Today Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) announced that the Central Union Mission, a 170-bed men’s shelter currently located along 14th Street NW, would not be moving to a new location along the fast-developing Georgia Avenue in his ward. Instead, it would re-locate to a spot near Union Station. Wrote Graham on his website:

Good news!!! Central Union Mission is not moving to Georgia Avenue in Ward One. It is moving downtown.

We have re-defined the project to include real progress for lower Georgia Avenue. Instead of a 170-bed men’s shelter on the 3500 block of Georgia Avenue, there will now be mixed-income housing.

This is a solid victory for grassroots activism. I worked with the neighborhood, who came together to send a very effective message that a homeless shelter was not the kind of improvement we wanted.

I joined Mayor Fenty this afternoon for a press conference to announce that the Mission had signed an agreement to move to 65 Mass. Ave.

Congratulations to everyone involved, especially the Georgia Avenue residents, local ANC, Georgia Avenue Redevelopment Defense Squad and the Pleasant Plains Civic Association! And a special thanks to Mayor Fenty and his fine team.

If he seems happy, well, he is. Two years ago the men’s shelter announced that it was looking at moving to a new spot along Georgia Avenue, a proposal that didn’t much amuse the neighbors or their representative on the D.C. Council — Graham. According to them, the shelter wouldn’t fit in with the development plans for that stretch of Georgia Avenue, but on a number of occasions Graham also brought up the unpleasant prospect of having that many homeless men in one of his neighborhoods. So when news broke earlier this year that the shelter would instead move to another spot in another ward, well, that was just fine with Graham.

Of course, Graham’s activism on this issue presents an interesting contradiction. In early 2007, Graham authored legislation that would have allowed the strip clubs displaced by the new stadium to be moved en masse to a location in Ward 5. Predictably, Ward 5 residents and their representative on the council, Harry Thomas, didn’t much like that idea. And since some of the clubs catered to a gay audience, there was grumbling that Ward 5 residents were coming down with a case of NIMBY — not in my backyward. I confronted Graham on this issue last year and he said the two cases were different. How so? Why are strip clubs in someone else’s ward OK, but not a homeless shelter in your own? I never got a good answer.

If anyone lives along Georgia Avenue and has some insights, please share them. Is this a case of NIMBYism? Or would the shelter really stand in the way of developing the area? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Photo by katmere