Family homelessness in the District is expected to rise 16 percent this winter, and advocates are already worried about a shortage of beds in the family shelter system.
A total of 840 families are anticipated to need shelter during the coming cold months, up from 723 last winter, according to an official Winter Plan, approved Sept. 2 by the city’s Interagency Council on Homelessness (ICH). The estimate is based on recent trends including a 26 percent rise in families seeking assistance at the city’s Virginia Williams Family Resource Center over the summer.
The city’s family emergency shelter at DC General Hospital and in other smaller facilities currently include 409 rooms for homeless families. However, many or most of these rooms are already occupied and will remain so at the time of the first freezing weather of the season, triggering the need to place the overflow of needy families into motels, ICH planners acknowledged. Though officially charged with devising the annual Winter Plan, the group lacks the budgetary authority to add more rooms to the shelter system.
Efforts led by Mayor Vincent Gray to move families out of the shelter system and into homes in time for winter this year achieved some success, with an average of 52 families exiting shelters each month. Still, family homelessness prevention and rehousing efforts need to speed up in order to free up shelter beds and avoid a scenario similar to last winter’s when the family shelter system was overwhelmed, advocates say.
“It is very likely we will be entering the season with DC General full or close to full,” said Scott McNeilly , a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, who serves as a representative of the homeless community on ICH. “If we don’t rise to the challenge there could be catastrophic consequences.”
The Winter Plan also forecasts the need to accommodate 1,579 single men and 479 single women in emergency shelters around the city during the coming winter. Additional beds for unaccompanied children, teens and young adults are also included in the plan. District law requires the city to protect the homeless during freezing weather. The official hypothermia season extends from Nov 1 through March 31. Hypothermia alerts are declared when the actual or forecast temperature, including windchill is 32 degrees or below. When an alert is declared, shuttle buses and outreach teams are deployed to help get homeless people into shelters. Anyone seeing a homeless person in need of help is encouraged to call the shelter hotline at 1-800-535-7252 or the Mayor’s Call Center at 311.
