Serving the Master. New salary data shows that top aides to Mayor Muriel Bowser are pulling in hefty salaries of over $200,000. City Administrator Rashad Young makes $295,000. Chief of staff for the puppetician, John Falcicchio and Snr. Advisor Beverly Perry both make $198,000. Droid Bowser makes $200,000. [MORE]  

From [HERE] D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser on Thursday took a step to begin undoing the city’s backlog of 4,000 homeless people filling city shelters and seven motels, saying she would hire four “housing navigators” to match needy singles and families with apartments. The City stopped adding people to the "waiting list" in August 2013. With at least 4000 in emergency care DC is easily on track to eclipse last year's record breaking numbers of sheltered homeless. The number has grown by more than 1,500 over the past four weeks and continues to expland daily, often with as many as 100 families or more seeking shelter when temperatures drop below freezing advocates say. [MORE] 

The homeless backlog has consequences beyond the fates of the families currently stuck in a holding pattern. Once hypothermia conditions set in, DHS is required by law to house all homeless people in need. For the past three years, with inadequate shelter space, the city has put some of these people up in hotels, at a cost of $100 a night. DHS estimates that the city will spend about $2.5 million on hotel rooms in the new fiscal year.

Just a Nigger Warehouse. Making sure there is a decisive borderline between the white gentrifiers and the criminalized Black poor, the D.C. Govt has created its very own white supremacy megaplex near the Stadium-Armory Metro station. All on a single litter-strewn campus sits a clinic for meth rehabilitation and sexually transmitted diseases, two jails (the CTF and the main jail), the former city morgue and the crumbling down D.C. General, an old hospital which now functions as the City's emergency homeless shelter. This architectural and spatial arrangement keeps the Black 'lost and found' out of sight and out of mind.[MORE] and [MORE]. (Nigger means victim of white supremacy. [MORE]) 

Worse than Living in an Alley? Whatever happened or did not happen at D.C. General is the result of white supremacists/racists as they control everything in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and war) [MORE] 

CFSA Director Brenda Donald says it’s important to move families out of the hotels promptly, in part because housing them there is “ridiculously expensive.” A $100 per night room comes out to about $3,000 a month, Donald notes, making it a pretty uneconomical way to house homeless residents. “D.C. does have high rents,” she says, “but not that high.” [MORE]

“The "housing navigators"] will help identify units across the city,” Bowser (D[oin' what I'm told) said. She added that housing inspectors would fan out once units are identified “with the very specific task . . . of making sure housing units are suitable for our residents. . . . This is a very targeted approach that we intend to get started on immediately,” she said.

Bowser also announced the city had secured 152 new vouchers for long-term housing for the homeless. Most of the apartments the city locates for homeless families are funded for up to a year by the city; Bowser said she wants to transition to more permanent affordable housing.

Moving homeless families out of city shelters and leased motel units was a perennial problem during the term of former mayor Vincent C. Gray. For the past several years, the city began the winter hypothermia seasons with scores and sometimes hundreds of families still in shelter from the previous winter. The District has a long-standing policy of not evicting families from shelter after winter until transitional housing has been identified. The city has long had a far less formal program for singles, most of whom must vacate city shelters each morning.

In the summer, Gray (D) attempted to clear the backlog of homeless families still in city shelters with an aggressive goal of finding city-leased apartments for 500 families in 100 days. The effort moved less than half that, 187 families, peaking at a rate of about 75 families per month. 

The city’s momentum, however, stalled before the holidays and did not easily pick up in January. As the city was grappling with an influx of hundreds of new families in shelter, it moved out just over 50 in its first four weeks.

Bowser’s administration last week sought and then withdrew an emergency motion from a D.C. Superior Court judge to stop providing to new homeless families motel accommodations or the equivalent, a stipulation of District law. The court motion said the administration was within a day of running out of overflow motel space. When the motion was withdrawn, the city said it had found an additional 100 motel rooms to lease, but Bowser’s deputy mayor for human services said the city would also have to get better about transitioning families out of rooms to have enough capacity to meet the need for the remaining six weeks of the traditional hypothermia season.

On Thursday, Bowser’s acting director for human services, ­Laura Zeilinger, said the navigators would be experts in real estate, and would help both with families and singles.

“We’re basically filling an important gap,” Zeilinger said. “What oftentimes slows down the process . . . is that we don’t have enough folks whose core expertise is really real estate and housing acquisition. We are expecting social workers and case manager staff to also have an expertise in how to navigate that.”