Homelessness in the District is a monumental crisis and we have grown blind to its heights. We decide to look the opposite way of our fellow men and women who have fallen on hard times. We disregard their humanity and turn them to stone, urban scenery; believing that they share the cold, unchanging fate of statues.
Open Arms Housing works to break that caste. Established in 1997, Open Arms assists women experiencing homelessness in the District, guiding and housing them with a compassionate hand.
Currently they house and support 16 women in the Dunbar building. Each woman has her own apartment, kitchen and bathroom. They also share a community room stocked with phones, televisions and computers.
Open Arms will soon take in more women as they plan to open their second building, Owen House, by the end of this month: another crack in the mold.
“In the housing industry today and in the homeless industry today we have to do real surgery and put in some real stitches. Open Arms Housing is doing just that,” said Sandy Allen, a D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development employee, in a speech at a September 30 fundraiser for Open Arms.
This ‘real surgery’ has been explored by the fundraiser’s keynote speaker, Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who is credited with developing the Housing First model.
“Ending homelessness is the easiest part of the job. The real challenge is providing the support services to treat severe mental health and addiction problems. When a person is living at home, treatment has a much better chance of success,” Tsemberis was quoted in a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) 2012 report.
Janet Starke, a 2-year resident of the Dunbar building and soon to be Resident Assistant of Owen House, agrees.
“How important it is that our people get the same opportunity I have… providing them the ability to experience life in a positive way,” Starke said to the crowd.
That is our basic human right: through proper merit, we should be forever able to pursue happiness.
Open Arms provides versatility in this pursuit, so that individuals can follow the path which best suits their needs. This versatility is Tsemberis’s Housing First model, which allows those experiencing homelessness to gain independent residency before long-term employment, addiction treatment, mental health assistance or other forms of recovery.
But it’s not just an idealized concept: it works. In its first year of implementation, the model supplied a housing retention rate of 84 percent, according to the SAMHSA report. Since then, Housing First has continued to produce positive results across the United States and the world.
Dr. Tsemberis further defended his model in his keynote address, striking the issue at its core; he states, “people who are homeless have to improve themselves much more than the rest of us do in order to get into housing. There is a great injustice in the way that people who are homeless have to earn their way back into housing; through sobriety or through treatment in order to prove themselves worthy.”
Tsemberis directly criticizes our assumptions, our prejudice toward the homeless.
“How many of us would be going home tonight if we had to be sober?” he asked the audience.
In our sameness we realize that, as Tsemberis says, “It’s not about us and them… it’s all about us working together.” He continues in saying that, yes, we should work together on “ending homelessness as a policy decision and fighting that war, we should, but it’s also a personal decision to include [the homeless] among us, to open our arms in a way that is all inclusive.”
Open Arms Housing will continue to do just that, with four residents expected to move into Owen House at the end of October.
Alongside Open Arms, it’s on you and I to resist the urge to look the other way, catching only frozen scenery. It’s on us to see the arcing of limbs in motion, the tension of muscle beneath skin; to understand that we are all incredibly, irrevocably human.
