Jul 04, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Workers this week were putting the finishing touches on the renovation of a three-story, eight-bedroom house in Northeast Washington that is scheduled to open on Monday as the area’s first transitional housing facility for homeless gay and transgender youth.

The Wanda Alston House, named after a local lesbian leader who was murdered three years ago, will serve as a temporary home for up to eight gay male, lesbian, bisexual or transgender youth between the ages of 16 and 22.

“It’s a transitional housing program, not a shelter,” said Sue Marshall, executive director of the local, non-profit group Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, which arranged for city funding to finance the Alston House.

Marshall and Brian Watson, director of programs for Transgender Health Empowerment (THE), a local group that will operate the Alston House, said the house will provide a wide range of services for its residents in addition to room and board.

Marshall and Watson said that unlike a shelter, where homeless people are provided emergency lodging on a daily basis, a transitional facility like the Alston House selects its residents through an admission screening process and provides an assigned room and bed for a period ranging from several weeks to several months.

Under the direction of THE, the Alston House will provide a licensed social worker to counsel the residents and guide them through other D.C. agencies and community resources, with the goal of preparing them for independent living and self-sufficiency, the two said.

But some of the residents who live on or near the 800 block of 46th Street, N.E. in the city’s Deanwood neighborhood, where the Alston House is located, watched with alarm as construction workers transformed what had been an abandoned shell of a house into what appeared to be a group home, according to Carolyn Lambert, who lives in a house next to the Alston House.

“Nobody told us anything,” said Lambert, who noted that rumors surfaced in the neighborhood that the city planned to open a halfway house in the Alston building for newly released prisoners. “I have two grandchildren who come by here and I’m concerned about who will be living in that house,” she said.

When told by a reporter that the house would be occupied by homeless gay and transgender youth, Lambert said she had no objections to such a facility as long as she receives assurances that the young residents would have adult supervision.

“It’s going to create some tension in the neighborhood,” she said.

Watson said at least three adult supervisors will be stationed at the house each day in separate, eight-hour shifts, providing 24-hour supervision of the residents.

Alice Chandler, a member of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 7C, which has jurisdiction over the area where the Alston House is located, said officials associated with the Alston House had not contacted her ANC about the house.

Chandler said she, too, would not object to a well operated and supervised facility such as the Alston House. But she said it would have been easier to build community support for the facility if organizers provided the neighborhood with information about the house in advance of its opening.

Watson said he contacted a member of the local ANC about the Alston House, but he isn’t sure if it was the ANC with jurisdiction over the street where the Alston House is located.

Chandler said the different ANC commissions in the area have boundaries that sometimes divide neighborhoods and confuse those who are not familiar with the boundary lines.

“It’s possible that he talked to someone from another ANC who didn’t tell us about this,” Chandler said.

Chandler said she has had experience working with gay and transgender youth in her role as a special education instructor at the city’s Duke Ellington School for the Arts. She said she would try to work with Alston House leaders to build cordial relations with the surrounding community.

If Alston House officials had contacted her sooner, she said, she would have alerted them to reports by neighbors about a drug dealing problem on the block where the house is located.

“It’s an ongoing concern in the neighborhood and I would advise them to seek out routine police patrols to make sure their residents are protected,” Chandler said.

Sgt. Brett Parson, commander of the D.C. police department’s specialized constituent units, including the Gay & Lesbian Liaison ...