NEWS CITY DESK
Moving Backward
“While it is true that D.C. is experiencing unprecedented economic distress and uncertainty, this budget does not do enough to address the urgent needs of our neighbors living without housing, and does little to alter the status quo of D.C.’s homelessness crisis,” Jesse Rabinowitz, an advocacy and campaign manager with Miriam’s Kitchen, said in his written testimony for a May 22 budget oversight hearing. “Without action from the Council, over 1,650 households will likely continue to experience chronic homelessness.” Nowadays, concerns among homeless advocates extend to the government practice of moving people back and forth between shelters and hotels, especially when congregate settings have become even more dangerous. Long was shuttled back to 801 East on May 8, but returned to his hotel room on the same day, once it was discovered that he had tested positive for COVID-19 eight days before. And while Long’s experience offers just one example of what life is like now for individuals experiencing homelessness, City Paper spoke with numerous individuals, who are homeless or advocates, that denounce the practice. Caitlin Cocilova, a staff attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic who’s been helping Long, says she knows of others who are worried about what will happen to them once they’re moved into hotels.
During the coronavirus pandemic, people experiencing homelessness are being shuffled back and forth between shelters and hotels. Many do not want to return to communal living settings.
Until recently, Lowell Long didn’t have a place to himself for more than a year. These days, he gets to lay in bed, uninterrupted. In his room at Hotel Arboretum on Bladensburg Road NE, Long is able to take long, hot showers whenever he likes and sit on the toilet seat to think. Using the bathroom at will is something many take for granted, as is some semblance of privacy in one’s own room. But for Long, who’s been living in his van or in homeless shelters for the past two years, privacy is a privilege that comes with staying in a hotel reserved for people who have come in contact with someone infected with COVID-19 or tested positive themselves. In Long’s case, it’s both. On April 24, he was moved from 801 East Men’s Shelter in Congress Heights to Hotel Arboretum after learning he was in close contact with a COVID19 patient, and on May 1, he tested positive. Long says he doesn’t feel sick and is not experiencing any symptoms commonly associated with the disease. A stay at one of the hotels the D.C. government has reserved for quarantine typically lasts between 10 and 14 days. Long, 44, has been living at the hotel for nearly a month, while he tries to get placed in a hotel where individuals who are vulnerable to severe illness related to COVID-19 due to age or preexisting health issues can stay indefinitely. The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless has been advocating to D.C.’s Department of Human Services, the government body partly in charge of running the hotels, on Long’s behalf. He fears returning to 801 East Men’s Shelter, where he contracted COVID-19. It’s also where he was assaulted. On April 5, a security guard allegedly assaulted Long in the parking lot at 801 East Men’s Shelter. The assault landed Long in the hospital. According to the police report, the security guard told Long “that’s why your mother suck my dick last night,” right before he struck him with a closed fist to his right check and the top of his head. Long says the security guard, who regularly worked at the shelter’s front entrance, was a bully who threatened to beat him up before the incident occurred. “I don’t want to go back to that hell hole,” Long tells City Paper by phone from his hotel room. Long says “it was always rough” at the shelter, but it “got crazy” once the pandemic hit
the District nearly three months ago. Because there’s nothing to do—right now, 801 East Men’s Shelter residents are discouraged from leaving the shelter and there aren’t activities for them inside—some around Long resorted to using drugs, he says. When he was staying at the shelter, Long would lie in his bunk bed all day, watching Netflix on his phone or calling friends. Long used to find relief from the shelter by going to the day services center downtown, where he ultimately signed up for Project Empowerment, a local government program that strives to move participants into the workforce. The program paused and the center closed, offering limited services by appointment only, during the public health emergency. When Long needed to momentarily escape the crowds during the emergency, he’d ride the bus, with no specific destination in mind. As nice as the privacy of a hotel is, Long isn’t in paradise. He is under quarantine, though DHS isn’t holding anyone against their will. He doesn’t feel sick, but he says he looks it, since he hasn’t seen sunlight in weeks. Not only does he miss being outside, but he also wants to find work. He’s worried about paying his cellphone bill. His phone is one of his few connections to the outside world. Long recently learned he would not get to stay in a hotel indefinitely. Instead, DHS is moving him into La Casa’s transitional housing program in Columbia Heights. He’s returning to another communal setting, where he has to share a bathroom and room again, albeit with fewer people than at 801 East. Homeless advocates have long expressed concerns about the dismal living conditions at communal shelters. Individuals who’ve stayed there say violence and pest outbreaks at shelters have prompted them to live in tents on the street instead. The pandemic further underscores how dangerous these shelters are and the need for more government investment in housing, advocates argue, but it’s unclear whether officials will learn from this moment. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 ends homelessness for 150 households, according to The Way Home, a campaign to end chronic homelessness in D.C. That represents 7 percent of what the campaign requested. The budget also makes cuts to programs that help individuals experiencing homelessness.
4 may 29, 2020 washingtoncitypaper.com
Hotel Arboretum
Darrow Montgomery
By Amanda Michelle Gomez @amanduhgomez
making the case that the Law Center should partner with shelters. “No one should be in these communal settings right now if they don’t want to be,” Cocilova says. “There may be some people who want to stay in [a] shelter for various reasons. But the majority of people are being forced to live there, creating an environment that’s ripe for people to get sick again. And the fact that we are just cycling people back into communal shelters and allowing that to happen as policy is disgusting, in my opinion, and horrible for public health outcomes.” DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story. Jewel Stroman, who was formerly homeless and now advocates for those who are still unhoused, says she’s been hearing from women staying at Patricia Handy Place for Women in Ward 2 who can’t stay 6 feet away from one another. These women tell Stroman that there are upwards of 50 people living in a dormitorystyle room. Stroman’s aunt became infected with COVID-19 while staying at the shelter, and just returned after a short stint at a hotel to quarantine. “The issue doesn’t make sense to us—when people in shelters get sick or infected, they pull them out and place them into quarantine. But then throw them back into shelter,” Stroman says. “It’s counterproductive.”
The Washington Legal Clinic, along with others, is calling on the mayor to offer a noncommunal setting to anyone living in shelters or on the streets for as long as the public health emergency lasts, because the rates of infection are significantly higher among the unhoused population. As of May 26, 6 percent of individuals living in emergency shelters have tested positive for COVID-19, while 1 percent of D.C.’s total population has. At least 16 residents experiencing homelessness have died of COVID19. Homeless shelters have been rather candid about not always being able to practice social distancing due to lack of space. Advocates are calling for creative solutions so D.C. doesn’t continue to spend up to $181 per night on hotel rooms. More than 100 Georgetown Law students have written to their dean, asking him to share vacant university housing with unhoused residents, and a few penned an op-ed in the Post,
Advocates are especially concerned for individuals who have been moved to hotels because they were in close contact with someone who’s infected, but have yet to test positive themselves. They could get infected once they return to shelters, where practicing social distancing can be next to impossible. Taylar Nuevelle was hearing similar complaints about social distancing from women who were staying at King Greenleaf Recreation Center, a shelter that’s usually only open between November and March, but that the government continued to use during the pandemic to create more space in the existing shelter system. Nuevelle, the founder of Who Speaks for Me?, a nonprofit that helps returning citizens, visited Greenleaf in early April to donate a phone to a woman who was staying there after being released early from a halfway house. When she got to Greenleaf, she says she
