The D.C. Council on Tuesday rejected an emergency bill aimed at restricting Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s authority to remove homeless encampments.
The measure was defeated despite mounting pressure from local advocacy groups, homeless outreach workers and the American Civil Liberties Union — all of which have called the Democratic mayor’s efforts to clear some of the District’s largest encampments harmful.
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Seven D.C. Council members opposed the legislation as homeless residents and advocates gathered for demonstrations and services to mark the nationally observed Homeless Persons Memorial Day and remember those who have died this year.
The bill would have paused all encampment evictions through the end of the District’s coldest months and established a formal process by which homeless residents could challenge officials’ decision to remove them from sidewalks, parks or other public spaces.
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Some council members voiced concerns over the broad nature of the bill, the bureaucracy it introduced and, according to council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3), the establishment of a “legal right” to camp outside in the city.
Others noted that the mayor’s controversial pilot program, which seeks to eliminate some of the District’s largest encampments by offering some homeless individuals expedited vouchers for housing, aims to do the right thing — put people in warm beds — though most council members said the approach so far had been clumsy and needlessly traumatic.
“What I’ve seen of huge, heavy equipment being used with lots of law enforcement is unnecessary,” said council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), who voted against the bill. “I also have heard from my constituents, particularly around New Jersey Avenue, about the real quality-of-life concerns, the real health and safety and concerns, that they’ve raised.”
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Some advocates had pinned their hopes of stopping the mayor’s pilot program on this bill, which was introduced just days after Wayne Turnage, the deputy mayor for health and human services, shuttered a sprawling encampment where a homeless resident had died in a tent fire this year at New Jersey Avenue and O Street NW.
As the council convened Tuesday, about 20 demonstrators carried a coffin to the steps of the Wilson Building, chanting “Housing is a human right!” The coffin, the centerpiece of an overnight vigil held annually to remember homeless people who died in the District, represented the 69 residents that advocates say died “without the dignity of a home” in the District this year. At least 22 of them had been accepted into voucher programs but died before they could move.
At least 69 D.C. residents died in 2021 ‘without the dignity of a home’
The bill’s proponents, including its author, council member Brianne K. Nadeau (D-Ward 1), argued that the council needed to erect guardrails around the mayor’s pilot program and other efforts to clear sites where people have set up camps.
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“Nothing in this legislation requires the District to leave these residents in tents,” said council member Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large), who supported the bill. “It simply removes the punitive and traumatic closures of encampments, which is not a necessary part of … getting people into housing.”
The bill had become the latest battleground in a conflict over the District’s efforts to address homelessness and stem the growing number of people sleeping in tents across the city.
Bowser launched a pilot program aimed at studying the effectiveness of using housing placement to clear such encampments. Critics say what has resulted is an even more confusing and inequitable system in which some people get to effectively skip the line for housing vouchers while others are literally left out in the cold and forced to search for a new place to sleep as three new no-camping zones have been established in NoMa, under the Metro overpass on L and M streets, and at the New Jersey Avenue park.
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Homeless advocates, 75 elected members of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions from each of the District’s eight wards and members of the legal community, including D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine and the ACLU, had urged council members to vote yes on Tuesday.
The ACLU of D.C. issued a statement criticizing the mayor’s pilot, known as the Coordinated Assistance and Resources for Encampments program, for breaking up communities and making it more difficult for those not placed in housing to access services. The ACLU also noted a civil rights concern.
“The Fifth Amendment requires that the government not deprive people of property without due process of law. Yet, by establishing ‘no camping zones,’ the Bowser administration is creating zones of public land subject to ‘immediate dispossession’ with no notice, no right to appeal or challenge the decision, and no proof that the government has any special concerns for their property,” the group wrote. “This threatens the rights and liberties of unhoused D.C. residents.”
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The District typically suspends efforts to sweep homeless encampments when a hypothermia alert has been declared. This is typically done to mitigate the harm of displacing people and taking away their belongings — tents, clothes, blankets, sleeping bags, etc. — during cold weather.
But several council members said the mayor’s office is not legally obligated to leave homeless individuals who are camping in public spaces alone for the entirety of the season, noting that a clearing had been scheduled for Tuesday morning just hours before the council convened at a site across the street from the 4th District police station in Brightwood.
On Tuesday morning, two representatives from the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services and a handful of volunteers pulled up to the site and told a man named Ashmore who lives in a tent there that the clearing had been canceled because of cold weather.
Ashmore, 81, with gold-rimmed teeth and white whiskers, has been homeless on and off for nearly three decades, and has gotten to know the people in the community where he lives. Volunteers stop by to offer him food and conversation. Customers of the neighboring thrift store pause to greet him as they pass.
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He is not a part of the mayor’s pilot program, nor is he particularly trusting of government programs. Council member Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4), who voted in favor of Nadeau’s bill, said her office has been working to earn Ashmore’s trust and that pushing him out now could reduce the likelihood that he will accept housing services.
“I’ve heard it all before,” he said as he toiled over bungee cords that kept insulation snapped into place around his tent. “People say they can get me a home, but then it’s really a bed at a shelter. Shelters are not homes. We’ll see what they do this time. Until then, I’ll be here.”
Justin Wm. Moyer contributed to this report.