You think getting a spot at the shelter means a walk on Easy Street? A place for the lazy to get three hots and a cot on the government dime? They have a kid in college up in Maine and five younger ones at home - which is now a tiny room in the family shelter. Or there’s another family, too embarrassed to let me use their names. They didn’t get an emergency cot until that magic number - 32 degrees - signaled the start of hypothermia season and a District law kicked in that mandates emergency shelter for anyone in the winter. They’ve been homeless since July, when McDonald’s cut Cruz’s hours until he couldn’t afford his apartment and his wife’s part-time work at Wal-Mart didn’t provide benefits when she had their child. General with his wife and baby since Thanksgiving. She lost her apartment trying to keep up and has been in the shelter with her 1-year-old for two weeks.Īnd there’s Kevin Cruz, 29, who has been at D.C. She had a baby, and her tuition increased but her scholarships didn’t. There’s Alexia Sullivan, 23, who was a full-time student at Howard University until her life fell apart. Where have 400 more homeless kids come from, and who are these families? General shelter, it was two years ago and there were about 200 kids there. The last time anyone agonized about a capacity crowd at the D.C.
Elayshia's mother, Asia Brown, lost her apartment in January and wound up in the abandoned hospital, where a record of nearly 600 children are now being housed. This, of course, is happening in the same city now rolling in a $417 million budget surplus and on track for a $240 million surplus in the coming year.Įlayshia Brown (left), 6 months, shares a stroller for warmth with another baby living in the District's shelter for homeless families on Friday. And that’s an improvement from the time they spent sleeping in cars, bus shelters, Metro stations, apartment-house lobbies or on a different couch every night. Six hundred kids with chubby cheeks and Spider-Man sneakers and Dora hats are beginning their journey in life on an army cot in a cafeteria or an old hospital bed in a city shelter. There are about 600, according to a nightly census done by the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness. The District has set a dubious new record for the number of homeless kids crammed inside a scary, abandoned hospital that serves as the city’s makeshift family homeless shelter. Here’s what we ought to be talking about: 600 kids. I don’t care about Lance Armstrong’s doping or RGIII’s knee, or whether Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o knew his dead girlfriend never existed in the first place, or any of the other sports dramas we’ve spent gobs of energy on in these past few weeks. I don’t care what we call our football team.
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