Greetings Friends & Neighbors,

Please join members of the Ward 8, Anacostia, and Fairlawn community  Thursday, December 29th at 7am in Anacostia (near the corner of MLK & Good Hope) as we rally  against the continued  oversaturation of social service facilities in Ward 8.  Please bring your voices, your concerns, and if you have them, your signs while we advocate peacefully for "more businesses, not beds."

If not now, when?

This rally, coordinated by Ward 8 Council Candidate Natalie Williams, will take place on main street Anacostia in front of 1217 Good Hope Rd SE, the proposed location for Calvary Women's Services homeless shelter on main street Anacostia.   This is not a political rally (if Barry was hosting I would still attend). This is a community rally to take a stand against the continued oversaturation of social services in Ward 8. Please come out regardless of your political affiliation. This is a Ward 8 issue and I hope to see all our our community residents and leaders (political or otherwise) come out.
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This newest homeless shelter will be joining other transitional housing in Anacostia and will be adjacent to the Anacostia gateway.  This project will join a plethora of other social service facilities on the street including a drug treatment facility and a methadone clinic.

With an unemployment rate of nearly 30%,  Ward 8 is in desperate need of economic development that will lead to jobs, more businesses, and entrepreneurship opportunities for Ward 8 residents to prosper. Our young people need parents who work and opportunities to work themselves in their very own community. We need to support the people who are invested in our community, who raise their families here, who live here. We can't continue to play host to outside organizations that come in, use our community, and send their employees back home across the bridges to spend their paychecks in their own neighborhood. Most of these social service facilities do not contribute to our economic development (some would make the case that they stifle it) and they are not committed to the long-term prosperity of our community. As demonstrated by the actions of Calvary Women's Services the past six months, sometimes these organizations don't even think we are worthy of a conversation.

Don't get me wrong, Ward 8 has no problem doing its fair share, but our "fair share" has Ward 8 becoming the preferred dumping group of homeless shelters, group homes, and methadone clinics in the metro area. In a Ward of over 70,000 people we have just recently gotten our third sit-down restaurant and our second grocery store, yet we are awash in the city's social service agencies and organizations. We can't even get cabs to come over the bridge yet almost every social service agency in the city is represented here. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if these facilities were at least operated and designed to fit into the community but they are not. We are an afterthought at best and most often not even a thought at all.

Charity starts at home, our home.

The answer to resolving the unemployment crisis in Ward 8 is not shipping more unemployed and disadvantaged people into the community and thus increasing the concentration of poverty East of the River. We need jobs and one way to do that is to make our community as attractive and viable as possible for businesses to open here. We can't do that with a homeless shelter and rehab at every other storefront.

Our land may be "cheap" but our community has real value and we want an opportunity to continue to nurture our fledgling business districts.  We want our side of the river to have an opportunity to prosper like other DC communities. All neighborhoods should be doing their share, especially the ones who have benefited from the type of economic prosperity that has been elusive for too long East of the River. Some would say that the concentration of social services East of the River is because we have the strongest need. Do we really? If that is the case are these services reserved just for Ward 8 and East of the River residents? No. Almost all of these facilities service all DC residents (and receive funding from the DC government to do so) and several of these facilities such as the methadone clinic in Anacostia (a very small neighborhood) services clients from DC, Maryland, and Virginia .... t o the tune of almost 800 people per day. 

Congress Heights park

Don't get me wrong. There is definitely a need for homeless shelters, methadone clinics, and dare I say it group homes but the responsibility (and burden) needs to be distributed evenly across the city and in relation to what a community can reasonably support. We just don't have the density - yet - and the City needs to provide supportive services to the communities that house these type of facilities, especially the large-scale ones like the homeless shelters.  Congress Heights already has a main street homeless shelter, 801 East, that is managed by Catholic Charities through a contract with the city and we have been left holding the bag for years. The shelter houses the men at night and Catholic Charities kicks them out during the day, the result is our main street is filthy, loitering abounds, and without a place to go during the day the homeless are left to line up and sleep on MLK Avenue in front of our few businesses and in our parks. We can't even get the city to give us trashcans but we are asked to sacrifice the value of our homes and our quality of life. The District's homeless deserve more and the community deserves more. The loitering and litter only perpetuates the negative stereotype that Congress Heights  and Ward 8 is the "ghetto," a place to avoid, definitely not a place to open a business. When a community has more group homes than businesses, and more homeless than homeowners, how can we be expected to survive? To prosper?

Lack of trashcans on Mellon St SE leave residents frustrated

Our residential blocks have become victim to "clustering" and our business districts house far more social service agencies that do not contribute to the economic development (or tax base) of our ward. Our elected leaders smile and pat each other on the back at the ribbon cutting ceremonies for yet another social service facility but seem to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear when the community asks, "Where is our economic development?"

We need more than vague promises, beautification projects, and community summits. We need a plan and we need commitment to follow that plan. For every Uniontown there are three dozen more transitional housing projects. There needs to be a balance.

I don't claim to have the answers and I don't know what the long range plan is but I think that the root of the issue lies in how the District government, city agencies, and social service providers perceive Ward 8 and East of the River in general. Are we a community of promise and potential or are we just negligible inhabitants of cheap land available for the taking? Are we nothing more than voiceless spectators in the Social Service version of  The Price Is Right?

Either way, I know that with every new "gotcha" like the Calvary shelter and every new ribbon cutting ceremony of yet another social service facility I find that the hope and excitement that I once felt for my new community "on the rise" is being turned into a realization that the city's promises of "economic development for all" did not include Ward 8 and East of the River -- at least not in a way that would change the status quo. Poverty is entirely too profitable and there is no business like Ward 8 business.

Perhaps promises of "one city" are nothing more than a big joke and the joke is on us. We actually believed the promises for a better tomorrow and an equitable distribution of responsibility and benefits. For that reason  (and a host of others) I will be joining the rally tomorrow.  If for no other reason than to express my outrage, frustration, and total and complete disappointment with the District of Columbia. We need more than sound bites, we need action.

I have been hoodwinked.