Seven Activists Arrested in Sit-In At Former Homeless Shelter in SW (DC)

[Khephra]

By Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 27, 2004; Page B01

A standoff between police and protesters who staged a sit-in at a former homeless shelter in Southwest Washington ended yesterday with the arrests of seven people.

Activists with the group Mayday DC had occupied the former Randall Shelter at I and Half streets SW since Wednesday night, unofficially "reopening" it to the homeless. Since then, about 40 people had received housing, food and other necessities such as aspirin, said the protesters, who demanded that the city keep the building open as a shelter.

"The city government's policies seem to be to sweep the homeless out of sight," Jamie Loughner, 40, said yesterday afternoon as she stood inside the squat red-brick building and poked her head out a metal door's small broken window, before police moved in. Behind her were green cots and a table loaded with soda bottles and orange juice cartons, while above her activists sat on the roof near a spray-painted sheet reading, "Shelter Here! Now! Forever!"

Loughner was one of seven activists inside the building when police officers started making arrests about 5 p.m., said Kristan Markey, a spokesman for the group. Markey said that officers went up to the roof in a cherry picker and arrested the seven one by one.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15440-2004Nov26.html

Gee, how nice of the city to wait until the day after Thankgiving to do this. Their compassion knows no bounds.

[Laughing Mirror]

1. Half & I Streets, SW, is too choice a corner of real estate

too close to tourists on the Mall and the Capitol grounds. Better to chase the homeless down Half Street and, if not into the river, then at least across it, over to the poor side of town, where they'll fit in better. Let them repopulate the once infamous St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. It was emptied out during Reagan, and seems to be converting now into a poorhouse.

It's like we're coming full circle. Re-gentrifying Southwest DC and chasing out what remains of the poor mostly chased out decades ago. There were 35,000 poor people cooped-up in rancid slums and shacks with outhouses within too close range to the federal part of town. The Southwest slums were too huge an embarassment to the post WW2 Capitol of the Free World for them to stand, and so the people had to go. Where? Chased to the other side of the Anacostia, just like now.

Half and I is too close-in. The City needs that $6.2 million from the sale of the property. The Corcoran will replace the homeless and their shelter with a stunning jewel of an edifice, no doubt, a showpiece of the Brave New World America.