The Honorable John Carney

Mayor-elect

City of Wilmington, DE

Dear Mayor-elect Carney:

In this open letter, which we are also disseminating publicly, we provide some unsolicited, practical advice about addressing homelessness in Wilmington in light of the recent “Battle of the Benches” between Wilmington’s homeless advocates and the outgoing Purzycki Administration. With the dust still swirling from the incident and the resulting letters, it provides you an early opportunity to demonstrate a better way for how the City will address homelessness during your term as mayor.

 We are both professors at the University of Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, of which you are an alum. Collectively, we have been addressing homelessness in Delaware for over 30 years, a time in which we have engaged on this issue with numerous nonprofits and city, county, and state government entities. From this we can tell you that homelessness will be one of the most challenging issues you will address as mayor. You, and the City, shouldn’t go at it alone.

 While we cannot solve homelessness in Wilmington in this letter, we will draw upon our experience to offer a “top-ten” list of actions by which you can address this topic in a position that will enable you to better work toward this goal.

 1)     Restore the benches. Doing so would signal that the City is interested in collaborating with all involved stakeholders and not just continue the previous administration’s policies. More pragmatically, the city gains nothing from having removed the benches, and further defending this action would only give homeless advocates a potent symbol of an uncaring city government.

2)     Establish a means of regular communication with interested stakeholders to discuss homelessness. Effective responses to homelessness require that all the entities and stakeholders involved, within and outside of City government, regularly communicate and work together. There has never, to our recollection, been a structure set up to facilitate such coordination in Wilmington.

3)     Put a face on the city’s homelessness response. Designate a point person within the city government that people and organizations can contact about homeless matters, who can represent the city at external functions, and who can work with municipal colleagues to respond to concerns with coordinated action. 

4)     Develop a “homeless detail” that is trained and experienced in working with people in homeless situations. Many cities have teams that respond to 911 calls and other situations involving homeless people. These can be specially trained police officers, other City personnel, or people working for nonprofits. This takes the burden of responding to homeless situations away from regular police, who are often not explicitly trained for addressing homeless situations.

5)     Establish alternatives to arresting homeless for low-level infractions. Police, when they respond to calls involving homeless people, often end up citing or arresting them for low-level offenses. This leaves everyone poorly served, as it entangles homeless people in the legal system for citations that go unpaid, for missed court dates, and for outstanding warrants. This results in clogged court systems and the further barriers that keep the homeless person from getting rehoused. Alternative policies that connect people to housing and services, which involves a different set of skills not taught in traditional police training, lead to much better results.

6)     Coordinate with nonprofit and private services providers. Mayor Purzycki, in his defense of the bench confiscations, stated that Wilmington police had their own homeless response system. If so, they should coordinate with, rather than work parallel to, Wilmington’s non-governmental services providers and private business improvement district towards common objectives. Responders to situations involving homelessness are only as effective as all the resources available to them.

7)     Integrate data. We cannot manage what we cannot measure. As governor, you were an active proponent of the Delaware Data Integration System, which seeks to bring together data from various State departments into one database as a basis for more efficiently and effectively provide public services. Hopefully you will continue these efforts as mayor and integrate City data systems, thereby setting a bar for the State to follow. In doing so, homelessness provides an ideal platform to demonstrate how data can better inform services delivery.

8)     Recognize the role of housing. As governor, you rarely talked publicly about homelessness. One exception came during the 2023 State budget address, where you promoted increased state investments in affordable housing, but cautioned that homelessness is “a very different problem.” Please reconsider this stance. Just as you wouldn’t address hunger without taking food into account, you cannot address homelessness without housing.

9)     Come up with a plan. Wilmington has never had a coherent plan or policy for addressing homelessness. Set a precedent here with a deliberate blueprint for addressing homelessness and include all stakeholders in this process.

10)  Get personally involved. Volunteer at a meal center. Accompany outreach workers as they make their rounds visiting encampments. Participate in the annual point-in-time count of the homeless population. Do something else where you get the opportunity to strike up conversations and listen to homeless people and those that provide them services. They are all your constituents, and you will learn a lot from what they have to say.

 These recommendations all reflect things you can start upon taking office without any significant financial expenditures or new legislation. We do not presume to solve homelessness in Wilmington with this. Instead, with this we present a framework for a more productive process; one by which you can address this challenging task in a collaborative and transparent way that promises more success and unity on a topic that, until now, has only bred divisiveness.

We wish you success in addressing homelessness, and with your mayoral tenure more generally.

Sincerely,

Stephen Metraux, Ph.D.                                            Steven W. Peuquet