By Guest Contributor, on February 9th, 2015 Cross-Posted from Hyacinth’s Place
Written by Vanessa Wellbery
 Here we go again – budget season!
Every year, District government lays out a plan for how much money it will take to meet our residents’ diverse needs—and keep the city running. It’s not just how much money, but where the money should go. Everything under the sun is in the budget, from street repairs to the police force to school lunches.
I say budget season because the whole process will go on for a number of months. Don’t be intimidated! It’s going to be fun!
Here are some of the important parts of the process:
Agency oversight hearings. Yesterday marked the start of agency oversight hearings. Between February and March, City Council committees will get to ask D.C. government agencies questions about their programs and how they use their funds. These hearings are one tool Councilmembers use to make decisions about what funding streams are effective and whether they are serving their purpose.
The Mayor’s budget proposal. While the council is holding oversight hearings, the Mayor will be preparing her own budget proposal, which she will release on April 2. Every year the Mayor sends the City Council a budget proposal outlining how she’d like to see all the services and programs the city provides funded. Mayor Bowser has indicated she is committed to putting resources behind fighting homelessness, and her budget proposal will send a clear message on whether she intends to stand by that commitment. One way to keep reminding her that it matters to us is by attending one or more of her three budget engagement forums this month.
Public hearings. Members of the City Council have another way of gathering information—public hearings. Through April and May, public hearings will be an opportunity for the citizens of D.C. to weigh in on the budget. By testifying, organizations and individuals can illustrate how budget decisions have a real impact on Washingtonians’ lives. As just one example, Hyacinth’s Place testified before the Committee on Housing and Economic Development last year about the Housing Production Trust Fund, one funding stream that makes permanent supportive housing programs like ours possible.
Mark-ups. Now that the committees have gathered information from government agencies, reviewed Mayor’s budget priorities, and heard input from real Washingtonians, they hold mark-ups, where they will craft the actual budget and vote to approve it. These mark-ups also take a number of weeks! But once the council has agreed on and passed a full budget in the form of a bill, they send it to the Mayor, who also has to approve it.
Hyacinth’s Place has hit the ground running, and we’ll be active throughout budget season. Like last year, we’ll advocate for the Housing Production Trust Fund and the Local Rent Supplement Program. We’ll also lend our support to our diverse partners who advocate for the many other programs that fight poverty in the District.
Here are some ways you can be involved.
– Check out the Fair Budget Coalition’s (FBC) budget priorities. Hyacinth’s Place worked with FBC to craft this comprehensive list of funding recommendations. It’s a great primer for all the important programs we’ll be fighting for this budget season.
– Tweet using the FBC’s hashtag #WeAreALLdc. You can also retweet us!
– Like us on Facebook for an easy way to get updates and see our latest blog posts.
– Come to the Mayor’s budget engagement forums over the next month. Email Vanessa@hyacinths.org if you’d like to attend.
– Attend council hearings or, if you can’t be there in person, stream them online.
– Testify at the public hearings! We’ll let you know when the time to sign up comes closer.
– Check out these other great resources: the Fair Budget Coalition, the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute
It’s going to be a long haul, but we’re excited to be a part of the effort to make D.C. a safe and healthy place for all its residents to thrive!
By Grassroots DC, on February 4th, 2015 How much longer will you be able to afford to live in Washington, DC? The Coalition for Nonprofit Housing & Economic Development believes all District residents deserve decent, quality housing at a price they can afford. Join them at this Saturday’s Housing For All Rally and find out what you can do to stop your impending displacement, because DC is our home.
By Brenda Hayes, on November 6th, 2014 Cross-Posted from ONE DC
In a town rife with Non-Profits that seemingly have all the answers for what ails longtime D.C. residents as they face gentrification-fueled displacement, ONE DC’s July 26th meeting was a much needed breath of fresh air for me. I asked permission to record the meeting for my radio show This Light: Sounds For Social Change, thankfully permission was granted to me to do so.
The meeting opened with a visual recap of June’s meeting. A 1950 to present timeline of redlining and economic cycles that lead to displacement hung on one of the walls. An adjacent wall held a visual that had the word “Concentrated Poverty” written in the center, surrounding those words were some of the commonly held beliefs about people who live in poverty; rampant drug abuse, crime, apathy.
We all sat in a familiar “meeting circle,” introduced ourselves and said how long each of us has lived in D.C.; there was one man who has lived in D.C. since birth, 60+ years.
 Next we were led to do an exercise in which attendees were asked to present a physical movement that represents their perspective of gentrification and displacement. Some of the poses and movements included a young white woman who stood with her back to the rest of the group as she covered her eyes, blind to what was going on just behind her. A few people held stances of defiance, arrogance, indifference and helplessness.
For the second part of the exercise, we were asked to physically represent empowerment, action and change. I was most struck by what one Shaw resident, who happens to be a black woman, did; she held an invisible protest sign high above her head, two young white participants quickly stood in support behind her holding their invisible placards up. What these three participants represented to me is the need for community lead, driven, and sustained movement for equity in housing, work, and education.
Before the meeting, I interviewed longtime community activist Linda Leaks who handed out Terms of Empowerment, a seven page glossary of housing-related terms in which residents should become familiar when trying to remain in neighborhoods besieged by gentrification.
I also interviewed Patricia Trim, a 40+ year Shaw resident. During our conversation Ms. Trim told me how her mother would come to D.C. during the week for her job with the Federal Government and leave her with relatives in Virginia. Ms. Trim’s mother couldn’t afford to have her stay here in D.C. until she was sixteen years old. Ms. Trim and her mother moved several times, Champlain Street in Adams Morgan, 18th and Wyoming, 17th and T Sts., each time staying in apartments until the rent was raised to a prohibitively high amount. 
Ms. Trim recently drove to Columbia Heights to see a dentist on 14th Street. As she drove to her appointment she realized she was in the neighborhood where she grew up. After her appointment, she
decided to drive around a bit and was astonished at and dismayed by all the changes that have taken place in recent years. She couldn’t bring herself to drive down Champlain Street the street where she first lived when she and her mother moved to D.C.
When she arrived back home that day, she went to her bedroom to pray. She tearfully asked “What I have done to fall so far from grace to be treated less than a human being.” I fear too many D.C. residents people are asking that same question.
By Grassroots DC, on October 27th, 2014
By Grassroots DC, on October 23rd, 2014 Cross-Posted from Sociology in My Neighborhood: DC Ward Six
Written by Johanna Bockman
As many of you know, there is much discussion about the future of the DC General homeless shelter. This morning, the Post’s Petula Dvorak stated, “Developers are salivating over D.C. General. It’s a huge property with plenty of potential. So there’s no question that it will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about.” Mayor Gray is rightly calling to rehouse those at the DC General shelter before closing it, but his plan is based on an unfounded belief that private apartment owners will now come forward and house the hundreds of families at DC General at rents far below market rates. Thus, in the interests of “salivating” developers, hundreds of homeless people are going to be displaced again? DC General is District property and could be renovated, maybe even employing homeless or near-homeless workers, if the District wanted to do so. However, developers and homeowners in the area are working hard for the “revitalization” of the DC General area, which they see as requiring the removal of their homeless neighbors. The deterioration of DC General is required as proof of the need for “revitalization.”
A few weeks ago, I went to a great panel discussion, “Racism in the New DC,” organized by Empower DC, which spoke to these issues from a very refreshing perspective. The speakers were three public housing residents working to maintain public housing and public schools in DC (Marlece Turner, D. Bell, and Shannon Smith), as well as Dr. Sabiyha Prince (the author of African Americans and Gentrification in Washington, DC), Ron Hampton (a former police officer and activist against police abuse), and Post columnist Courtland Milloy.
The main takeaway from the panel discussion was that institutional racism (not individual racist people but a racist system) works based on the idea that brown and black people do not deserve as good things as white people do. Improvements in the city are made for white people both because they often have more money and also because they are seen as deserving better things, like better schools and better services.
I asked the panel about a recent Post article that had said that, “Almost 10 years after the District vowed to assure low-income residents in four areas that they wouldn’t be displaced if their neighborhoods were revitalized,” the District decided that this was “overly optimistic.” The District was considering a policy change to “no longer guarantee that residents have a right to stay in their neighborhoods, and the promise that existing public housing won’t be demolished until a new building is constructed to replace it would be abandoned.” Empower DC and others have been warning people about these false promises for some time.
So, I asked the panel, is this a new policy? or is this a statement of what the District was already doing? Courtland Milloy immediately said, “They do what they can get away with.” He explained that, when District officials made these promises, they had to to make their redevelopment plans and the destruction of public housing palatable. Earlier, Milloy had stated that we need to acknowledge institutional racism and that these “revitalization” policies are in the interest of property owners and not in the interests of the homeless and other poor DC residents.
How can we change the situation in which “They do what they can get away with”? As a start, we might recognize that the journalist’s statement “So there’s no question that it [DC General] will be shut down and sold. That part of the plan no one is worried about” is not a statement of fact but rather a statement supported by those who are interested in this outcome and “can get away with” it. It is a political statement in the battle over space in the District. The next step would be to support a range of policies, including permanent public housing and permanent affordable housing in the District.
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Here we go again – budget season!
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