Georgetown elected officials face blowback over how the city is dealing with the homeless population.
Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with Maggie Reynolds, reporter for Spotlight Delaware, about the underlying complaints and the electoral threat to the mayor and city council members.
The full interview can be heard on Delmarva Today 11-7-25 at our website delmarvapublicmedia.org.
RUSH: Some Georgetown residents are calling for the mayor and some of the city council members to resign over complaints about the homeless in the community. This is Don Rush. There are two organizations that have been involved in helping the homeless: Shepherd's Office and Springboard Delaware. We turn to Maggie Reynolds, reporter for Spotlight Delaware, who covers rural communities in the southern part of the state.
REYNOLDS: So there's kind of a coalescing of factors with a bunch of residents coming together under this group that they're calling Make Georgetown Great Again. And they're really angry at the town government, the mayor, and some of the organizations that aim to address homelessness in Georgetown. And so those people kind of feel like homelessness has just been skyrocketing in the town and nobody's adequately addressing the problem. And so they want to take down some of the members of the Town council and the mayor for their failure to handle it. And they also want to dismantle or reimagine some of the organizations addressing homelessness in Georgetown.
RUSH: What is their major complaint? Then?
REYNOLDS: There's two main organizations that address homelessness in Georgetown. One of them is the Shepherd's Office, which is a day center that gets food and does religious services. And then there's the Pallet Village, which is kind of a short-term, medium term place for people to stay while they look for long-term housing. And so they feel like those are just handout options to unhouse people that are allowing them to continue their lifestyles that these residents say that homeless people are choosing, that they want to continue using drugs and just want to get these free things. So they say that people will go to the Shepherd's Office for meals and then just create a lot of trash around the town with the meal packages, or they take clothing from the clothing drives there, and then just sell it somewhere else or something like that. And so people are being enabled to continue this disruptive lifestyle as they're calling it.
RUSH: Now, in terms of Judge Malone and the Springboard Delaware, what does he have to say about what he sees anyway?
REYNOLDS: I think he feels good about the success of Palette Village. He acknowledges that they've had some challenges with people continuing to use substances while they're living in the Pallet Village or getting into some disputes with one another. But his main argument is that the reason so many people continue to be homeless in Georgetown and in Sussex County is because there just is not an affordable housing stock, and the lack of affordable housing keeps growing. And so it's not that people are choosing to be homeless or something like that, it's just that they can't find a place to live. So he feels like this intermediate option that he's offering is really valuable.
RUSH: From an academic point of view, are these solutions that people are offering up, whether it's tickets or what have you, or fines, I guess there's another suggestion for that. Do they work?
REYNOLDS: I've talked quite a bit with a professor at the University of Delaware who studies homelessness named Steve Metraux, and Steve says that there's this threat oftentimes, or this argument that people have that homeless people in their town or city are not from that place, and that they are for some reason deciding to come to say Georgetown, because Georgetown has better services for homeless people. And Metraux says that that is not true, that the numbers show that homeless people in a place are usually from that place. They don't move somewhere else to be homeless. So the idea of writing bus tickets or criminalizing homelessness really isn't a super productive idea because it's not like you can write them a bus ticket home. They're from Georgetown. So the issue needs to be addressed in Georgetown with creating an expanded version of the Powell Village or more affordable housing stock or something like that, rather than just directing people to be homeless in another town.
RUSH: Maggie Reynolds reporter for Spotlight Delaware, who covers the southern part of the state. The full interview can be heard on Delmarva today at noon on WSDL and WESM. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
“First State in Focus” is a collaborative recurring news segment from Delmarva Public Media and Spotlight Delaware that aims to provide greater coverage of local issues to the visitors and residents of Sussex and Kent Counties as well as the beach resorts in Coastal Delaware.
