Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
With a good amount of protesters gathered outside of the Lincoln Theater yesterday, Muriel Bowser gave her first State of the District address as Mayor of Washington, D.C.
Activists gathered outside the venue well before Bowser’s speech start calling on her to address two of the biggest problems currently facing the District: the affordable housing and homeless crisis.
Invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bowser promised to address such issues, saying that the District needs to develop “a kind of dangerous unselfishness.” She said that her administration will do that by “giving a little more to create and preserve affordable housing, to care for our homeless neighbors and to invest in a safe and reliable transportation system to get our residents to work and school and to keep the visitors coming.”
Among the big topics Bowser covered in her address last night: boosting the District’s education, strengthening the middle class, and—yes—a promise that the streetcar will actually run.
Education
Bowser promised to invest in D.C. Public Schools, saying that they’ll spend $15 million in next year’s budget to “support our middle school students with more extracurricular activities, summer programming, and international travel.”
She also promised to create a “state of the art middle-school” at McFarland in Petworth. She promised to make “‘black lives matter’ more than just a hashtag by taking concrete steps like investing in, and creating opportunity for, those students who are falling behind.”
Middle Class
Strengthening the middle class was a big part of Bowser’s promises in her State of the District address. She mentioned the Labor Peace agreement her administration recently made between the D.C. United and labor union UNITE HERE, Local 25 to ensure that the construction—and completion—of the new soccer stadium “will have jobs that put [employees] on the path to the middle class.”
Bowser also announced that she will appoint the first-ever Deputy Mayor for Greater Economic Opportunity, who will “be charged with creating solutions to improve the outcomes for residents who face challenges to entering the workforce or starting their own venture.”
Affordable Housing
Bowser name-dropped the Housing Production Trust Fund as the city’s primary tool for creating affordable housing at a time when that is becoming increasingly more endangered. She said that the fund would be budgeted at $100 million each year to ensure more affordable housing is made available.
Homelessness
Homelessness is perhaps the biggest issue facing the District right now, as many protesters outside of the Lincoln Theater made loud and clear. Bowser said that the city’s Interagency Council on Homelessness has “finalized a plan to end homelessness by making it rare, brief, and non-recurring.”
Though she didn’t expand on the specifics of the plan, she said that she plans to end family homelessness by 2018 and all homelessness in the District by 2025. And, another big promise: closing D.C. General.
Streetcar
Despite saying that the streetcar may never run, Bowser promised last night that it would. She even promised that her administration will extend the line to downtown Ward 7 and all the way to Georgetown. We’ll see.
You can read her full address, as prepared for delivery, here.
