15 Homeless People Get Apartments Next Month

The D.C. government is quietly preparing to take nine homeless people off city streets and put them into publicly funded apartments, playing down any fanfare to protect the identities of the recipients, who are mentally ill.

But moving day Thursday will mark another step in the city's ambitious, five-year-old plan to end homelessness by 2014.

Drafted under former mayor Anthony A. Williams, the strategy calls for using local and federal dollars to develop or subsidize 6,000 units of affordable housing between 2004 and 2014, partly to help the homeless and mentally ill move from street corners into their own homes.

In a statement, the Department of Mental Health said it is well on the way to upholding its end of the overall strategy, starting with the nine homeless people who will have new homes this week and six who will follow them Oct. 15. The department has received a $950,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to pay for the housing.

But there is significant doubt over whether the city can reach its goal amid the recession as tax revenue falls and the number of unemployed and homeless people rises. Amber Harding, a staff attorney for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said Friday that the city cannot succeed unless it increases the budget of the department's housing initiative.

In a study last year, the Urban Institute reported that the city's 2,300 housing units each cost about $8,500 yearly to operate.

"DMH needs far greater resources if it is to serve the many consumers waiting for affordable housing in homeless shelters, institutions or unsafe settings," Harding testified at a D.C. Council oversight hearing in February. Harding said 500 households were on DMH's waiting list for housing, "all of whom have a serious mental illness and many of whom are in an institution or are at risk of entering an institution."

Mentally ill residents receive rent subsidies that are lower than those given to residents in other rent voucher programs supported by the city. "As a result of DMH's low rent caps, many consumers live in housing that is riddled with housing code violations -- such as lack of heat, rodents, insect infestation, plumbing problems and other conditions -- that make recovery far more challenging than it need be," Harding said.

City officials bristled at Harding's statements, calling them untrue. Laura Zeilinger, deputy director for program operations for the Department of Human Services, which is chiefly responsible for sheltering and housing the homeless, said all housing units must pass an inspection before residents are placed. A majority of landlords do not pass inspection and are forced to make adjustments, she said.

Phyllis Jones, a spokeswoman for DMH, said in a statement that it has provided $6 million for rent subsidies to 750 mentally ill residents in apartments throughout the city since 2005 and pooled its resources with the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development to direct $14 million to "build or renovate 300 new units for homeless people with mental illness." About 50 people have moved into new housing, "some of whom were homeless for 15 years," the statement said.

"I think the District has been doing great," said Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. "We're not one to say easily that people are doing great when they're not. I think there's a lot more focus by governments, especially in the bigger cities, and D.C. is right up there with the best of them."

Roman said cities have incentives to pay millions of dollars to move mentally ill homeless residents into permanent housing. The obvious one is a moral imperative by which societies are judged, she said. "We have to take care of people who are sick," she said. But tourists and business developers frown on homelessness and judge cities by their ability to place people in adequate housing.

Roman also cited a University of Pennsylvania study of 5,000 mentally ill people living on New York streets that estimated their annual cost to taxpayers at $40,000 each for shelter visits, hospitalization, run-ins with police for petty crimes and incarceration.

"The idea that as taxpayers we aren't paying anything for people who live on the street who are mentally ill is fallacious," she said. "We pay a lot."

It took 18 months from the time the District received a funding commitment from HUD to find housing for the first of the 15 mentally ill homeless residents next month. Promised in April 2008, the money was not transferred to the city until December. After that, DMH contracted with the Community Partnership to End Homelessness to find a landlord willing to take the residents and a rent voucher, a nine-month process.

"When you have to put together these housing dollars, it's just layers of financing," Roman said. "There's an awful lot of bureaucracy involved. It takes a long time."