Driving at night through downtown Washington, D.C., among the shadows of the buildings that during the day house the Departments of State, Interior, and Justice, one cannot help noticing the groups of women and men huddled together over the steam-engulfed steel gratings that cover the hot air ducts outside these buildings. Those who find enough warmth on the grates outside the Corcoran Art Gallery--enough to survive the District’s raw winter nights, the coldest in 50 years--are the closest neighbors of the new family in the White House, only a block away. Many others crouch in doorways in front of abandoned buildings that dot the city’s neighborhoods, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with others around fires in barrels and garbage cans in vacant lots, sleep in parked or abandoned cars, try to remain unnoticed by police in order to catch a couple of hours of sleep in one of the bus terminals attempting to keep hands and feet warm, to stay alive. At least eight persons have died from exposure since the first of last December.
Scenes such as these are extreme, but all too real, representations of Washington’s housing crisis. Slightly less visible but just as immediate are the thousands of families who are evicted from their homes each year, many of them victims of speculation and urban renewal. On any given day hundreds of people are sleeping in parks, boarded-up buildings, and empty cars. In 1975 alone, there were 2,260 families evicted from their homes. Because of development pressures and the considerable impact of broad economic forces and unemployment on a city with many poor residents, the eviction rate has increased more than 600% in the last year. Thousands are homeless.
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