An interfaith service was held on Wednesday evening, "We Remember the Homeless," December 21, 2011, at the Inner Harbor Amphitheater, in Baltimore, Maryland. The event memorialized the 111 homeless people who have died in 2011 in Baltimore City. (This video has a ten second delay in front.) Speaking on camera are: Adam Schneider, James Crawford Jr., Rev. Brian E. Murray, Rabbi Martin Siegel and Rev. Andrew Foster Connors.
For thirteen years, the Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR) has been commemorated both to honor those who have died at the hands of anti-trans hatred and to bring visibility to lives that are so often forgotten. On November 20, Baltimore gathered in memorial for TDOR.
Members of the Baltimore City Council held an investigative hearing yesterday regarding allegations of gender discrimination and intimidation at the new City-funded homeless shelter, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Housing and Resource Center (HRC). The hearing comes just ten days after City police forcefully removed over 300 students and advocates from staging an overnight “sleep-out” in front of City Hall to raise awareness about homelessness, despite being allowed to do so in previous years.
Right off the large main lobby of Healthcare for the Homeless in downtown Baltimore, there is a small, tile-floored room with folding tables and plastic stackable chairs. Offering some small respite from the loud TVs and chatter of dozens of people in the main lobby, the room reminds me of a school classroom—complete with colorful, handmade drawings and paintings covering almost every inch of the walls. However, as around 25 folks make their way into the small room on this Tuesday morning in August, the respite gives way to a bit of claustrophobia as we all try to squeeze in.
On a hot August morning, I sat down with James Crawford at a table in the apartment building where he lives on North Avenue. I had first called him less than 24 hours before, and he had told me to come see him the next morning at eleven. As we sat alone in a large room full of chairs, tables, and couches, in what I guessed was the lobby of the apartment building, I asked him about his work for Bmore Housing For All (BHFA), an activist organization of currently or formerly homeless people and their allies in which he is an active member.
On Monday October 24th, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Maryland and the Homeless Persons Representation Project (HPRP) sent a letter to Baltimore Mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, demanding intervention in the discriminatory and illegal denial of overflow shelter beds to homeless women at the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Housing and Resource Center. Currently, only homeless men are provided with additional beds at another location once the 250-bed shelter is full.
On the northwest corner of The Fallsway and Centre Street in downtown Baltimore City, there used to sit an inconspicuous brick warehouse that housed offices for the City's Department of Transportation. Earlier this year, however, a new banner appeared above one of the corrugated metal garage doors that proclaimed, “Future Home of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Housing and Resource Center.” The banner included a computer-generated image of a shiny new building overlooking The Fallsway on an idyllic sunny day. This old warehouse would be transformed into a dedicated year-round 24-hour homeless shelter, meant to replace the old derelict shelter on Guilford Avenue.
Baltimore has never been a model city for addressing urban homelessness. From the old Oasis shelter that was closed shortly after a female client was sexually assaulted, to the city's first year-round 24-hour shelter, dubbed Code Blue, that had conditions described as “shocking for a First World country”, Baltimore's growing homeless population is continually neglected and underserved.
Hopes for change were high, but skepticism remained, when Baltimore announced in early 2011 that a new year-round 24-hour shelter would be opening up to replace the old derelict Code Blue shelter. This new shelter would be called the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Housing and Resource Center. But when it was learned that this new shelter, which opened its doors in July, would have 75 less beds than the shelter it was slated to replace, confidence in the city's ability to take care of its homeless citizens waned.
As people gathered into a large room on the third floor of a University of Maryland Medical Center building on June 14th, there were a lot of friendly conversations and familiar greetings among those in attendance. It was clear that this was a group of people where many folks already knew each other, both professionally and personally.
