In the last edition of Street Sense I shared that, to my amazement and deep gratitude, I attend meeting after meeting at various organizations, where teams of people with compassion, expertise, training and determination are working to house and/or employ the neediest in D.C. But I see the success that these teams would otherwise achieve being trampled by huge problems, or elephants, hovering around their work.
To review these often unacknowledged beasts:
* We only have a small fraction of the affordable housing needed in the region.
* We only have a small fraction of the jobs that are needed and attainable by the region’s homeless and or needy.
* The wages for the available jobs are well under 50 percent of D.C.’s housing wage.
* The biggest elephant of all: the absence of a region-wide group funded, empowered and able to tame the first three.
But now, two more elephants and a third are ready to trample most of us if we don’t take revolutionary action now.
5. Top-level management information systems have not yet been built. With 25 years in information technology, I deeply admire the cutting-edge work that is being done in parts of the system, particularly in identifying the neediest homeless people and connecting them with housing and services, or coordinated entry. But until there is a regional effort to tackle the major elephants above, in conjunction with what our city is doing, we will not have the top-level management information systems to look at and manage the whole process, from identifying the needy to successfully connecting them with housing and the incomes to sustain that housing. If D.C. succeeds alone, we’ll only draw more people in need from Arlington, Baltimore and other neighboring locations – until our system becomes oversaturated once again. We must look at the big picture and work together.
6. Compensation systems for government and nonprofit organizations are not tightly tied to achieving housing and employment outcomes. Even our banks or cable TV companies – that probably care little about us personally – work hard to align the measurement and compensation systems of all their employees at mid- and lower levels with customer satisfaction. This is not how, as a culture, we compensate and manage those who serve homeless or poor people. Thank goodness we have the most decent folks doing this work in the District. However, it’s all too possible that too many needy will remain without jobs and without homes at the end of 2016 or 2020 while servers and providers in the system are nonetheless compensated as successful.
7. Our region, our city, our country is no longer for all of us. It is just for the few and fewer every month. We in the D.C. region have little, if any, time left to decide if we are going to let that stand or if we are going to immediately and aggressively make our region – with liberty and justice – for all of our sisters and brothers.
Baton Rouge, Minneapolis and Dallas brought a terrifying clarity to me. We have all but become a country that by policy, politics, economy and policing, is a country of, by, and for the 20 percent. Our system functions to pacify, control, defend against and contain the 80 percent of us. Activist and journalist Chris Hedges has said many of our cities are now equivalent to “miniature police states.” I couldn’t agree more.
I think this is by design of the wealthiest among us, who lack the compassion to care for more than themselves and the few around them. But more than that I think it is due to the triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism – which Dr. King warned 50 years ago were already destroying us. He said our “thing-oriented society” would not last. However, we have not repented, we have accelerated.
Whatever the cause, elephant number seven is already trampling all long-term prospects of making homelessness in the D.C. rare, brief and non-recurring.
Washington, D.C. is the heart of our country. If we stand with courage and compassion and face the seven elephants now, name them and tame them, we might still be in time for the rest of the country to follow our lead.
Will we in Washington, D.C. and the region accept this America that is no longer of, by, and for all of the people? Will we individually and collectively find and live with the revolutionary courage to make it what it should be? That is the only way to turn from the ultimate disaster we are otherwise headed toward.
James McGinley is a volunteer writer for Street Sense.
