The worst city government in America - Washington, D.C

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1989 by Jason DeParle

Well, well, money's tight, and in an age of govemment cutbacks you can't have everything. But the city spends $1.2 million a year to run the two shelters. This, as it turns out, may not buy much soap, but it buys a lot of employees-52 of them, in fact. Cloherty reported that Washington's church-run shelters provide a real night's sleep for about half the cost of the city-run squalor. Sheets and towels included. No rats allowed.

Cloherty presented the appropriate officials with the evidence and managed to flush out a bureaucratic response priceless for its adherence to classic lines: "We've been trying as best we can with minor repairs to keep [shelters] up to a minimum standard of safety and comfort," said Virginia Fleming, deputy director for administration at the Department of Human Services.

Not that the city doesn't have standards where private shelters are concerned. Luther Place Church helps run nine different facilities for the homeless, including a medical clinic, emergency shelters, and group homes. The church pastor, John Steinbruck, chaired the D.C. Commission on Homelessness. Last year, city inspectors visited his church shelters and wrote up six pages of violations-citing such dangers to the dispossessed as "walkway has cracks" and "rooming unit not numbered." Steinbruck says it cost the church $10,000 to comply. Perhaps this Clouseau-like application of magnifying glass to church sidewalk is what has delayed city inspectors from arriving at the city-run shelters.

The spending money pocketed by the 52 shelter workers-about $23,000 each if you divide it out- is nothing by the standards of homelessness magnates like Cornelius Pitts. Beginning in 1982, a series of, shall we say, generous city contracts to house homeless families pulled the Pitts Motor Hotel out of deep red and plunged it into abundant, lucrative black.By 1986 annual payments ranging between $1.3 million and $1.5 million had allowed Pitts and his wife to eke out an annual income of $245,000 in salary, benefits, and profits, reported Marianne Szegedy-Maszak in The Washington Monthly ["How the Homeless Bought a Rolls for Cornelius Pitts," July/August 1987] . The Pitts contract had a number of marvelous provisions, such as charging the city $97.07 per square foot for office space in a neighborhood of junkies and prostitutes while the city was paying only $15 for prime office space downtown. No wonder Szegedy-Maszak found Pius tooling around in a $117,000 Rolls Royce and a $61,000 Mercedes-Benz.

The Pitts was less kind to its homeless families, who, city inspectors reported, hunkered down sixto-a-room in the midst of loose plaster, leaks, poor ventilation, holes in the walls and floors, no fire alarms, broken lights, bedbugs, roaches, and other insects. Given this bargain, DHS officials renewed Pitts's contract from 1982 to 1986 without even bothering to seek other bidder's. A church organization down the street from Pitts offered the city better services for about 20 percent of the cost-$500 a month as opposed to $2,748. But DHS wasn't interested. Pitts, who, like most of his clients, is black, says he knows why. "It is difficult for a white business person to care for my people," he told Szegedy-Maszak. "I just don't believe that any white person can be as interested in the welfare of poor black people as a black person."