Relegating the homeless to the margins of the map
Last month, the Dorothy Day Hospitality House on Spring Street in Danbury, which offered shelter to some of the city’s poorest residents for 37 years, lost its appeal to remain open. The tool used to shut it down? An obscure zoning violation.
The 16-bed shelter is located in a working-class neighborhood zoned for high-density housing. Zoning regulations require nonprofits wishing to provide shelter for the homeless to obtain an exemption to operate in neighborhoods like Spring Street. The shelter was granted permission to operate by zoning officials — in 1983. In addition, for many years it applied for and obtained a license for dormitory use.
Nevertheless, in her ruling denying Dorothy Day’s appeal, Superior Court Judge Barbara Brazzel-Massaro chastises the shelter for failing to apply for annual zoning exemptions. There’s just one problem with that reasoning — according to Neil Marcus, the attorney representing Dorothy Day, there is no such thing as a one-year zoning exemption.
“There is nothing in the Danbury regulations now or back in 1983 when this all occurred that talked about a one-year zoning permit,” Marcus told Hearst Connecticut Media reporter Julia Perkins.
Yet the shelter may not appeal the ruling, because for now, due to COVID, all shelters in Danbury, and many across the country, have been shuttered. Danbury’s homeless are being housed at a Super 8 Motel.
With the travel industry all but dormant, cities across the country are housing the homeless in hotels and motels to help halt the spread of the pandemic. Danbury, though, plans to go a step further, by purchasing the former motel with a view toward creating a permanent, centralized space for both the housing insecure and the social services aimed at helping them.
Municipalities in California and other states have been purchasing hotels for similar programs, and even refitting rooms with kitchens to create small apartments, where it is hoped the homeless can finally find a home. Such “turnkey” or rapid rehousing solutions, advocates say, can help the homeless transition to more stable, sustainable living situations, and there seems to be evidence these programs are succeeding.
And yet, there is something about this feel-good, nobodyloses scenario that feels all kinds of wrong to me.
Maybe it’s the name of the shelter in question. Named for journalist, activist and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day Hospitality Houses can be found throughout the United States, and the world.
Essays written by Day dating back to the 1930s defend hospitality houses against the same concerns alluded to in BrazzelMassaro’s decision, that they attract individuals whose existence is a threat to the “public health, safety and welfare” of the surrounding community.
This reasoning is based on an assumption Day combated in her work and writing — that the poorest among us are somehow other than us.
Present-day activist Erin Boggs is executive director of Connecticut’s Open Communities Alliance, an agency that researches the root causes of segregation, including exclusionary zoning.
“There simply aren’t enough affordable housing units in the state to meet demand, and those that do exist tend to be concentrated in the poorest communities in the state’s cities, where the poor have been ‘outzoned’ from the suburbs,” she says.
The problem she sees with rapid rehousing is that these programs tend to be concentrated in already-struggling residential neighborhoods, or in the case of motels and hotels, in commercially zoned regions.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Stratford resident Sonya Huber has spent the past six years researching how restrictive zoning contributes to resource and income disparities as exemplified in the border between Fairfield and Bridgeport for her forthcoming book “What Divides Us.” She sees the move to house the homeless in city-owned motels and hotels as “a temporary solution to the larger problem of underfunded public housing.”
“In cities like Bridgeport, public housing complexes have become uninhabitable and been condemned due to lack of money for maintenance,” Huber says. “So we still need to address the larger issues of segregation and long-term funding for public housing; otherwise such hotels will face the same challenges in decades to come.”
In her own era, Day was wary of solutions that placed the poor out of sight and out of mind. She believed it was important that the hungry and homeless be sheltered within the community, in every community. Such intimacy, she believed, would ensure the homeless would not be seen as somehow apart from the housed, and that volunteers, workers and the sheltered would thereby witness the divine in one another. Sheltering others, she wrote, is “an act of love, resulting from an act of faith.”
Where can we find that faith in our inherent humanity today? Probably not off highway exit ramps at the most remote edges of American cities.
Dorothy Day believed it was important that the hungry and homeless be sheltered within the community, in every community.