Why Should Delaware Care?
The number of people in Delaware without a home has risen in recent years just as Wilmington officials have sought to bring more people into the city’s core. Earlier this year, Wilmington Mayor John Carney created a homeless task force tasked with creating a set of recommendations to address homelessness in the city.
A Wilmington task force charged with addressing homelessness in the city has composed a set of preliminary recommendations, which include a proposal for the city build a tiny home village of temporary housing in Christina Park.
The group, created by Wilmington Mayor John Carney in March, will hold a final meeting for public comment on its recommendations Monday, before voting on them at the end of September.
Beyond housing in Christina Park near Wilmington’s Eastside, the task force’s recommendations call for more day center options for unhoused individuals, for an agreement with local developers to build more affordable housing, and for a daytime storage facility.
While the task force appears likely to move ahead with approving the recommendations at the end of the month, critics of the group are questioning how the efforts would be funded, and whether the recommendations are anything but a continuation of what the city is already doing around homelessness.
On Thursday, Carney said he is excited to see the recommendations his task force puts forth, but did not say specifically which he would, or would not, support.
“It will be interesting to see what the group comes up with,” Carney told Spotlight Delaware. “These are folks mostly that work with this population on a day-to-day basis, so they know the challenges that we all face.”
More than 1,500 people in Delaware are homeless, according to a count conducted by housing advocates earlier this year. The figure represented a nearly 17-percent increase over the previous year.
The recommendations
The task force’s first two recommendations describe temporarily allowing 28 tents in Christina Park, modeled after a tent community in Lewes, for 3-4 months until a series of “tiny homes” could replace the tents in the park in early 2026.
The tiny homes, which the recommendation describes as housing 50-60 people, would be built based on Springboard Delaware’s pallet village community of transitional homes in Georgetown.
Carney said sectioning off an area of the park for unhoused people to stay in tents would be helpful, so that the city could legally ban tents from other parks and neighborhoods.
The preliminary recommendations also call for another day center facility for unhoused individuals – using either a Wilmington Housing Authority building on 4th street or expanding the hours of the St. Patrick’s Center on 14th street. The task force also proposes the creation of a personal item storage facility at either the day center or in a repurposed city bus.
Finally, the task force recommends that nonprofit organizations partner with local developers to create 50 to 100 units of affordable housing over the next 10 years.
While the recommendations do not describe how the tiny homes and other proposals would be funded, the task force on Tuesday discussed the possibility of using state revenue from the cigarette or marijuana sales tax to fund such services, Shyanne Miller, a community advocate who has been present at nearly all of the task force’s meetings, said.
Carney said Wilmington would need to partner with the state government to fund these increased homelessness resources. He said that he had heard Gov. Matt Meyer mention the possibility of allocating the marijuana tax revenue to homelessness services.
Miller said she believes the recommendations are mostly continuing existing efforts of the city to address homelessness, without proposing any new approaches.
“No one’s going to say no to like cleaning up. But that’s the job of the city already to clean up,” Miller said.
She also expressed concerns about the transparency of the task force. Much of its discussions were done in subcommittee meetings, which were not open to the public, she said.
Miller said she submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for the notes of the subcommittee meetings, but has not received records from those requests.
Task force history
The 12-member task force, led by former-Corrections Commissioner Claire DeMatteis, also included representatives from the Wilmington Housing Authority, the city police department and the city council.
Carney created the task force after vowing to make addressing homelessness a priority of his mayorship when he was elected in November.
Carney’s commitment to examining homelessness in Wilmington came after controversy with former Mayor Mike Purzycki and the city police department’s treatment of unhoused individuals.
Last year, city police removed benches that people used near the Episcopal Church of Saints Andrew and Matthew on North Shipley Street. In the basement of the church building is an organization called Friendship House, which provides daytime services for unhoused individuals.
The bench removal came shortly after Wilmington officials and the ACLU of Delaware had settled a lawsuit over the city’s policing of homeless people – an agreement that barred local police from arresting individuals who had asked strangers for money or who had lingered in public areas.
Carney’s homeless task force has also discussed ways to impose harsher criminal penalties on certain activities At a June 3 meeting, the members discussed creating a city ordinance that would classify homeless shelters as “drug free zones,” and criminalize bringing drugs near such buildings. The proposed ordinance did not make it into the task force’s current list of recommendations.
The task force’s meeting for public comment on the recommendations will be held at 10 am on Monday, September 15 at the Louis L. Redding City/County Building in downtown Wilmington.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
