In late November I was asked to serve on Mayor Adrian Fenty's e-Transition Team as a co-chair of the Homeless Services group alongside Sczerina Perot, an attorney who has worked for the last ten years with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. My involvement with the homeless is even more direct. I was homeless in D.C. for many months and was the strategic director for the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter.

Our task was to draft a three-page document that would make concise recommendations for how the coming administration could best alleviate the problems affecting people who are homeless in the District.

How can you craft an effective strategy to combat homelessness in three pages or less? Still, we moved forward with this huge undertaking and began a series of "webinars," or online chats. These chats brought together various interested parties including service providers, government officials, and formerly homeless individuals. Everyone brought their own ideas to the table.

However, the problem with conducting these meetings online is that there is very little opportunity for persons who are homeless to access a computer at any given time. In order to solve this dilemma and bring current members of the homeless community into the discussion, Sczerina and I organized a face-to-face meeting specifically for homeless individuals. Several members of the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter participated in that meeting as facilitators, including Jesse Smith, Michael McFadden, Eric Sheptock, Rommel McBride and David Benziquen. In the end, we gathered more information from that meeting than in all the webinars combined. If you want to learn how to alleviate homelessness, ask the people who have experienced it themselves. They are the real experts.

After the meetings it was time to take the information we had gathered and assemble a document that would give concrete suggestions for what needed to be done in the first year of Fenty's administration. It was a challenge to condense the dozens of recommendations into one concise, three-page document. In the end it was actually four pages, but we still had to pick and choose between all the incredible ideas that were offered to us. Sczerina working out the legal specifics, while I contributed the impassioned doggerel. Our most important recommendations are as follows:

• Increase Housing Production Trust Fund spending. We are losing affordable housing at such a rate in the District of Columbia that we could build units at the current rate of 300 a year ad infinitum without making any headway on the District’s plan to construct 6,000 net units of affordable housing.
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• Create model shelter facilities for men and women in the downtown corridor. It does no good to improve facilities in the outer reaches of the District while closing down shelters where the homeless actually are: downtown.
• Dedicate staff in the City Administrator’s office to act as a liaison between the Government, the Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the homeless community who would hold monthly meetings with the homeless community to give progress reports and hear grievances and communicate issues raised to the City Council.
• Increase funding to provide case management for all people in the continuum of care at a ratio of 20 clients or less per case manager. Case managers should no longer be tied to facilities; rather, they should be independent and follow individual clients throughout the system.
• Increase capacity for families and individuals by funding more Housing First programs. The only way to really end homelessness is to put people into homes.

  Will our work make a difference in what the new administration does? I don't know. All that I can be certain of is that right now there is great anticipation among the District’s homeless community. We have pinned our hopes on Adrian Fenty. Let's see if he can deliver.

David Pirtle is a former resident of Franklin Shelter in downtown D.C., and a member of the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter. He now lives in city-subsidized housing in Southeast.