunks and addicts could sit on the stoops but could not lie down. People could drink on side streets, but not at the main intersection. Bottles had to be in paper bags. Talking to, bothering, or begging from people waiting at the bus stop was strictly forbidden…. If a stranger loitered, … [he was asked] if he had any means of support and what his business was; if he gave unsatisfactory answers, he was sent on his way. Persons who broke the informal rules, especially those who bothered people waiting at bus stops, were arrested for vagrancy.135

The article argued that disorder must not be underestimated and that on the community level “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked.” The authors asserted the existence of a general consensus between police officers and social psychologists: broken windows left unrepaired in a building will lead to all its windows being broken, irrespective of the building’s location in well-kept or run-down neighbourhoods.136 Therefore, the mark of a stable community is one that maintains the façade of order through upkeep in which: teenagers are not permitted to gather in front of the corner store, drinking in public is strictly controlled, and panhandlers are not permitted to accost pedestrians. The community which does not keep order will succumb to an eventual “criminal invasion.”137 In an interview on NPR’s “The Hidden Brain” podcast Kelling explained: Once you begin to deal with the small problems in neighbourhoods, you begin to empower those neighborhoods and people claim their public spaces and store owners extend their concern to what happens on the streets, residents control park spaces, communities get strengthened once order is restored or maintained… it is that dynamic that helps prevent crime.138

134 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety," The Atlantic, March 1982, accessed November 5, 2017. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Shankar Vedantam et al., “How A Theory of Crime And Policing Was Born and Went Terribly Wrong,” NPR (NPR, November 1, 2016), The Hidden Brain, May 29, 2017, accessed March 23, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2016/11/01/500104506/broken-windows-policing-and-the-origins- of-stop-and-frisk-and-how-it-went-wrong.

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Prominent scholars have called into question the efficacy of broken window theory in policing.139 Was this theory’s application to inner-city policing an effective means to combat petty and violent crime or were the early positive statistics indicative of a reversion to the mean, as some sociologists would later suggest?140As one of the more “visible” aspects of public disorder, many homeless activities became “quality-of-life” infringements. Analysing quality-of-life policing is essential to understand how local communities engaged with street people to control and criminalise homelessness. There are ample sources on this subject, particularly in New York City.141 Deconstructing the notion of disorder is important because its range of application to the public city is vast. Stop-and-frisk policies, police/community relations, petty and violent crime, and inner- city policing are essentially defined by varying degrees of disorder particularly where disorder is perceived as a “precursor to or [accompanying] serious crime.”142 Cultural stereotypes define how we see disorder and how we categorize and behave towards members of marginalized groups.143 Kelling recognized the complexity of broken window policing enforcement:

We might agree that certain behavior makes one person more undesirable than another but how do we ensure that age or skin colour or national origin or harmless mannerisms will not also become the basis for distinguishing the undesirable from the desirable? How do we ensure, in short, that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry? We can offer no wholly satisfactory answer to this important question. 144 Nationwide, as many municipalities and states sought to reclaim public spaces from the homeless at the end of the twentieth century, remedies included outlawing activities such as aggressive panhandling, sleeping in public, sitting on curbs and sidewalks during business hours, sitting on

139 Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig, “Reefer Madness: Broken Windows Policing And Misdemeanor Marijuana Arrests In New York City, 1989-2000*,” Criminology & Public Policy 6, no. 1 (2007):165-181.; Sampson and Raudenbush, 319-342, https://doi.org/10.1177/019027250406700401. 140 Vedantam et. al, “How A Theory Of Crime And Policing Was Born And Went Terribly Wrong.” 141 Themis Chronopoulos, Spatial Regulation in New York City from Urban Renewal to Zero Tolerance (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013).; J. Phillip Thompson, “The Failure of Liberal Homeless Policy in the Koch and Dinkins Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 111 (2001): 639–660; McCain v. Koch, 70 N.Y.2d 109; 511 N.E.2d 62; 517 N.Y.S.2d 918; 1987 N.Y. (1987); McCain v. Koch, 136 A.D.2d 473; 523 N.Y.S.2d 112; 1988 N.Y. App. Div. (1988); Ofﬁce of the Comptroller, An Analysis of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development: Renovation of Apartments for the Homeless (New York: City of New York, 1988), 31. Carolyn A. Eldred and Richard I. Towber, A One-Day “Snapshot” of Homeless Families at the Forbell Street Shelter and Martinique Hotel (New York: Human Resources Administration, Ofﬁce of Program Evaluation, 1986); Dennis Hevesi, “City Traces Origins of Homelessness,” New York Times, June 21, 1986, 30; Emanuel Tobier, “The Homeless,” in Setting Municipal Priorities, 1990, eds. Charles Brecher and Raymond D. Horton (New York: NY: Citizens Budget Commission, 1990), 307-338.; Marybeth Shinn and Colleen Gillespie, “The Roles of Housing and Poverty in the Origins of Homelessness,” American Behavioral Scientist 37 (February 1994): 505–521.; A.S. Vitale, City Disorder How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2008). 142 Kent S. Scheidegger, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Restoring Public Order: a Guide to Regulating Panhandling, “ rep., Restring Public Order: a Guide to Regulating Panhandling (Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, 1992), 15-16. 143 Sampson and Raudenbush, 319-342. 144 George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, "Broken Windows.” accessed November 5, 2017. 172 benches unless waiting for a bus, loitering, and eating in public spaces.145 The quest for order in America’s urban cores, provided an optimal diversion, distracting from real issues such as adequate amounts of temporary shelter beds, decent mental health services, living wages, and sufficient affordable housing. The illusion of control created through deployment of police power was an optimal diversion, distracting residents from the real issues of adequate numbers of temporary shelter beds, mental health services, employment, and sufficient affordable housing for the homeless.

Was policing public spaces and criminalising behaviour the solution for people who have no private space? In the Clinton administration’s War on Homelessness those in power saw to it that through the use of community policing, street disorder could not prevail over residential quality of life in the pleasant and pristine contested public spaces of the District. Police power was deployed through quality-of-life policing and increasingly punitive local ordinances which kept the signs of disorder such as homelessness from pristine residential neighbourhoods and affluent business districts: the contested public spaces of the nation’s capital. Conversely, the ascendant wave of public square and residential restrictions were in stark contrast to the rhetoric of Federal Washington. President Clinton’s vision for housing and the homeless promised a new spirit of compassion in the White House. However, in Hometown Washington, under increased political pressure from merchants of the city’s business district in Ward Two, who continued to effectively use government strategies, the District passed punitive ordinances against homeless activity not just in their ward but also throughout the entire city. Indeed, homeless activity was becoming increasingly viewed as a quality-of-life infringement. In an effort to respond to complaints from residents and the business communities, the Kelly administration looked to New York City’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for his policy on quality-of-life policing. The Kelly administration would also work closely with the Clinton administration to supply data from its recent studies for Federal Washington’s War on Homelessness.

In 1993, The Washington Post returned to one of the “Community Empowerment Policing” pilot communities begun in January 1990 to report on the impact of the program. Beat 26 in Southeast Washington was reported as being satisfied. A resident testified that: “When police are on the beat crime is down. When residents see police on the beat, they feel safer. Therefore, CEP

145 Don Mitchell, “Anti-Homeless Laws And Public Space: II. Further Constitutional Issues,” Urban Geography 19, no. 2 (1998): 98

173 can work because community residents are informed about crime, they are looking out for one another, and they feel safe.”146 Community Policing, which was officially endorsed by the Clinton administration, became one of the dominant themes of police reform in America. Although Community Policing was a very flexible way to manage crime and malleable to the needs of individual communities, it contained one common thread: the protection of the quality of life of its neighbourhoods. Understanding quality of life policing is fundamental to understanding the criminalisation of homelessness in Washington, D.C.

As an alternative to criminalising homeless panhandling, some advisers to the mayor suggested a voucher system which would give panhandlers vouchers instead of cash. Berkeley’s Cares program, the non-profit organisation that created the initiative, reported a reduction in aggressive panhandling, selling 100,000 vouchers in Berkeley since it began in 1991.147 However, under pressure from such groups as the Dupont Circle Advisory Commission, the D.C. city government passed the D.C. Panhandling Control Emergency Act of 1993 in a ten to one vote on June 1, 1993. 148 “Aggressive panhandling” was the centrepiece of the new ordinance.

George Kelling’s introduction to “A Guide to Regulating Panhandling,” defines the term “aggressive panhandling” as: “continually begging after a person has made a negative response; touching someone without his or her consent or speaking to or following a person in a manner that would cause that person to fear bodily harm.”149 The D.C. law prohibited panhandling or asking for money: “at bus, train, or subway stations, in public doorways, in traffic lanes, within ten feet of automatic teller machines, or in private or residential property without permission from the owner.”150The law also qualified as aggressive: “speaking to or following in a way that would cause an ordinary person to fear bodily harm,” which introduced ambiguity that fed into pre- existing tropes about homeless people and confounding discomfort with danger.151

Whereas Atlanta’s attempt and failure in the late 1980s to repackage vagrancy law into a “vagrant-free zone” known as the “safeguard zone” received strong community pushback, the passage of anti-aggressive panhandling ordinances of the 1990s in cities like Seattle and

146 Judy Jennings, “Community Policing – The Beat Doesn’t Go On,” Washington Post, February 7, 1993. 147 Ruben Castaneda, “Vouchers Proposed for Panhandlers,” Washington Post, September 30, 1992. 148 Panhandling Control Second Congressional Recess Emergency Act of 1993, D.C. Code 22-3306, Oct. 5, 1993. Linda Wheeler, “D.C. Officers Skeptical Of Panhandling Limits: Some Say Enforcement Would be Low Priority,” Washington Post, June 3, 1993. 149 Efuntade, Morenike, “Panhandlers Warned in Leaflets: New D.C. Law Bars Aggressive Behavior,” Washington Post, June 16, 1993. 150 Ibid. 151 Morenike, “Panhandlers Warned in Leaflets.”; Don Mitchell, The Right to the City, 187-188. 174

Washington, D.C. were endemic of changing attitudes towards the homeless population.152As police misconduct practices skyrocketed in New York City due to liberal interpretations of broken windows policing, homeless panhandlers in Washington, D.C. received their own brand of harassment. Abuse of the new law meant that any passer-by could accuse an individual of aggressive panhandling. The accused panhandler could be arrested then, fined and potentially sent to trial. Indeed, the practical application of this new law seemed to feed a needless legal bureaucracy. For example, in Seattle, where the law had already been passed, many of the cases were thrown out as victims tended not to show up at court.153 In fact, the panhandling ordinance served a larger purpose of allowing street sweeping. Charlene Drew Jarvis, ANC Commissioner for Ward Four in the District told a Washington Post reporter: “The purpose of the law is to give the police the authority to tell the panhandlers to move on … The fine or jail is a threat the police can use.”154 The feasibility of enforcing the law was called into question within the police force. A fifth district officer admitted: “I think they’re really going to have to want to be arrested.”155 Clearly expulsion, not enforcement was the aim of passing the law. Dr. Simpson (a criminal justice policy expert) argues: “[i]n essence, the solution to the panhandling “emergency” was to use police powers to move individuals along, particularly those most undesirable to wealthy residents in the city.”156

A year after the ordinance was passed, some city council members reported a marked reduction of panhandling in their Wards. For the homeless living and working near the downtown business districts, their relationship with the public square meant dodging police presence, accumulating multiple arrests, or moving on to areas with less aggressive enforcement. Although some Wards reported a reduction in panhandling a year after the law was passed, some business association leaders were still having problems and fielding customer complaints. A vocal minority of disgruntled merchants and community activists representing the concerns of Ward 2 residents whose complaints were the impetus for passage of the Panhandling Control Act, believed that the “problem was far from over.” 157

152 Steffen, 186. 153 Wheeler, “D.C. Officers Skeptical Of Panhandling Limits.” 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid. 156 Simpson, 136. 157 Linda Wheeler “D.C.’s Aggressive Panhandlers Are Fewer, But Not Yet A Memory,” Washington Post, June 8, 1994.

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The criminalisation of homeless activity in the District was achieved through laws that led to the privatisation of targeted public facilities and certain functions of public institutions through quality-of-life ordinances against loitering, employment solicitation, as well as through park curfews and restrictions on public actions such as eating, bathing, sleeping, and public congregation of homeless populations.158 Criminalising the homeless also promoted what Don Mitchell has called “an ideology of comfort” used to project the illusion of control to disgruntled businesses and fearful neighbourhood activists.159 Yet privatisation was merely a phase in a larger purpose of reversing the trend which sent 22,0000 District residents into the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland between 1990 to 1995.160 If District residents, were indeed: “tired of dealing with ineffective and inefficient services, underachieving schools and high crime rates,” the homeless were the “broken windows” of opportunity, the visible embodiment of this decline which needed to be removed to encourage their return and the taxable dollars they took with them.161 Clearly street disorder was not being fully contained and more drastic action needed to be taken – but what? However, the immediate priority of the city on the verge of financial and operational collapse was the maintenance of its essential functionality – the “homeless problem” would have to wait.

Although District of Columbia finances enjoyed relative stability in the 1980s, it began operating at a deficit in 1994. Local government’s financial position “reached its nadir in the mid- 1990s,” provoking resident frustration, and mounting anger over the city’s inability “to deliver efficiently the most basic services to its citizens.”162 The success of the D.C. Initiative was undermined by the District’s financial crisis and its inability to meet “three-year maintenance-of- effort commitment,” leaving the homeless susceptible to “slipping back to the warehousing situation they faced before.”163 In the end, the District was not able to live up to the promises of the Initiative. Evaluating the shelter service complex, Martha Burt – Senior Research Associate for the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population in the Urban Institute – described the existing shelter system as a “non-system.”164 Indeed the emergency shelter system that was still in

158 Gregg Barak, Gimme Shelter: A Social History of Homelessness in Contemporary America (New York: Praeger, 1992), 81. 159 Mitchell, The Right to the City, 187. 160 Alice Rivlin et al., “Appendix One: The D.C. Revitalization Act: History, Provisions and Promises,” Building The Best Capital City In The World: A Report By DC. Appleseed and Our Nation’s Capital. (Washington, D.C.: DC Appleseed Center and Our Nation’s Capital Institution, 2008), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/appendix-1.pdf, 81. 161 Ibid. 162 Rivlin et al., “The D.C. Revitalization Act,” 81. 163 Elwell, 205.; Editorial, “D.C. Initiative, Day 1, 221,” Washington Post, January 24, 1997. 164 Martha R. Burt, “Assessment of the D.C. Initiative's "First" Year” (Washington, D.C: The Urban Institute, I November 1995), iii.

176 place offered “no hope, no direction, no motivation, and no route to follow to move beyond emergency shelter toward leaving homelessness.”165 The Initiative’s architects understood the deep nature of the problem writing:

Ultimately, society must look to economic development, adequate wages, the end of racial and economic segregation, and welfare reform to improve the overall climate which has allowed homelessness to take root and choke off the aspirations of so many of our fellow citizens.166 However, they misjudged the capabilities of one of its most important partners: the District of Columbia. Elwell rightly argued that transferring authority of homeless assistance services, without the financial capital to fully fund those services was a recipe for disaster for both the programs and the clients.167 The very premise of using the District for yet another ill-fated pilot program and to fulfil the political expediency of the moment is astonishing. The HUD, the federal agency which engineered this partnership, woefully underestimated the extent of the infrastructural decline and “systemic flaws” that led D.C. government to the brink of bankruptcy and necessitated the intervention of a Control Board by 1995 to put the District’s coffers in order.168 Choosing the city as a partner was at best ill-timed.169

Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly’s inability to connect with the Washingtonian electorate, lack of results and unfulfilled campaign promises such as taking the boards off many of the city’s abandoned houses and installing a shelter in Ward Three, left her not only with a sixty-seven per cent disapproval rating in 1994 Washington Post poll but also led her to an unsuccessful bid for a second term.170 On January 2, 1995, Marion Barry was sworn into his fourth mayoral term after a scandal-ridden hiatus from political life. Over the first two years of his final mayoral mandate, the city and even the mayorship itself underwent profound changes. Mayor Barry no longer held the power he once did. Indeed, over the next two years, Barry’s mayorship would become ceremonial. Discussion of Barry’s disempowerment is significant, as it speaks to the fact that the reins of power lay outside the city government and black leadership. Real political power was wielded by people

165 Ibid. 166 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “The D.C. Initiative: Working Together to Solve Homelessness. Executive Summary (Washington, D.C. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1993), 3. 167 Elwell, 207 168 Greenberger et.al, “The Cold, Harsh, and Unending Resistance: The District of Columbia Government’s Hidden War Against Its Poor and Its Homeless,” November 22, 1993, 324. 169 The D.C. Initiative expired in March 1999. See also Editorial. “Homeless Initiative Sunset,” Washington Post, April 1, 1999. 170 Susan Irving, “Abandon the Guy Mason Proposal,” Washington Post, November 16, 1992.; See also Molly Sinclair, “D.C. Plan to Use Center For Homeless Hits Snag: U.S. Agency Questions Guy Mason Proposal,” Washington Post, December 5, 1992. Guy Mason Recreation Center was eventually transformed into Friendship Place in 1993.; Elwell, 192.; Jaffe and Sherwood, 321.

177 such as private developers from the suburbs, from other cities or larger out-of-Washington infrastructure. In exchange for his complicity, developers contributed generously to Barry’s mayoral campaigns. During his second mandate in the mid-1980’s foreign and out-of-state investors began downtown property land grabs which were then available at rock bottom prices. This downtown boom drove the forces of gentrification and commercial property development, as developers transformed small-scale local brick-and-mortar businesses into large office buildings. Yet Barry’s populist “Mayor-for-Life” persona had been built on the image of being for the District’s black community, the poor, and the homeless.171 Once in power, he was answerable not only to the people he made promises to, but also the political players who backed his rise to power and whose interests were at odds with the city’s housing poor. Black Studies scholar Dr. Alfred Reed wrote about this conundrum: “The dynamics that make possible the empowerment of black regimes are the same as those that produce the deepening marginalization and dispossession of a substantial segment of the urban black population.”172

By 1995, the District’s deficit ballooned to $722 million and the District’s bond ratings fell to “junk” levels, preventing the city from paying vendors and obtaining credit lines. As in the past when the city was threatened with financial ruin, there was much debate of subjecting the city to federal receivership, which was not unlike the commissioner structure which existed when the city was no longer under home rule. This recourse was supported by the newly elected Republican majority in Congress and condemned by representatives of the District. The other solution proposed, was to put the city under the management of a Control Board. Representatives of Hometown and Federal Washington namely Eleanor Holmes Norton, the successor to Walter Fauntroy as non-voting delegate representative of the District of Columbia, District, Speaker Gingrich (R-GA), and House D.C. Subcommittee Chair Davis (R-VA) worked together to find a solution towards the second option.173 Holmes argued that other cities such as New York, Cleveland, and Philadelphia had all been managed by financial control boards and had emerged with “full autonomy once the control period ended.”174 Rep. Davis, Speaker Gingrich and Rep. Holmes Norton helped pass the District of Columbia Financial Responsibility and Management Assistance Authority commonly known as the “Control Board” in 1995 to ensure: efficient and

171 Paul W. Valentine, “Barry Backs Small Shelters, Centers for Street People,” Washington Post, February 15, 1979. 172 Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, 88. 173 Rivlin et al., “The D.C. Revitalization Act,”, 82. 174 Ibid.,82.

178 effective delivery of services to DC residents, encourage timely debt payment, “long-term economic vitality,” and “to lead the city out of insolvency and mismanagement.”175

In order to ensure this “long-term economic vitality,” several decisions were made. Due to the fact that the city’s finances were in such a state of disarray, the responsibility for dealing with the District’s financial situation were put under the responsibility of Anthony A. Williams, the Board’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He was answerable directly to the Board who retained control over contract, budgetary, personnel matters as well as the restructuring of local government.176 High turnover in the city’s administrations had also wreaked havoc on city infrastructure efficiency, therefore poor performing departments such as the DC Housing Authority and the Department of Mental Health were put under court-ordered receivership.177

Although corruption and mismanagement were major factors in the District’s dire financial straits, many of its most profound challenges in 1995 were linked to its status as the seat of the Federal Government and as the source of employment for thousands of government employees residing in Greater Washington. Passage of the Home Rule Act 1974, banned non-resident tax which meant that D.C. government employee revenue of those employees living in Greater Washington could not be taxed. According to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report, “D.C. cannot tax nearly two dollars out of every three earned in the District.”178Additionally, an estimated forty-two per cent of land in the District comes under the jurisdiction of Federal Washington tax exemption which limited the District of Columbia’s revenue stream. Building Height limitations also inhibited the growth of the city’s tax base.179 These realities were the key forces behind the drive for the downtown revitalization projects in the early twentieth century. The desire to make room for these projects was the impetus for the criminalisation of homelessness and the displacement of homeless from the contested spaces of downtown Washington, D.C. through the mechanisms of positive power.

The optimism at the beginning of Clinton’s presidency was validated by his immediate recognition of the homeless problem. This recognition came through such symbolic gestures such

175 Ibid.,82.; Vincent S. Morris, “Reforms Are Certain to Reshape Life in D.C. Barry Labels Plan ‘Rape of Democracy,’” Washington Times, July 31, 1997. 176 Elwell, 259. 177 Elwell, 192. 178 Rivlin et al., “The D.C. Revitalization Act,” 86.; U.S. General Accounting Office, GAO 99-126, “District Government Information on the Fiscal Condition and the Authority’s First Year of Operations,” Washington, D.C., July 1996. 179 Rivlin et al., “The D.C. Revitalization Act,” 86.

179 as his administration’s declaration of war on homelessness and the drafting of a Federal plan on homelessness by Executive Order. He also made repeated requests for additional funds for McKinney programs which were unfortunately denied by a conservative Congress.180 However, this optimism “quickly turned into disillusionment once again as Clinton enacted once of the most regressive welfare reform bills in US history.”181

In an effort to fulfil his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it,” Clinton signed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA).182 The bill’s main objectives were to foster a work ethic and to wean recipients off welfare dependency. The conservative rhetoric of this act perpetuated the demonization of single-female heads of household targeting them as the embodiment of this dependency and pathologizing their alleged behaviour. Michael B. Katz weighed in the nefarious effects of social engineering through policy and its detriment to authentic reform. He argues: “In one way or another, welfare reform has been as much about improving poor people by changing their behavior as about helping them with food, housing or cash.”183 Under the new law Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) which were disbursed to the states in the form of block grants, replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the following restrictions: a mandate for TANF recipients to work after a two years of benefits, a five-year, lifetime cap on federal benefit recipiency, and stricter enforcement of child support laws.184 These new restrictions would further disadvantage subpopulations of the homeless such as inner-city homeless families and the mentally ill who were already experiencing barriers to employment, making their existence in the “crises regime” of Control Board austerity all the more precarious.185

As the Clinton administration’s New Democrats began laying the foundations for their “partnership state” in the “roll out” stage of inner-city neoliberalisation of the 1990s, downtown corporate interest would become increasingly at odds with distressed housing projects in Washington, D.C. These projects stood in the way of “mixed community” housing development (Ellen Wilson Dwellings and Capers), with emergency shelters of the third ghetto which obstructed

180 Elwell, 193. 181 Martha Burt, Laudan Aron and Edgar Lee with Jesse Valente, “Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing?” (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2001), 193. 182 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, Public Law 104-193, 104th Congr., August 22, 1996. 183 Katz, Improving Poor People, 21. 184 TANF federal assistance program began on July 1, 1997. 185 Simpson, 99-100.; Suleiman Osman, “We’re Doing it Ourselves”: The Unexpected Origins of New York City’s Public-Private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Planning History 16, no.2 (2016): 166 -168.

180 downtown development, and with the presence of visible homelessness.186 Local PPPs known as business improvement districts (BIDs) in the Washington, D.C. exerted positive power to isolate and criminalise street homelessness from the contested spaces of downtown Washington, D.C. in the interest of public safety and property marketization. Urban scholar Mike Davis argues that: “[t]he contemporary opprobrium attached to the term “street person” is in itself a harrowing index of the devaluation of public spaces.”187 Simpson posits: “through the use of security services, homeless outreach, and partnerships with law enforcement agencies, BIDs are able to both remove and exclude those deemed out of place, particularly the homeless and poor.”188 These partnerships were also the bridge between stalled downtown development in Washington, D.C. of the 1980s and the large-scale development projects of the twenty-first century. Indeed downtown development in Washington, D.C. was stalled by the commercial real estate collapse in 1990 and 1991 as the speculative bubble burst and “bankers called in credit lines and some of the developers who had gotten fabulously wealthy in the 1980s went broke overnight.”189 However, by the late 1990s, when the District began its own road to economic recovery BIDs began to appear.

BIDs are local entities which rely on a place-centred development strategy created to restructure public space. They also provide satellite public services such as security and crime monitoring, trash collection, infrastructure rehabilitation, public-space maintenance and outreach to the homeless.190 What is their significance? Simpson argues “[t] hey are quintessential public- private partnerships in which private investment assumes or supplements public services and needs, while simultaneously, through the promotion of economic development and urban revitalization, increasing the city’s tax base.”191 Urban Studies scholar, Suzanne Schaller argues that for BID advocates they represent the pinnacle of local government efficiency which: “allow the blending of public and private sector resources to design and offer a specific set of amenities, deployed to induce consumers to “vote with their feet,” to frequent local businesses and spend their dollars.”192 Historians have well documented the privatisation of public spaces which

186 Steffen, 172. 187 Davis, 226. 188 Simpson, 243. 189 Jaffe and Sherwood, 306. 190 Simpson, 242. 191 Ibid. 192 Susanna F. Schaller, “Bidding on Urbanity with Business Improvement Districts: Re-Making Urban Places in Washington, D.C.” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2007), 14.

181 permitted real estate owners to control public spaces and the homeless within them.193 BIDs were a perfect means to exert this control.194 Within these designated districts, local businesses and property owners paid mandatory special taxes or fees creating collective resources which the BIDs could use at their discretion. There is a good reason for historians to take a dismal view of BIDs. Although business improvement districts in Washington, D.C. served as means of a central mechanism of downtown revitalization roll out in the 1990s, private sector groups in these local BIDs worked with public infrastructure in contested downtown areas to create increasingly punitive measures to deal with local street people such as zero- tolerance policing.

In 1996, due to the D.C. Council passage of legislation authorizing the creation of business improvement districts, DowntownDC BID opened in 1997.195 At its creation,729 businesses, a majority. of the owners of 792 properties, and large infrastructure such as the MCI Center and the Convention Center were located in the DowntownDC BID.196 The National Mall was on its southern border, Massachusetts Avenue on the north, Louisiana Avenue on the east and the White House and 16th Street on the west. It neighbourhoods include: Gallery Place, Chinatown, Federal Triangle, Franklin Square, McPherson Square, and Penn Quarter.197 $340,000 of the $38.5 million budget was earmarked to pay for a Homeless Council to coordinate service providers, develop a public awareness campaign to “encourage” the homeless to leave the streets, to finance a men’s daytime drop-in centre and a job and housing referral program.198 Despite this funding, Foscarinis voiced her concerns, in a Washington Post article about the new BID concerning the implications of clean-up efforts on homeless rights: “Are they going to provide alternatives [to homelessness] or are they simply forcing people into other parts of the city.”199 Foscarinis concerns were validated the following year. In order to make way for a new convention centre, 126 women living in the Mount Vernon Women’s Shelter located on Seventh Street and New York Avenue NW in the new Golden Triangle BID were displaced to an area outside downtown near Interstate 395. Mary Ann

193 Sulieman Osman, “ ‘We’re Doing it Ourselves’”: The Unexpected Origins of New York City’s Public-Private Parks during the 1970s Fiscal Crisis,” Journal of Planning History, Vol 16., No 2 (2017), 162-174: See also: Jerold S. Kayden, The New York City Department of City Planning, and The Municipal Art Society of New York, Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000).; Mitchell, The Right to the City. 194 Nathaniel M. Lewis, “Grappling with Governance: The Emergence of Business Improvement Districts in a National Capital,” Urban Affairs Review 46, no. 2 (2010): 180-217. 195 Ten other BIDs currently exist: Golden Triangle (1997), Georgetown (1999), Mount Vernon (2004), Capitol Hill (2001), Adams-Morgan (2005), NoMa (2007) and Capitol Riverfront (2007). Anacostia (2012), Southwest (2015), Dupont Circle (2018).; See also https://dslbd.dc.gov/service/business-improvement-districts-bids 196 Stephen C. Fehr, “Property Owners to Revive D.C.: In Heart of District, A $38.5 Million Push for Safety, Cleanliness,” Washington Post, July 27, 1997. Simpson, 244. 197 Simpson, 244. 198 Fehr, “Property Owners to Revive D.C.” 199 Ibid.

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Luby, an outreach worker at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless weighed in on the displacement: “I think it’s a move to get [homeless] people out of sight…It’s out of sight out of mind.”200 Downtown revitalization projects such as these, were not only used to displace the homeless but to police their behaviour.

In addition to the pre-existing 2,000 public and private security personnel located in the DowntownDC BID, an unarmed foot patrol of “55 uniformed security personnel” were charged with “giving tourist directions, stopping aggressive panhandling and reporting crimes to D.C. police.”201 This DowntownDC BID, upon which successive BIDs would be modelled, produced homogenous, “managed environments” based on “theme park models” engineering public spaces out of fear of potential danger from people such as the homeless.202 Davis describes the familiar spectacle of downtown urban spaces: “[t]he valorized spaces of the new megastructures and super- malls are concentrated in the center, the street frontage is denuded, public activity sorted into strictly functional compartments, and circulation is internalized in corridors under the gaze of private police.”203 Indeed, the configuration of public space in the DowntownDC BID was also designed to control homeless activity while keeping them out of sight. Mitchell asserts: “The intent is clear: to control behavior and space such that homeless people simply cannot do what they must do in order to survive without breaking laws. Survival itself is criminalized.”204

Despite a rather large police presence in the Downtown DC BID, the city followed a rising national trend of increased police power. D.C. Police Chief Soulsby’s “zero tolerance” crime initiative began on March 7, 1997. It created remunerated arrest incentives for petty crimes such as disorderly conduct, traffic violations and panhandling. From March 7 to April 22, 1,355 arrests were made, fifty-six of which were for such crimes as public urination, loitering, public drinking, and panhandling. 205 Zero-tolerance policing provided the means of regulating these behaviours, clogging courts and filling prisons with perpetrators of petty crime. Enforcement also meant unofficial street sweeps as offenders were moved on, a dramatic increase in minor crime arrests,

200 David Montgomery, “Down and Out, Again: D.C. Shelter for Homeless Women Moves to Make Way for Convention Center,” Washington Post, October 2, 1998. 201 Fehr, “Property Owners to Revive D.C.: In Heart of District.” 202 Ibid. 203 Davis, 226. 204 Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti Homeless Laws in the United States,” Antipode 29, no. 3 (1997): 307. 205 Cheryl W. Thompson, ”D.C. Police Zero In on Petty Crime: Campaign: Campaign Stirs Wave of Arrests, Complaints,” Washington Post, May 5, 1997.

183 and invasive data collection for the weeding out of potentially more serious crime profiles. Although most D.C. residents were reportedly happy with the initiative, historically an increase in petty crime arrests has had a negative impact on black communities, particularly African American males.206 Under the new initiative, eight in ten arrests made were for disorderly conduct, aggressive panhandling, and traffic violations, which explicitly targeted the homeless.207 Additionally, its focus on the city’s highest-crime neighbourhoods targeted poor and marginalized communities. Whereas residents of affluent neighbourhoods risked feeling slightly inconvenienced by the initiative, its place-based law enforcement invited unjust harassment, profiling and targeting, of a disproportionate amount of black men and homeless panhandlers.

After two years of battles with the Control Board and Anthony Williams –its Chief Financial Officer (CFO) – for authority over daily operations and budgetary decisions, Barry’s mandate received another blow when Federal Washington (Clinton and the newly elected Republican Congress) stepped in passing the National Capital Revitalization Act, also known as the Revitalization Act of 1997.208 Under this plan, Federal Washington retained more power over issues such as increased Medicaid payments, billions of dollars in unfunded pension liability, and the city’s court and prison systems. Barry would no longer have control over the nine central agencies such as Public Works, Human Services, Fire and Rescue and Public Health, but remained in charge of the Department of Parks and Recreation, the public libraries and the Board of Tourism.209 Meanwhile, the District government continued to focus its priorities on the interests of private developers, corporate activists, the Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), and Advisory Neighbourhood Commissions (ANCs).

In the city’s two remaining years under the crisis regime of the Control Board Era, Barry’s forced retreat into ceremonial leadership, forged a clearer path to the mayorship for Williams to the point that his election as mayor in 1999, seemed not only logical but almost a formality. William’s technocratic approach to District mayorship was showcased through his ability to make city agencies operational. Williams was part of the “second-wave” of African American, post- civil-rights era mayorship which Osman defines as: “pro-growth, technocratic liberals who

206 Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime. 207 Cheryl W. Thompson, ”D.C. Police Zero In on Petty Crime: Campaign: Campaign Stirs Wave of Arrests, Complaints,” Washington Post, May 5, 1997 208 Rivlin et al., “The D.C. Revitalization Act,” 81. 209 Morris, “Reforms Are Certain to Reshape Life in D.C.”

184 retained faith in state-sponsored redevelopment and hoped to make a streamlined public sector more scientific and efficient.”210 Although he had been able to get the municipal finances under control as CFO, he was not particularly regarded for his concern for the poor, the precariously housed, or the homeless. His technocratic approach to urban governance would have an adverse impact on the homeless well into the new millennium. Elwell argues that William’s

pro-growth policies quietly undermined anti-homeless[ness] and anti-poverty efforts. His administration often favored development interests over the needs of low- and no-income Washingtonians, and as a result of the real estate investment boom, gentrification went unchecked alongside massive development projects.211 Mayor Williams’s vision for downtown D.C. of the new millennium was consolidated in the “Downtown Action Agenda,” which prioritised the creation of “a vibrant, mixed-use living downtown” and targeted three locations: Mount Vernon Triangle, the area around Penn Quarter, and the Shaw neighbourhood which borders the convention center. The primary objective of the agenda was to attract tourism and visitors through “urban design and public space management.”212

By the end of the twentieth century, there were a few improvements in homeless assistance delivery and housing security in the District. Moreover, scientific studies had begun to focus on the realities of the nearly homeless and homeless families. According to a survey of outreach workers cited in a Washington Post editorial, the number of families on waiting lists for public housing went from 488 in 1996 to 288 in 1998.213Homelessness researchers Dennis Culhane and Chang-Moo Lee (both from the University of Pennsylvania) conducted a study of family shelter requests in Washington, D.C. over a fourteen-month period, from May 1996 to June 1997 revealed that: homelessness prevention programs could be most efficiently located in the areas with disproportionate concentrations of requestors…[and] if prevention program centers were located in Wards 1, 5, 7, and 8, 90 percent of the families would be within two miles of a center.214

210 Thompson, Double Trouble, 7-8.; Osman, 166. 211 Elwell, 288. 212 Office of Planning, District of Columbia Government. “Downtown Action Agenda.” Washington, D.C., 2000,1.; Simpson, 247-248. 213 Eric Lipton, “D.C.’s Homeless Initiative Makes Progress,” Washington Post, January 13, 1999. 214 Dennis P. Culhane, and Chang-Moo Lee, “Where homeless families come from: Toward a prevention-oriented approach in Washington, DC.” (Washington, D.C.: Fannie Mae Foundation, 1997), 1-20.; See also: Dennis P. Culhane, Chang‐Moo Lee, and Susan M. Wachter, “Where the Homeless Come from: A Study of the Prior Address Distribution of Families Admitted to Public Shelters in New York City and Philadelphia,” Housing Policy Debate 7, no. 2 (1996): 327–65.; Culhane is now a prominent researcher with expertise in the area of homelessness and assisted housing policy. He is currently the Dana and Andrew Stone Professor of Social Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Director of Research for the National Center on Homelessness among Veterans at the United States Department of Veteran Affairs.; See also: http://www.penntopten.com/essays/ending-homelessness-now/

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A spatial approach to the emergency shelters of the third ghetto finds its relevance in this type of study. Additionally, by 1998, the demand for shelter beds for adults dropped by forty-eight per cent. By the Fall of the same year, the number of homeless people in the street went from 1,800 in 1992 to 700.215 Thanks to partial funding from the D.C. Initiative, the once vermin-infested Blair emergency shelter at 635 N.E. vastly improved conditions and became a fully operational rehabilitation program run by the Coalition for the Homeless called the Blair Rehabilitative and Transitional Program. Although bed capacity went from 150 to 100 beds in the Blair Shelter, conditions were reportedly “cleaner and calmer.”216 For long-term services, the Tenant Empowerment Network run by Catholic Charities offered long-term housing programs.217 However, these tangible results were only indicators of an improved service delivery system and a decrease in visible homelessness.218 Returning briefly to the editorial in the Washington Post on the DC Initiative, we find other important information. It reported that the measure made valiant strides in homeless assistance services by, shifting “the city from a crisis-oriented system of haphazard overnight shelter to one that gives more community outreach.” We also learn that the Community Partnership proved to be much more efficient at managing the initiative’s $20 million budget and making a few inroads in the reduction of homeless people on the street, reducing the waiting list for emergency services, and increasing investment in the root causes of homelessness.219 However, the District’s homeless assistance apparatus still left more than 400 homeless families on a six-month waiting list for housing and hundreds of single men and women living in makeshift shelters in public school buildings and trailers by the time the initiative expired on March 31, 1999, officially ending the Clinton administration’s New War on Homelessness on a sombre note.220 The question of whether the Clinton administration won the war on homelessness, is less pertinent than understanding the reason it was fought in the first place and its consequences – unintended or not. Historically, declarations of wars on poverty, crime, and drugs have been most effective in fortifying the governmental apparatus created as a result of the declaration. The policies and practices that their initiatives created served as the pretext to create the infrastructure

215 Lipton, “D.C.’s Homeless Initiative Makes Progress.” 216 Ibid. Maximum stay in the shelter was set at six months. 217 Ibid. 218 As opposed to hidden homeless populations. 219 Editorial, “Homeless Sunset,” Washington Post, April 1, 1999. 220 Ibid.

186 to manage the problem more than producing actual solutions. Unfortunately, more often than not, the state wound up targeting the communities they were supposed to be assisting. The war on homelessness fared no better. The three most significant consequences of Cisneros’ so-called new war were in three areas –privatisation, partnerships, and power. Privatisation of the public square led to the criminalisation of certain homeless activity through resident-community activism and the use of police power. Partnerships with local entities and the creation of BIDS decentralised state power and empowered local communities which restricted access to the public square and controlled the presence of visible homelessness. Management of the homeless problem by this local poverty governance apparatus translated into power over contested spaces in the District not just in places with public facilities and commercial activity but also in proximity to residential areas. Therefore, it can be argued that the roll out of homeless policy in the Clinton administration was not only to help the homeless but to consolidate spatial power. Conclusion: The homeless crisis was not only a crisis of homeless bodies. In the neoliberal city of the 1980s, it was a crisis of capital. However, the return of white suburbanites to the inner city was also “a movement by capital at the expense of the poor.”221 The right to the city has distributive implications of housing opportunities not just for the de-suburbanization of white middle class and affluent families, but also must include members of what Peter Marcuse refers to as “the abandoned city.”222 Low-income housing tenants and the homeless have the right not only to dwell in public spaces as scholars such as Don Mitchell have argued, but they also have a right to the residential cities of America’s urban cores and should not be gentrified from them. Unfortunately, at the end of the twentieth century, large cities invited the return of capital and the white middle class that possessed it through policies which either further concentrated low-income housing residents and the homeless into service dependent ghettos, or forced their displacement from inner cities altogether. One of the aims of this chapter was to analyse how specific PPPs helped to facilitate this dynamic.

Although the second ghetto was the product of New Deal and Great Society liberal policies and the third ghetto was institutionalized in the neoliberal city, the proliferation of PPPs at the end of the twentieth century marked a point of convergence. The use of PPPs by the business sector

221 Don Mitchell, “Homelessness, American Style,” Urban Geography 32, no. 7 2011): 941. 222 Marcuse, “Space and Race in the Post-Fordist City,” 196. Peter Marcuse is currently a Columbia emeritus professor of urban planning.

187 and for community empowerment (in affluent neighbourhoods and community policing) led to the exclusion of marginalized, residual communities of both ghettoes. For residents of the second ghetto, this exclusion came when HUD outsourced the management of distressed projects slated for demolition while abdicating its federal responsibilities of oversight for the protection of the residents displaced to other housing in or outside the city. For the homeless of the third ghetto, the exclusion was the consequence of ceding to the pressure of neighbourhood activism and private business interests through partnerships with the police power which led to the creation and enforcement of laws against homeless activity.

Housing exclusion for the nearly homeless and the homeless at the end of the twentieth century in Washington D.C. was marked by marginalisation, privatisation, displacement, dispersal, and demolition. Privatisation of public institutions, such as the “distressed” public housing projects of the Hope VI program and public spaces and facilities used by the homeless in the District were governed by the dynamic of space, race, and the politics of place. This program was designed to improve the living conditions of public housing residents and to revitalize sites of public housing projects; to provide housing in order to decrease the concentration of very low-income families and to create “sustainable communities.”223 However, it sent public housing communities away to improve project properties without creating adequate infrastructures to see to adequate “temporary” outplacement.224 The high rents of the new and improved properties coupled with the lack of affordable housing, priced out many low-income families, leaving few places for families to return. More specifically, privatisation in the neoliberal city of urban governance led to the displacement of marginalised communities from spaces slated for revitalization, to racial segregation in increasingly concentrated pockets of poverty, and to the political expediency of letting the District’s “promises substitute for performance.”225

Examining the approach to inner-city blight in Hirsch’s second ghetto in postwar Chicago and the third ghetto of Washington, D.C. at the end of the twentieth century, highlights a continuity of approach to poverty governance. Whereas downtown urban construction in Chicago of the 1950s was contingent on urban renewal programs that drove slum clearance initiatives, downtown

223 Susan J Popkin et al., “A Decade of Hope VI: Research Findings and Policy Changes,” rep., The Urban Institute (Washington, D.C., 2004), 12. Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (H.O.P.E.). 224 Ibid. 225 Michael I. Greenberger, Elizabeth M. Brown, and Anne R. Bowden eds, “Comments on the HUD-D.C Initiative Implementation Plan: “Working Together to Solve Homelessness.’” rep. Cold Harsh, and Unending Resistance: The District of Columbia Government’s Hidden War Against Its Poor and Its Homeless. (The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. November 22, 1993), 323. 188 development in Washington, D.C. at the end of the twentieth century centred around the creation of a safe and ‘living city’ which aimed at the removal of visible signs of urban decay from downtown areas. Both ghettoes were forged through the mechanisms of positive and negative power. The veto groups in D.C. residential and business districts exerted negative power in the NIMBY battles which persisted throughout1990s, displacing inconveniently located homeless shelters and some members of the visibly homeless population. Indeed, hostile local residents and business owners sought to remove the spectacle of visible poverty from their neighbourhoods. Positive power was exerted through the leverage of the public power of local government which formed partnerships with private entities such as hotel owners for welfare hotels and urban developers in the revitalization projects of downtown DC. These projects eventually displaced, dispersed, and demolished low-income housing, homeless shelters, and marginalized communities which were not a part of the Downtown Renaissance projects of the beginning of the twenty-first century.

This commonality led to the question: what was the underlying dynamic that drove the creation of downtown commercial districts in the twentieth century? This thesis argues that fear was a key component of this larger force that shaped both the second and third ghetto: fear of black urban violence in Hirsch’s second ghetto and fear of “broken windows” the thin end of the wedge that transformed petty incivility into potentially more serious crime and threatened neighbourhood order and quality of life due to the presence of the inhabitants and emergency shelters of the third ghetto. Hirsch argues that postwar downtown urban construction in Chicago used positive power or the forces of private interest and public power, more for private corporate interest than public benefit. Negative power exerted by the white residents who lobbied for housing policy favoured their own neighbourhoods at the expense of powerless black neighbourhood protestation. In the third ghetto of the neoliberal city of the District, city officials exerted positive power through PPPs that shifted privatised homeless services, abdicating oversight and accountability for homeless assistance services. Corporate and resident activists used negative power to help enact local ordinances that cracked down on the homeless, to protect themselves from what they perceived as visible signs of disorder. Through the use of police power, civic leaders were able to help conserve middle-class quality of life, assuage the fear of downtown insecurity embodied by visible homelessness, and protect business and residential groups targeted by the retail and residential development initiatives planned for the new millennium.

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Conclusion – Where Do We Go From Here?

Two important figures emerged from the street homelessness of the 1990s in the District: Stacy Abney (see Introduction) and Yetta Adams (see Chapter Four). By 1993, Abney’s life under the Capitol steps had not changed. However, the Washington Post’s coverage of him had. Reporter Tom Dunkel’s article: “Capitol Offender: After 18 Years, Why Won’t Stacy Abney Get Off the Steps,” portrayed him as a coherent yet marginal figure with a lot to say.1 One of the most pertinent facts concerning Abney’s life was not so much what he had to say or who was listening, as much as what his eighteen-year stint under the Capitol steps had come to represent. In comparing the early media coverage in the 1970s to Dunkel’s article, the Washington Post’s coverage went from depicting him as embodying the public outrage of the late 1970s and 1980s, to representing homelessness as a permanent fixture on the American landscape. Conversely, despite her use of a steady stream of support services including all the housing assistance systems in the District, Yetta Adams was found dead at the bus stop across the street from the HUD on November 23, 1993. Following this highly publicized tragedy, a pilot program on homelessness, in place since September 1993, was simply rebranded as the New War on Homelessness.2 By 1999, this “war,” which produced the D.C. Initiative and a national rollout of streamlined homeless assistance services, was shut down without having reached its initial objectives. Adam’s and Abney’s lives had meaning to this study not only as examples of the more intractable subpopulations of homelessness but also as a testimony to the failure of America’s public institutions to aid the poor and the homeless. This thesis asserts that one of the solutions to the on-going homeless crisis lay in the re-examination of the structural, social, and economic conditions of their homelessness and the creation of preventative homeless policies before future Yetta Adamses and Stacy Abneys find their way to our doorstep. Their tragic circumstances were as inspirational to this study, as the impetus to understand the nature of new homelessness at the end of the twentieth century.

The forces that propelled the growth in ‘new homelessness’ in the 1970s and 1980s were essentially driven by market-based strategies which relied on the neoliberal rollback of social programs that divested support from the inner cities and failed to provide the underlying support

1 Dunkel, “Capitol Offender.” 2 Cisneros, “The Lonely Death on My Doorstep.” 190 necessary to address the structural problems of the homeless crisis itself. During the 1990s, in many urban regimes across America, successive administrations at both the local and national level mobilised rolled out policies to remove visible homelessness from contested spaces and focused on policies aimed at “efficiently” managing the homeless crisis. Concomitantly, in Washington, D.C., local government began laying the groundwork for downtown development to attract the return of taxpaying suburbanites to the inner city through the use of privatisation of public spaces and services, partnerships with private for-profit organizations, and the consolidation power in downtown, pro-growth entities. It was against this backdrop that local and federal actors tried to answer the question of what was to be done about the homeless. The making the third ghetto was forged in the attempt to answer this question.

From the many actors who helped construct the third ghetto, two significant conceptions of the role of the state emerged which guided its construction. Peter Marcuse and sociologist David Madden’s conceptualisation of the myth of “the benevolent state” and of “the meddling state” capture the nature of their flawed conceptions of state.3 The myth of the benevolent state is based on the assumption that government action is mainly motivated by concern for all its citizens and is focused on finding solutions to identified social issues. In fact “if government efforts fall short of success, according to this narrative it is only because of lack of knowledge, countervailing selfish interests, incompetence or lack of courage.”4 Madden and Marcuse argue that this vision is misguided as it does not address the inherent flaws with the system itself. In Hometown and Federal Washington, the liberal forces that mobilised to make social justice claims for the right to shelter and the passed McKinney Act and the D.C. Initiative did not address the underlying structural causes beyond the immediate needs of the affordable housing and the emergency shelter system. It was a misguided belief to expect local and federal government to unconditionally provide solutions. Homeless activists and congressmen who helped make homeless policies should have also put the necessary guardrails in place to ensure adequate fund appropriation, prevent outlay delays, and secure initiative oversight, which are essential to making sure that the real needs of the homeless were being met. As this was not done, homeless policy on the local and federal level of the 1980s and 1990s, merely reinforced the emergency shelter system. Conversely, by

3 David Madden and Peter Marcuse, “The Myths of Housing Policy” in In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (London: Verso, 2016), 63 - 77. 4 Ibid.,63. 191 defunding social programs, neglecting inner city infrastructure, and further decentralising poverty governance to the state (block grants), the Reagan administration built its policy interventions for the precariously housed and the poor on the myth of the meddling state, by mainly seeking to curtail the alleged nefarious effects of big government and bolster trickle-down economics. The unfortunate consequence of this Reagonomics was the exacerbation of the homeless crisis itself.

The significance of race and gender in the question of homelessness at the end of the twentieth century in America’s inner cities must no longer be overlooked. What has been neglected? The central question for current urban scholarship is: how can we look at homelessness differently in the twenty-first century? My response was not only to problematize the orthodoxies about race and gender in the study of homelessness but also to assert their salience by breaking the textual silence as regards to their significance in urban poverty research.This thesis has made further conceptual contributions to Urban History by arguing that the emergency shelter system which emerged from the neoliberal city in urban regimes of the mid-1970s, first as a burgeoning, shadow network of services provided by faith-based organizations and homeless advocates, then institutionalized through the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987 was Washington, D.C.’s third ghetto.

The main argument of this thesis was that D.C. urban governance of the 1980s and 1990s fostered the neoliberalisation of the economic, social, institutional, and political forces that were invested in the containment of homeless visibility and its displacement from Washington, D. C.’s contested spaces. The periodization of the first phase of the third ghetto was marked by two key factors: CCNV’s leadership and the Reagan administration’s domestic policy on poverty governance. CCNV’s early intervention sowed the seeds for the emergency shelter system which was marked by a complex mixture of annual tolls of hypothermia deaths, tension with local providers (particularly CCNV), media pressure for accountability, and political promises in the form of plans for a minimum effort to deal with the “homeless problem.” Reagan’s “Great American Comeback” which relied on free-market solutions and economic growth was proposed as the solutions to reduce poverty – the rising tide that promised to lift all boats. However, studies conducted during the Reagan administration concluded that economic growth alone was not the solution to eradicating poverty.5 Cuts in domestic spending on welfare programs figured on the

5 Peterson, “The Feminization of Poverty,” 336.

192 list of priorities of an administration determined to invest in its ambitions to win the Cold War, upholding traditional family values, and encourage policies that fostered social mobility. The impact on low-income and poor communities was documented in Chapters One and Two. Yet defining this periodization was not the central goal of this thesis’s approach to the third ghetto but rather its spatialization. Adapting a spatial interpretation of the first and second ghettoes was essential to understanding the making of the third ghetto in Washington, D.C., as it underscored the importance of southern migration, ghetto formation, slum clearance, and public housing policies, gentrification, and the issues of race and gender (as it pertains to family homelessness) in homeless history.

During the 1980s, two important pieces of legislation shaped the making of the third ghetto: Initiative 17 and the McKinney Homeless Assistance Act. Passage of Initiative 17 in 1984 was as much a gauge of public sympathy for the homeless as it was a cautionary tale against creating local legislation without consideration for the broader implications of poverty governance of the entire city. It also underscored the nexus between the second and third ghetto and their dependence on the quality of public and private service delivery of housing streams. The bill also showcased the extent of CCNV’s political reach to city constituents, started the clock on CCNV’s political decline, and delineated one of its most intractable battlegrounds for the Nimby battles of the 1990s – Ward Three.

The McKinney Act fortified the emergency shelter system and marked the institutionalization of the third ghetto by providing federal funding streams that perpetuated homeless warehousing and fostered the consolidation of service dependent ghettoes in the District. In short, the impact of anti-homelessness activism on city politics and policy in the first phase of the third ghetto is undeniable. However, as discussed in Chapter Three their failure to consolidate the momentum of public compassion into a national movement was the thin end of the wedge for the Nimby confrontations and community activism in the second phase (1989-1999). The trends in public attitudes towards those considered “undeserving” and the policies made to contain them were not only attributable to the actions of the Reagan-Bush administrations, but also an extension of white-working class hostility, black middle-class conservatism, and the individualism inherent in Great Society policies, revisited and revised by various permutations of New Federalist

193 intervention.6 The dependency talk present in debates on both sides of the political divide fed self- help rhetoric in policies that were created to manage the more intractable manifestations of poverty.

The central dilemma at the end of the twentieth century for activists, service providers, members of local government, inhabitants of Hometown Washington and the policymakers of Federal Washington was what to do about the visible homeless population in the District of Columbia: was it a political problem, an affordable housing problem, a question of social justice, a choice? Kevin Kruse rightly asserts that focusing on one city brings perspective to “the complex relationships between people and places, which are always their clearest at the local level”.7 Yet understanding and defining the District itself was a challenging task, particularly within the scope of the new homeless era. During this period, the evolution of the solutions provided to deal with the homeless crisis was as driven by how the homeless themselves were perceived, as by the transformation of the crisis from a moral question to a political problem.

The homeless activists and first responders in the first phase of the new homeless era were not only vital to shaping how the homeless were perceived but also how they were cared for and on what grounds. Simply put, getting the homeless off the steam grates saved lives and it was society’s moral obligation to do so. At the end of the 1970s, the activists of the anti-homelessness movement and faith-based organizations began soliciting local authorities for assistance. However, the evolution of urban governance persisted within the larger framework of the economic, social, institutional, and political forces which were also evolving in Hometown Washington, and transforming it: from a symbolic city of rights and justice to an increasingly vocal, tax-paying community with needs of its own; from an abandoned city in the wake of the 1968 uprising to a “model city” of downtown development and the contested spaces generated by it. All these transformations occurred within the coexisting demands of the public city of services guaranteed by Federal Washington and the vindications of the middle and upper classes of an emerging neoliberal city living in Hometown Washington.

Outside the fanfare of the persistent turf wars between the federal government and the local governing apparatus for solutions to housing precarity and the new homeless crisis which has

6 Biles, The Fate of Cities. 7 Kruse, 11.

194 attracted past research and a great deal of media attention, the respective special collections on Winter and Fauntroy tell another story and pose a potential trap for the researcher. Examining their respective collections, a similar impression emerged of both these community activists: that they were tireless civil servants who were dedicated to the welfare of all Washingtonians but with a particular interest in its poorest residents. The challenge in the examination of their respective service to the city was not to fall into the trap of triumphalism and nostalgia for the victories of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s). A critical examination of their participation in the urban poverty governance of the 1980s reveals a similar perspective: the management of housing precarity and homelessness as political problems. Fauntroy expressed a clear-throated indictment of the Reagan administration yet worked in a bipartisan manner to solve the various challenges to housing precarity through rent control, fighting the scourge of the war on drugs and its effects on public housing, and his promotion of homeownership for low-income families.

As for the management of the homeless crisis, Winter held two people accountable for their respective missteps. As documented in Chapter Two, Winter took Snyder to task for his tax evasion and lack of financial accountability. She was also very critical of Barry’s contribution to the inadequate state of local shelter provision. As members of the local and federal government establishment, defining these issues as political problems confined to their solutions to the bureaucracy of governmentality, to the approval of their constituencies, and to the dictates of federal economic and political jurisdiction. Such were the limitations of poverty governance of black urban regimes at the end of the twentieth century. Solutions to housing precarity and homelessness deserve consideration in economic policy and should be brought into the larger scope of social issues such as welfare and health care reform, goals that remain elusive even in the twenty-first century. As discussed in Chapter Two, current scholarship has underreported if not undervalued the significance of black leadership in matters of local housing precarity in the late 1980s, such as the roles Winter, Fauntroy, Kimi Gray (D.C. public housing activist), Donna Brazile (Housing Now! March National Coordinator), and Rev. Jesse Jackson (D.C. shadow Senator and homeless activist). As for Fauntroy and Winter’s places in the annals of District governance of the 1980s, there is one lingering question for urban research: were they effective community actors in the struggle against housing precarity and homelessness in the District or were they merely bureaucratic paper tigers? The answer to this question remains inconclusive as the goal of poverty

195 governance in the 1980s and 1990s was not to eradicate housing poverty and homelessness but to simply manage them.

The overarching trajectory of this thesis, which was driven by the question of what to do for and then about the homeless, exposed the tensions between two permutations of the District of Columbia. On the one hand, the politicization of government services represented by Federal Washington: Reagan’s private initiative crusade “to get the government off our backs;” Bush’s “kinder, gentler nation’ in which public services functioned together as part of a “thousand points of light;” and the Clinton administration’s anti-poverty crusade waged in the New War on Homelessness (addressed in Chapter Four). On the other hand, there were also the realities of Hometown Washington: the co-optation of the anti-homeless agenda into a bureaucratized, professionalized, and institutionalized system of homeless assistance services tethered to the third ghetto; the rise of community activism, the nadir of the public city of local services, the ascendancy of the neoliberal city, the alienation of urban spaces, and the commodification of downtown D.C. by the end of the twentieth century. The examination of this local trajectory exposed the fact that by ignoring the structural conditions of homelessness and not initiating effective measures to prevent housing precarity, the neoliberal policies and practices of the 1980 and 1990s exacerbated the social inequalities which perpetuated the emergency shelter system of the third ghetto in Washington, D.C. This research makes an important contribution to the broader notion of homelessness in public and residential spaces as “a problem for capitalism,” as cities decided where the second and third ghettos should be located, who must pay for them, and what spaces these housing poor residents were allowed access to.8

The challenges of this study and its potential impact on poverty knowledge of the twenty- first century present a series of opportunities. First, further research is required on the role of race as well as gender and the examination of other subpopulations of the homeless community in the third ghetto. Second, given the fact that homelessness has become a permanent part of the American landscape, future studies must create a new era of homelessness. Third, the concept of predatory incarceration as applied to quality-of-life crime merits further consideration not just in Washington, D.C. but in other urban regimes. Finally, urban research on the new configurations

8 Mitchell, Mean Streets, viii.

196 of America’s cities, which will invariably result from the governance of COVID-19 and post- COVID-19 ridden societies, should consider the possibility of a fourth ghetto.

197

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