Baltimore residents who are currently or have been homeless, joined by their advocates, community allies, and members of Baltimore’s interfaith community will rally outside of City Hall on Tuesday, March 18 at 3 p.m. to stand up for the universal human rights to affordable housing, health care, and living wages. Demonstrators will testify why Code Blue, a 364-person shelter located at 1634 Guilford Avenue, must remain open beyond March 31, 2008.

In January of this year, Mayor Sheila Dixon presented the city’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness as “a blueprint for designing a city and a society where homelessness no longer exists.” Demolishing 2,400 units of public housing over the last year and closing the Code Blue shelter take us further away from fulfilling this promise. According to Health Care for the Homeless outreach worker, Adam Schneider, “We will be at City Hall Tuesday to stand with Baltimore City, in support of Mayor Sheila Dixon’s 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness, and to ensure that appropriate and adequate shelter and services are available beyond March 31. We all know that the streets are an inappropriate place for anyone to live at any time of year.”

The Greenmount West community, where Code Blue is located, is opposed to the shelter remaining open past March 31. Darryl Lawson, a resident at Code Blue, points out, “Communities don’t want shelters and neither do we! We want houses that we can afford.” Baltimore City must stay true to the goals of the 10 Year Plan and keep Code Blue open in order to provide emergency shelter until the city can establish permanent, affordable housing for all.

Mike Gorrera, a Baltimore resident currently staying at the Code Blue shelter explains, “Homelessness is a housing problem. We need permanent, affordable housing, and we need healthcare and we need jobs that pay living wages so that we can take care of ourselves. We don’t want to live in crisis; we want to live in our own homes.” There are a large number of skilled tradesman and craftsmen in the Baltimore homeless community willing to partner with the city and rehabilitate thousands of vacant city-owned homes in order to use their own sweat equity to work towards a home of their own.

Organizers expect to see many members of the greater Baltimore community at Tuesday’s rally to demonstrate in support of permanent and affordable housing for all. The crisis of homelessness in Baltimore city does not belong to the three thousand or more Baltimore city residents who go homeless every night—homelessness is a communal crisis. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The best test of a civilized society is the way in which it treats its most vulnerable and weakest members.”