Washington mayor Muriel Bowser has presented plans to open new homeless shelters across the District of Columbia, including along the U Street corridor (a newly hip area of restaurants and bars) and in swanky neighborhoods such as Wisconsin Avenue, blocks from the National Cathedral, where a proposed shelter would stand across from the Russian embassy.
The new facilities will, one can hope, reduce the number of homeless families — currently more than 700 — being sheltered in local motels. An exposé in the Washington Post in January captured the desperate conditions at motels, such as the Days Inn on New York Avenue in the northeast quadrant of the District, where homeless women and their children are being warehoused.
Tiera Williams, for example, lives at the Days Inn with her four tykes (ages 5, 3, 1, and a newborn) in a room with only two double beds. The refrigerator in the room is small. And Williams isn’t a fan of the meals (“continental breakfast in the lobby, and lunch and dinner in the 170-room motel’s banquet room”) provided gratis by taxpayers.
She did not, at least as far as the Post reported, have any complaints about the free Wi-Fi.
However, one detail of her plight caught the eye of The Scrapbook. According to the Post, homeless residents at the Days Inn only receive “every-other-day maid service.” An outrage, pure and simple. After all, one can be sure that non-homeless patrons of the Days Inn enjoy maid service every day. How then to explain the bald discrimination being perpetrated against the homeless, who get only half the maid service they might otherwise expect?
We can only hope that, as new plans for homeless shelters in the District are rolled out, this type of odious inequality will be addressed. Perhaps, if he can only be made aware of this ongoing enormity, Bernie Sanders will take up the baton and become a champion for the sacred principle of daily maid service for all.
