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LOU CHIBBARO J
Friday, July 04, 2008
Workers this week were putting the finishing touches on the renovation of a three-story, eight-bedroom house in Northeast Washington that is scheduled to open on Monday as the area’s first transitional housing facility for homeless gay and transgender youth.
The Wanda Alston House, named after a local lesbian leader who was murdered three years ago, will serve as a temporary home for up to eight gay male, lesbian, bisexual or transgender youth between the ages of 16 and 22.
“It’s a transitional housing program, not a shelter,” said Sue Marshall, executive director of the local, non-profit group Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, which arranged for city funding to finance the Alston House.
Marshall and Brian Watson, director of programs for Transgender Health Empowerment (THE), a local group that will operate the Alston House, said the house will provide a wide range of services for its residents in addition to room and board.
Marshall and Watson said that unlike a shelter, where homeless people are provided emergency lodging on a daily basis, a transitional facility like the Alston House selects its residents through an admission screening process and provides an assigned room and bed for a period ranging from several weeks to several months.
Under the direction of THE, the Alston House will provide a licensed social worker to counsel the residents and guide them through other D.C. agencies and community resources, with the goal of preparing them for independent living and self-sufficiency, the two said.
But some of the residents who live on or near the 800 block of 46th Street, N.E. in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood, where the Alston House is located, watched with alarm as construction workers transformed what had been an abandoned shell of a house into what appeared to be a group home, according to Carolyn Lambert, who lives in a house next to the Alston House.
“Nobody told us anything,” said Lambert, who noted that rumors surfaced in the neighborhood that the city planned to open a halfway house in the Alston building for newly released prisoners. “I have two grandchildren who come by here and I’m concerned about who will be living in that house,” she said.
When told by a reporter that the house would be occupied by homeless gay and transgender youth, Lambert said she had no objections to such a facility as long as she receives assurances that the young residents would have adult supervision.
“It’s going to create some tension in the neighborhood,” she said.
Watson said at least three adult supervisors will be stationed at the house each day in separate, eight-hour shifts, providing 24-hour supervision of the residents.
Alice Chandler, a member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 7C, which has jurisdiction over the area where the Alston House is located, said officials associated with the Alston House had not contacted her ANC about the house.
Chandler said she, too, would not object to a well operated and supervised facility such as the Alston House. But she said it would have been easier to build community support for the facility if organizers provided the neighborhood with information about the house in advance of its opening.
Watson said he contacted a member of the local ANC about the Alston House, but he isn’t sure if it was the ANC with jurisdiction over the street where the Alston House is located.
Chandler said the different ANC commissions in the area have boundaries that sometimes divide neighborhoods and confuse those who are not familiar with the boundary lines.
“It’s possible that he talked to someone from another ANC who didn’t tell us about this,” Chandler said.
Chandler said she has had experience working with gay and transgender youth in her role as a special education instructor at the city’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts. She said she would try to work with Alston House leaders to build cordial relations with the surrounding community.
If Alston House officials had contacted her sooner, she said, she would have alerted them to reports by neighbors about a drug dealing problem on the block where the house is located.
“It’s an ongoing concern in the neighborhood and I would advise them to seek out routine police patrols to make sure their residents are protected,” Chandler said.
Sgt. Brett Parson, commander of the D.C. police department’s specialized constituent units, including the Gay & Lesbian Liaison Unit, said he would take steps to place the Alston House on the list of locations that GLLU officers regularly visit and monitor.
Watson said he and other THE officials, including longtime D.C. transgender activist Earline Budd, began discussions about a residential facility for gay and transgender youth a little over a year ago, when a growing number of homeless youth began visiting THE’s transgender drop-in facility on North Capitol Street.
Although the North Capitol Street facility opened to provide services for transgender people, gay and lesbian youth began flocking there after hearing about it by word of mouth, Watson said.
“Many of the kids were thrown out of their homes by their parents after the parents found out they are gay or transgender,” Watson said.
He said the parents of one of the male youths accepted for admission into the Alston House, for example, forced the youth to leave their home after they discovered he purchased hormones over the Internet to begin transitioning into a woman.
According to Watson, many of the homeless gay and transgender youth who found their way to the THE drop-in facility reported being treated with hostility at the city’s regular shelters for the homeless.
“We found that in most cases, there were more problems with the staff than with the other residents,” Watson said. “There was a lack of sensitivity on the part of the staff toward GLBT people.”
In response to these and other reports of problems faced by homeless gay and transgender youth, THE officials began holding discussions with city officials, including Christopher Dyer, director of the Mayor’s Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Affairs.
Watson and Marshall of the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness said Dyer brought a proposal drafted by THE for a gay/trans homeless facility to the attention of Mayor Adrian Fenty, who backed the proposal.
Marshall said that although her organization provided a grant to THE to fund the Alston House, 100 percent of the funds came from the D.C. Department of Human Services, which will monitor the operation of the house and determine whether to renew the funding on a yearly basis.
Wanda Alston, in whose honor the house is named, served as the city’s first director of the Office of LGBT Affairs under former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. Prior to being named to that post, Alston had been recognized as a prominent gay rights and feminist leader and had served as executive assistant to National Organization for Women President Patricia Ireland in the 1990s.
Alston was murdered in March 2005 in her Northeast D.C. home not far from the new shelter. Police said the motive was robbery and was unrelated to her sexual orientation.
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