“Takoma is a middle class neighborhood with some sketchy patches in a quadrant of the city that, like so much of DC, is now starting to improve. Takoma residents don’t want to be used as a dumping ground.“
I agree with your assessment of the economic status of the majority of residents in Takoma park, but anyone I have known who lived there was very liberal and displayed all the appropriate bumper stickers on their “green” vehicles (unless their sole mode of transportation was a bike or public transit). I would wager that those same people would stamp their vegan sandals in protest at the thought of building illegal immigrant housing in the neighborhood. They wouldn’t admit to NIMBY syndrome; rather, objections would be framed as there should be no segregation of illegal immigrants into such structures in ANYONE’S neighborhood.
On the local news they say Trump is trying to ‘warehouse’ kids ...
While the east-wide dynamic is well known, there is an equally dramatic north-south transition as well. The monumental core -- the Mall, the Smithsonian, the monuments and the Capitol complex -- were DC's solid anchor as the city bottomed out in the 1970's. Buzzard Point (outside the Fort McNair fence) and the Anacostia waterfront were pretty grim. It's all now rebuilt; you really need to come visit if you are operating on old impressions. Just to the north, there was downtown (now massively rebuilt and doing well).
North of downtown, Logan Circle and Dupont Circle were hard pressed but never went entirely slum. LeDroit Park hung on by its fingernails as a refuge for the black upper class, but it was surrounded by trouble. Aside from that, going north from downtown -- well, those who paid attention to the urban wars will remember Sursum Corda, Shaw, Columbia Heights, 16th Street Heights, Petworth, Fort Totten, Lamond Riggs and Brightwood. That takes you up to Takoma, DC, on the DC line bordering Takoma Park, MD. Not so long ago, you would have wanted a police escort to travel in that direction.
Takoma Park, MD is very much a mixed income community, though it has a charming Arts and Crafts era historic district and the Sligo Creek corridor that create its brand. (Takoma DC has neither; it looks a little downscale, more like Fort Totten, Lamond Riggs, and Brightwood.) Takoma Park, MD, blends into Silver Spring, which is another rejuvenation story but which has also passed through tough times. To the east, it borders Langley Park, then Lewisdale, Adelphi Park and Avondale Terrace. We ain't talkin' the Gold Coast here. If you survived that trek, you would reach Hyattsville, College Park and the University of Maryland orbit, which is where things started to look up a bit.
The point is, someone who writes about Takoma DC as a ritzy neighborhood doesn't know what he is talking about. For ritzy, you have to go west, to the neighborhoods along Rock Creek Park and west of the park. The proposal at issue here, however, didn't try to place a shelter in the "good" neighborhoods. It picked an embattled, now slowly improving, area that doesn't need the city or the feds throwing new problems into the mix.
This is a sensitive subject for me because I've lived through the Capitol Hill gentrification miracle. I can recall, 20 or more years ago when the Hill was still somewhat dicey, a similar neighborhood revolt against a do-gooder proposal to dump yet another halfway house for troubled youth onto East Capitol Street just off Lincoln Park, which is geographically the center of the Hill. The dynamic was pretty simple. The city, and indeed the entire metro region, had for decades used Anacostia as a dumping ground. The city had finally realized that throwing more and more projects, halfway houses for addicts and released prisoners, methadone clinics, work release centers, housing for troubled youths, etc., etc., etc., into Anacostia, which was already drowning in a sea of dysfunctional social support facilities, was not a good idea. But where to put them? There was massive resistance in the suburbs. There was massive resistance from the moneyed neighborhoods in the white ghetto west of Rock Creek. So the default choice was to dump new facilities into Wards Four and Six, just across the Anacostia River from Anacostia: i.e, Capitol Hill, Woodridge, Michigan Park and Brookland, embattled middle class neighborhoods hanging in the balance. If you looked at a map of social welfare "support services" that you wouldn't want in your neighborhood, the little red dots in Wards Four and Six looked like a veritable Maginot Line. The disproportion was obvious. We were then as Tokoma is now.
And don't get me started on the fight to force Boys Town to dismantle its newly built halfway house on Pennsylvania Avenue S.E. across the street from a major, troubled public housing project in an as-yet ungentrified section of the Hill.
Siting these kinds of facilities is difficult. But if we've learned anything over the past 50 years, it's that big concentrations of problem cases create a toxic zone that becomes an urban cancer. Such facilities need to be smaller scale so that they don't overwhelm the "lucky" neighborhood that gets them, and they need to be scattered out. In DC, that means the west side needs to take more. And it especially means the suburbs need to take more. Montgomery and Fairfax need to step up. Montgomery is a solid blue county and Fairfax is purple, trending blue. Wealthy suburban liberals should have some skin in the game.