Amber Harding: DC should save businesses — and lives
In 2020, 180 District residents passed away while homeless, a 53% increase from 2019. Twenty-three of them died of COVID-19. On Dec. 21, the annual Homeless Memorial Vigil — organized each year by the People for Fairness Coalition — honored all of their lives, including two who died of COVID-19 in the week leading up to the vigil. Meanwhile, DC hotels have tens of thousands of empty rooms that they cannot rent — rooms that would provide safety and protection from the virus. The District has the perfect opportunity to marry relief for businesses with saving the lives of District residents.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached DC, it has disproportionately impacted the health and lives of people experiencing homelessness — nearly 90% of whom are Black — primarily because large congregate shelters with shared living, sleeping and bathing space are virtual petri dishes for the virus. As of Jan. 4, 415 people experiencing homelessness in DC have contracted COVID-19. (For reference, there are approximately 5,201 people who are homeless in DC who stay in shelters or on the street; of this number, 3,223 are single adults, the population most likely to contract the virus.) Four people experiencing homelessness have contracted the disease more than once. While the numbers of cases and deaths were relatively stable for a few months among those who are homeless, DC is now seeing the entirely predictable impact of a second wave.
Since April, almost 80 organizations and over 800 individuals have asked Mayor Muriel Bowser to offer each person experiencing homelessness a private, non-congregate space, such as housing or a hotel room, to prevent further harm. As a result of that advocacy, as well as an independent desire to protect the health and lives of people they are employed to serve, the DC Department of Human Services has opened three hotels to serve people who are homeless and whom medical professionals have deemed at high risk of dying or having serious complications from COVID-19. Over 600 people have been placed in these hotels, and not one of them has contracted COVID-19 since they entered the hotels. This is a critical, lifesaving program that we unequivocally support.
However, DHS officials reported at a Dec. 4 briefing that there were 603 homeless people on a waiting list for the hotels, all of whom have been determined to be high risk. Nonetheless, there are no plans to expand the hotel program. These 603 (and counting) individuals are waiting in large congregate shelters, recreation centers repurposed as hypothermia shelters, or on the street — all places where their risk of contracting and dying of COVID-19 are much, much greater than that of those in housing or hotels. Everyone on that waiting list has been forced to wager a high-stakes, poor-odds bet for their lives.
Meanwhile, hotels around the District are sitting vacant and struggling to stay open and keep paying employees. The mayor recently announced a $100-million relief fund for businesses, including hotels, but there are no requirements that recipients open their doors to people who desperately need safe shelter. Instead of just providing a bailout fund to hotels that are struggling, the District should be using those same funds to rent the hotel rooms for people experiencing homelessness and using federal relief funds to pay for staffing. Or, as other jurisdictions across the country have done, the District could purchase the hotels to use as shelter or convert into affordable housing.
How many of the 23 who died of COVID-19 would still be alive if they had been offered a safe place to stay last spring? How many of the 603 people on the hotel waiting list will have their names read out at the 2021 Homeless Memorial Vigil if DC fails to open more hotel rooms?
Mayor Bowser has an opportunity to act now to change DC’s tragic current course. Her administration should require that any hotel getting government funding provide rooms to DC residents who are most at risk of dying of COVID-19 and should expand the current DHS hotel program to serve everyone on the waiting list.
Amber W. Harding is an attorney at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.
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