WHO WILL SAVE THE HOMELESS?

IN THE WHITE HAZE OF AN OKLAHOMA city noon, slack lines of the city's homeless swelter against the wall of the City Rescue Mission, urban cowboys and native Americans figuring to spend the rest of the afternoon outside the Silver Dollar Motel and the Fun Arcade cadging quarters for coffee.

Inside the mission, its director, Mickey Kalman has just finished grace. The arm that in wilder days wielded pistols and knives and, since the Lord brought him around, the Bible, goes out toward a stack of government surplus wheat bread.

Beverly, his wife, is reaching for the corn chips, when Kalman suddenly brings his fist down.

"I don't like the new poor|" he says. "I don't like 'em|"

There is a moment of silence. Beverly washes down Hawaiian Punch, clears her throat.

"They're not responsible," she says quietly. "They come in here to say, 'You have to take care of me.' That isn't why I work here. I work here because I work for Christ."

The homeless bring it on themselves. To end homelessness, change the people.

WHY IS THERE A GODDAM SHELTER system in this country?" Chris Sprowal asks, careening his weathered camper down some of the meanest streets in Boston. "Why is it growing at the rate it's growing? This is exploitation. But it's by the professionals, so they don't call it exploitation, they call it control."

Once on the street himself, Sprowal has started a union for the homeless and begun a crusade to shut down or incapacitate lousy shelters wherever he uncovers them. Ever since his Committee on

Dignity and Fairness for the Homeless got rolling in Philadelphia last year, its "locals" around the country have been giving folks like Kalman a hard time.

"If overnight we could close every shelter in this country, we'd be happy," Sprowal says as he bounces his mobile organizing headquarters the wrong way down a one-way street.

The are victims of the system. To end homelessness, change the system.

NOT SINCE SUPPLY-SIDE ECONOMICS OR the nuclear freeze has an issue generated more heat and, some would argue, less light. Homelessness is what Hollywood would call "high-concept": It's vivid, packs an obvious moral punch, and who, after all, is in favor of people living on grates?

There's something in homelessness for just about everyone. Fundamentalists like Kalman can glean in the dispossessed the apotheosis of sin; radicals, like Sprowal, the nadir of a crumbling capitalism. Democrats can blame it on Republicans for gouging housing and welfare programs, while ignoring their own culpability in courting the downtown redevelopment that has displaced their poor. Republicans, in turn, can blame the Democrats for the debacle of deinstitutionalization, while finessing the moral uncertainties of selling off HUD properties to the highest private bidders.

Millions contributed to Hollywood's $2.5 million "Comic Relief" telethon or held hands somewhere between Long Beach and Battery Park in Hands Across America last May, celebrating a new kind of chic. America is printing T-shirts and tote bags and buttons. It is clearing out its closets, attending benefit fashion shows and buying homeless-made crafts at church bazaars.

From out of all this a handful of men have emerged -- some by dint of achievement, others because of a flair for the footlights -- asleaders of something that could be roughly called the homeless movement. Cultivated by "Donahue" and People magazine, awarded MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants, and made the subjects of TV movies, they now spend much of their time dashing to yet another microphone, another rally, another VIP cocktail fundraiser, relying more heavily than ever on their agents, public relations consultants and staffs to follow up on the loose ends.

What isn't clear is what the homeless have to gain from all this. Every social and political movement has its factions and feuds, its militants and moderates, be they Roy Wilkins and Stokely Carmichael or Kate Millett and Betty Friedan, but rarely has there been a collection of spokesmen for a single cause whose political and personal styles make it so difficult to find common ground. What this leadership offers up is not so much an agenda for solving the problem, but a personality parade. The only thing they all agree on is that billeting human beings in the moral equivalent of kennels won't eradicate homelessness.

This lack of consensus has made symbolic action a substitute for hard policy choices: At a recent conference hosted by the National Coalition for the Homeless, for instance, the only motion that clearly carried was for a 24-hour candlelight Christmas vigil. And one of the biggest moves planned for 1988 is a cross-country march of the homeless, to be led by Mitch Snyder, that will end in Washington, where both presidential candidates will be pressed to pledge that every American has the right to a home.

Of course, it is possible that symbols are all America is prepared to contemplate these days. But it's also possible that theatrics and seductively simple solutions to the problem have obscured another homeless movement that's taking hold at the grass-roots level, far from the glare of publicity. All across the country well-meaning amateurs and visionaries like Sandra Brawders at Washington's House of Ruth, are picking up the throwaways of a bankrupt Great Society program and doing the work that was supposed to have been done by state and federal governments. With little money and less expertise, they are creating a new human service network, and signaling the first serious realignment of social values since the post-Vietnam disillusionment, and solipsism, of the '70s.

What they offer is a social philosophy that is at once humane and pragmatic, that casts neither the system nor the homeless as villain, and an approach to homelessness that has been far more effective than the rhetoric and schemes of the movement's public figures. Yet discerning their voices amid the discordant chorus of prima donnas is often difficult. To do so, it is necessary to pass through the dressing rooms of the stars, as it were, and to see past the limitations of the familiar repertoire.

EVERY MORNING AT 8 O'CLOCK ALBERT J. Salmon, his hair impeccably slicked to one side of a flawless part, opens his Bible in front of about 35 street people in North Charleston, S.C., and begins to preach. To a man, the members of his audience have agreed that they want to give their lives to the Lord. They have signed a contract to that effect. They have found Jesus.

They have promised, furthermore, to follow Salmon's highly structured regimen of daily Bible classes, prayer and manual labor. As a condition of this commitment, they aren't permitted to leave the property for the first 30 days of their stay, they can't smoke indoors, and they risk missing a meal altogether if they arrive after the blessing. The kitchen is locked against poachers during off-hours.

"We've got pages and pages of sort-of rules," says Salmon's wife, Paula.

In other clauses of their contract, these soon-to-be-hallowed homeless have agreed to work without pay ("I'll be doing these jobs as unto the Lord,") and to subsidize the mission, as they are able, to the tune of $55 a week. ("Either upon entering the program and/or as I have grown and am able to procure a job and/or I am receiving financial assistance from outside sources.") Some stay six to eight weeks, others as long as four months, using Salmon's mission as a launching pad into Teen Challenge, a national 14-month Christian-oriented drug treatment program.

Outside the chapel in which Salmon is invoking Romans II, the sound of cicadas is everywhere. An old Coke machine lists on the porch of the baby-blue antebellum inn, around which sprawl the six bungalows, the trailer on cinder blocks, the overgrown lots and the worn blue school bus that make up the material domain of the Good Samaritan Mission.

Until homelessness "arrived," gospel missions like Mickey Kalman's in Oklahoma City were the only places in most cities where transients could lay their heads. The motto of the International Union of Gospel Missions, "Soup, Soap, Salvation" always meant a sermon before meals.

For a time in the early '80s, after big-city shelters and churches first opened their doors to the homeless, the missions were eclipsed, and even scorned, by the more secular advocates as hopelessly old-fashioned in their reformist zeal. But that was only until the revitalized fundamentalist Right, seeking converts more aggressively and with a greater sense of political mission than their forebears, rediscovered in the mission tradition the common roots of its own philosophy as well as a way to establish a presence in the cause. Which is where Salmon and his mission come in.

Missions like Salmon's, spinoffs of the gospel missions, abound in the Bible Belt. Some of them boast the most rigorous rehabilitation and counseling programs in the entire shelter field. Others just offer "three hots and a cot." They are fiercely autonomous, which explains the range in services, and have little use for coalitions. They are afraid, explained J. Robb Bartlett, a shelter director in Oklahoma City, "of being swallowed up by Big Brother."

What makes their critics uncomfortable is not the fundamentalists' programs (or lack of them), but rather their assumptions about the homeless. Fundamentalists view the homeless as sinners, as degenerates lacking in judgment and, often, even dignity. Such an attitude makes it possible to justify absurd responses to their plight. In Arizona, for instance, fundamentalist church groups send buses to local shelters on week nights and drive loads of homeless men to midweek prayer meetings, considering their obligations thereby fulfilled.

Even where fundamentalist shelter directors have a more enlightened outlook on the needs of their guests, as do the Salmons, the assumptions remain, breeding condescension and authoritarian control.

"Probably the biggest problem is -- I don't know if it's just laziness or lack of character," says Paula Salmon. "They've never been made to work hard. They've never been made to be honest. I think with their time in the Bible each day, it softens their heart and it helps them to face up to the truth. They can say, I have sinned."

I'M CALLED THE SPOKESMAN OF THE movement," the man in the Army jacket and blue jeans is disclaiming at Giant Food Inc.'s headquarters in Landover. "I'm better known in this city than the mayor. And this shelter has become the symbol of the strength of the homeless movement in America."

Barry Scher, director of public affairs for Giant, takes this in for a minute at the head of the conference table. A few years back the guy sitting across from him was arrested out in the lobby for dumping all over the floor groceries it was Giant's policy to throw away. Now here he is asking for a million bucks without blinking.

"Yeah, but Mitch," Barry temporizes, "why should someone want their name on the wall of a shelter that no one but street people will see?"

Mitch Snyder doesn't move, but it's as if something has just detonated quietly inside of him.

"Because," he begins slowly. "Because half of Congress, the president of the United States, and the world's press are going to be there when it opens. That's why. This will be the highest profile shelter of its kind in the country. You're gonna raise a million bucks for the Red Cross, and you'll get four lines of print out of it."

Several minutes and a tentative commitment later, Snyder passes through the well-polished lobby and swings out of the air conditioning, muttering, "We've gotten painfully responsible."

Mitch Snyder is a genius at wresting concessions from recalcitrant allies and foes alike, often by bullying, embarrassing, or hassling people out of their minds. In many ways, he's the movement's enfant terrible, mantaining control of situations by keeping people guessing what he's going to do next. Mercurial isn't the word; canny is more like it.

More than one loyalist views Snyder as the movement's saint, and it's easy to understand how this persona has won him the affection of millions.

Whichever characterization -- manipulator or saint -- you buy, no one argues against the notion that Snyder is the cause's most influential figure. The question at this point is whether his tactics can effectively direct a mature movement.

Snyder has earned his reputation as the movement's superstar of extravagant political gesture. He has endured near-suicidal hunger strikes, occupied the National Visitors Center with homeless people, and served Thanksgiving dinner to hundreds in Lafayette Park opposite the White House, all feats immortalized in last year's made-for-TV movie "Samaritan."

Like Albert Salmon, he harbors millenial impulses. But unlike Salmon, who is happy converting the sinful individual, Snyder wants the souls of all of America. He wants to reform a society whose values are "irrational and inhuman and very dangerous," a society that produces war and homelessness. In his mind, this goal requires eliminating as many barriers between the victims of evil and its perpetrators -- society.

Snyder sleeps on a shelter cot in a concrete cubicle that contains only that and a small bookcase. The food he eats (like his homeless friends, only water between breakfast and dinner), the clothes he wears and the automobiles he occasionally drives are all donated. For four months in 1985 he even lived as one of the homeless on the streets.

Until everyone in America can effect the spiritual transformation necessary to be able to do what Snyder has done -- until, in his words, "in theological terms, you would call it the coming of the Kingdom," he insists that the federal government pick up the slack by feeding, clothing and sheltering the homeless.

If this messianic approach seems less than promising as the basis for a national agenda -- the most concrete embodiment of Snyder's beliefs -- the shelter where he lives is to his critics even less of a model. At the D Street shelter there are no intake procedures, no rules and no rehabilitative programs, because Snyder and the community have always regarded such formalities as responsible for the barriers they are working to eradicate.

Leaving aside the economic implications of institutionalizing this type of laissez faire approach to the homeless, the human results could best be described as mayhem waiting to happen. The D Street shelter more closely resembles, ironically, the benighted big-city warehouse shelters than it does a "model" of hospitality and spiritual renewal. Six hundred to a thousand men drift in and out of the barracks-like building every day. Those too depressed or drunk to move idle on cots that are jammed into rooms and along corridors where walls have been smashed in by previous guests. Violence erupts without warning and there are no consistent responses to it. Sometimes it's dealt with, sometimes it's ignored. Renovations currently under way will change some of this, satisfying some of his critics, and counseling, medical care and detox programs will be offered for the first time.

Snyder is the first to admit that his role in the movement isn't as an administrator. Instead he claims, with justification, that he has raised the consciousness of a nation about what he sees as its most serious problem. But lacking a concrete and practical agenda, it is unlikely that he could emerge as the leader to take the movement beyond the realm of symbolic acts and, by his own admission, he still prefers the anarchy of "resistance" to aligning himself with anyone else's political program.

"We don't work in coalitions," he says, "because working in coalitions means finding a common denominator. We don't believe in finding a common denominator. We believe in carrying our beliefs to their logical conclusions."

IF SNYDER IS THE MOVEMENT'S guerrilla,Robert M. Hayes is its career diplomat. An East Coast liberal who wears seasonally correct suits and broadcloth buttondowns, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant, and at 33, the movement's most important legal mind.

"This cause has to have a centrist angle," he says, pushing his wire rims up his nose. "We need lightning rods, and that's Mitch's job. And we need to be aggressive. We need to do it, though, in American ways."

In other words, go to court. Only the government can establish legal rights for the homeless, or erect low-income housing, or provide the jobs programs on which a long-term solution to the problem depends, Hayes argues. And the best way to do that is to sue the government, an art that Hayes has perfected.

Hayes won his first favorable ruling for the homeless in New York City in 1979 while he was an associate in one of Wall Street's most prestigious law firms, Sullivan and Cromwell. The ruling, known in the movement's parlance as a right-to-shelter decision, established for the first time government's responsibility for the homeless. Under the new decision, New York City was required to provide a bed for every person who sought one. Not long afterward, Hayes left his law firm and founded the National Coalition for the Homeless.

On the face of it, right-to-shelter lawsuits have accomplished what no amount of political theater could. Courts from West Virginia to California have begun to agree that local governments have legal obligations to provide, among other things, decent shelter, welfare housing allowances and, most recently in New York, separate quarters for families.

Hayes' long-term strategy is to use these decisions to persuade cities that it's cheaper to provide long-term housing than it is to maintain exorbitant, court-ordered emergency programs.

The shortcoming of this laudable concept is that there are plenty of ways for cities not to get things done. For one thing, judges have been chary about getting too specific in their decisions about issues like square footage and sanitation standards, issues that make the difference between a quality shelter and a disease-ridden, rat-infested dive. As a result, Hayes often finds himself spinning his wheels, running after court orders and injunctions to try to ensure that the rulings are enforced.

The other problem, he acknowledges, is that lawsuits don't build the one thing besides shelter that the homeless need most: a constituency.

Partly to offset this weakness, Hayes has begun to turn to legislative initiatives. His first was an omnibus bill introduced into Congress this past summer. The Homeless Person's Survival Act of 1986 was the collaborative effort of more than a dozen national organizations, including the Children's Defense Fund, the American Psychiatric Association, and Catholic Charities USA. Its provisions range from minor changes in existing welfare regulations to major investments in public housing and emergency relief. Unfortunately, like all of Hayes' projects, it would cost the kind of money government isn't willing to spend these days. The bill carries a price tag of $4 billion annually, if all its measures were to be enacted.

Not surprisingly, therefore, no one in Congress is making the bill a serious priority. When Maria Foscarinas, the National Coalition's Washington staffer, sought sponsorship for the bill, "People were interested," she says, "but just didn't believe that it was possible to gather support for this kind of effort in the era of Gramm-Rudman. And a lot of people said that although they were very sympathetic, they couldn't take the risk, politically. Because it costs money. And it costs money for poor people, who are not a powerful voting block -- as was explained to me quite bluntly."

CHRIS SPROWAL IS PATIENTLY KNOCK-ing on the kitchen door at a women's shelter in Boston, and patiently explaining to a staff member on duty that he'd like to come by later and talk to the guests about the homeless union he has spent the last year trying to organize. When would be convenient?

"Well, uh, I'll have to talk to the director about this," the staffer falters, somewhat overwhelmed by Sprowal's massive physical presence and unexpectedly quiet voice. "Was she expecting you?"

No, she wasn't.

"Fine," he patiently answers, preparing to depart. "When can we get back to you?"

Sprowal is furious. Once again, his advance team hasn't done its homework. And once again some shelter type is making decisions she has no business making -- about whether to "allow" her guests to be exposed to new ideas.

In Baltimore, bad advance work had virtually killed a convention held there to start a local homeless union. The Boston organizing convention last summer was Sprowal's seventh since he began his union movement a year ago, and he had hoped to get a turnout of several hundred who would agree to sign union cards and contribute $1 a month in fees ($5 if employed).

"One of the things that Bob Hayes will readily admit to you is the lack of process in legal action," he says, sauntering back to his camper. "It takes people out of the process and as a result, people don't have a sense of involvement."

Sprowal doesn't have that worry. Involvement is a passion with him. In the past year, the former hospital workers union organizer has led teams of homeless men and women into Philadelphia's fountains protesting the lack of public showers, and into Tucson's city hall, in a takeover to demand better services.

Sprowal, the only prominent black in the homeless movement has a simple agenda: self-determination for homeless people. "Housing, jobs, health care, educational programs, pension programs," he says, "that's where we want to see money spent." Not -- repeat, not -- on more shelters.

The union concept is admittedly somewhat anomalous, given that the organization has no concrete labor agenda or issues to negotiate. In fact, Sprowal himself is so radical that he views negotiation as counterproductive. Instead, Sprowal's modus operandi is confrontation, and his weapons, homeless people. This would appear to put him in Snyder's ideological camp, but nothing could be further from the truth. He rejects totally what he regards as the self-serving nature of Snyder's agenda.

"That fight Mitch was having with the federal government over $5 million {to renovate the D Street shelter} -- we think there's something sick about that," Sprowal says. "How many houses could you build for that kind of money? How many people could you put to work with that kind of money?"

And he thinks homeless people, not self-styled "advocates" or Wall Street lawyers, are in the best position to efficiently demand what they want.

There aren't many natural alliances that spring from this philosophy. Those who might be his greatest allies, shelter providers, are usually the target of union boycotts and picket lines, often during the organizing period to create interest in, and attendance at, the founding conventions.

And beyond the questions of alliances and political strategy, Sprowal's critics question the ability of inexperienced groups of homeless people to translate such vague themes as "educational programs" into concrete local agendas. They question, too, the justice of Sprowal's claiming that an amorphous union will truly change their lives: many observers have noted that union members on picket lines, or in city government offices they have stormed, are often too agitated, angry or bewildered by what's going on to effectively make any progress toward resolving the problems that plague them. Finally, they question Sprowal's refusal to acknowledge the associated problems of street life -- drug and alcohol dependency and mental illness -- that make self-determination so difficult.

"Sprowal has a hard time acknowledging that a significant number of homeless people need more than housing and jobs," Hayes says. "The most intractable question is once you've got people in housing how to get them to be wholly independent. That is tough, I think."

Undeterred by his critics, however, Sprowal plans a nationwide campaign in the late fall that will include having union members occupy vacant luxury towers in New York City and Chicago. "Every room that's vacant there we're going to take," he promises. "I think the kind of programs that are going to come out of there are going to turn this country upside down."

ON AN OPPRESSIVELY HOT SUMMER afternoon in Washington, the phone won't stop ringing in the grammar school at 10th Street and D NE that was reincarnated nine years ago as the House of Ruth. A staff meeting is in progress and despite the heat and chaos, attention is focused on a woman in the shelter who has particularly difficult problems.

"You mean she's the only one in the house without a key?" asks Sandra Brawders, executive director of the House of Ruth, Washington's largest shelter for women. The color rising in her cheeks, she reaches distractedly for another wrapped chocolate, but her eyes never stray from the face of Martina Kornagay, the house manager.

The woman without the key is schizophrenic and the victim of multiple sexual assaults. She has been running around the shelter with no clothes on.

"She's acting out," says Brawders. "She feels like she's being punished."

Kornagay shrugs and looks at Joyce Abrams, the other house manager. The key had been denied the womanafter she broke house rules and disappeared into the night on several occasions, leaving the door unlocked and the house insecure. "What should we do?" Kornagay asks.

"We'll have to take away everyone's key," Brawders says. "That's the only fair thing we can do."

Her staff, former homeless women among them, agree. They concoct a scheme intended to make none of the other women feel deprived abruptly of a privilege, and move on to the next order of business.

But it's an undesirable outcome, Brawders feels. You can see it in her face, in the way she occasionally shakes her head. In the back of your mind, you remember her saying, "I wanted to find the roots of things. Why this was happening to people." That's why she decided to leave teaching high school English and history classes and study theology and ethics. And why, in the end, she couldn't accept the pre-masticated answers the organized church offered up on the subject. "I really don't believe that the poor will be with us always," she says. "They are here because there's a lack of action."

Brawders knows that without the kind of affordable housing Bob Hayes is urging on cities, many of her shelter guests aren't going to survive the struggle in low-paying, marginal jobs. And she agrees with Chris Sprowal that homeless people must be free to make their own choices about their life styles, jobs and relationships. She even agrees in principle with Snyder that until public consciousness is raised, most Americans will continue to respond to the problem passively, sentimentally or ineffectually.

But she also knows that these laudable -- even achievable -- ideals, are meaningless as soon as they become detached from the recognition that homelessness isn't just a material condition, and that a renewed sense of trust, belonging and self respect are as critical to the recovery from homelessness as is having a key to your own place.

Brawders exemplifies the unexamined face of the homeless movement. It is composed of businessmen turned shelter directors. It is Fairfax County housewives volunteering as housing advocates, Harvard undergraduates feeding the hungry in Boston soup kitchens, and a military school physical education instructor in Charleston, S.C., who requires his students to volunteer several nights each semester at a local shelter as part of their coursework.

Without even being aware of their counterparts across the country, these individuals have arrived at a common view about the nature of homelessness, a

continued on page 48 sense of which solutions work, and a philosophy of service that goes well beyond the symbols and single-issue solutions offered by the movement's leadership.

The locus of this phenomenon is the nation's small private shelters. Most are less than 10 years old and have their origins in church basements and community halls. It is here, in these modern-day poorhouses, that the people who work most closely with the homeless have been forced to confront the complexities of its causes. Their shelters are the halfway houses that never materialized for deinstitutionalized populations. They are home to poor women and children whose welfare checks couldn't meet the rent hikes, to families caught in the collapse of local economies, to runaways, to the elderly poor. In time, the people trying to help them to get back on their feet have come to understand that a common experience cripples all of them in one form or another. It is the experience of disconnectedness.

"Each era defines poverty in its own way," says Bartlett, the Oklahoma City shelter director, and one of the most articulate spokesmen of the grass-roots movement. Unlike the movement's messianics who seek the Apocalypse, and unlike those who are working, either by peaceful or violent means, for the revolution, Bartlett says the concept the grass-roots movement finds most instrumental is the notion of "social poverty."

"What that means is that to be poor is to be living without access to the self-help and support systems, the clean, healthy social environment of a neighborhood, access to education, to health care, to job-skills training, to family models. That's what it means to be poor these days, and it really has little to do with economics."

Instead of lobbying for big government spending, then, these people see their main task as rebuilding the broken ties, connecting the homeless not only to the medical resources, counseling and survival skills that middle America takes for granted, but to middle Americans themselves.

Call it what you will -- the thinking man's response to human service budget cuts, or shame over the blind spots in a trickle-down economy -- this philosophy views community-based shelters as crucial to the elimination of homelessness. The shelters these people run and volunteer at provide more than just a bed until a permanent housing spot or job placement comes along. They offer an opportunity for rehabilitation, a first step toward a renewed sense of self-worth and belonging.

When Brawders took over the House of Ruth two years ago at the age of 36, she established an innovative program of rehabilitation unequaled anywhere in the country. It is rare in blending pragmatism with almost limitless amounts of caring, and doing so where even the most sanguine advocates have said it couldn't be done, in a large urban shelter.

As a first step, she divided up the shelter population, creating five specialized shelters in separate locations, convinced that she wouldn't solve the problem of homelessness until she was able to address the distinct needs of each homeless individual.

"You'd come in and there were all these reasons for homelessness facing you all together," she explains. "You couldn't ever get at what's the primary reason you're homeless. Abuse? Economics? 'I'm pregnant.' 'I got thrown out' or 'I haven't got the money' or 'I have an infant and nobody can take care of my kid while I take a job.' "

Brawders created a shelter for pregnant women and women with newborns, and another for abused women and their children. She also established a handicap-equipped elderly abused women's "ward," off the main foyer of the large emergency shelter -- the only handicap-accessed shelter for women in the District, a remarkable fact, given the high percentage of homeless women who fall victim to disease, physical deterioration, and street violence.

Finally, Brawders turned one house into a transitional shelter, and began gearing guests to the idea of sharing an apartment with several other women, rather than seeking one completely on their own, an option too costly for most poor single women in the District.

"Once we separated a little bit, it seemed a little clearer who we were trying to serve here," she says.

Her second major innovation was to extend the permissible length of stay from seven weeks to 10 months. Most women's shelters around the country have a five-day to two-week residency limit. Men's shelters have an even shorter limit, often just overnight.

At each house, counseling and classes go on all day long. Participation is voluntary and completely individualized. For instance, young inner-city gang members and prostitutes are given job counseling, interview skills and understanding of financial management, as well as the encouragement to ease themselves out of dead-end situations. New mothers are provided with day care so that they can find jobs.

Brawders' third innovation is the centerpiece of the rehab programs, the work adjustment program. No other shelter in the country has such a well-developed -- and sensible -- program for reintegrating the homeless into the economic world. When women become eligible, in their own eyes and those of their counselors, they move into the transitional house and take a job at the shelter where they are paid $3.50 an hour, 40 hours a week, with benefits. By contrast, most shelters pay their homeless guests 20 cents an hour to do menial labor -- or worse, require them to work around the shelter without pay.

At this stage, the women also begin to go out into "the real world" again, to movies, and out to dinner (says Brawders, "No one has ever told these women they are beautiful before") as they get ready to take the final step into independence. (By contrast, most shelters pay their homeless guests 20 cents an hour to do menial labor -- or worse, require them to work around the shelter without pay.)

No one is forced to work. The women move at their own pace. "We're talking about women we're trying to teach to make choices," Brawders says. "If you're trying to teach choices, you can't be a hypocrite and make everything mandatory."

Solutions that focus exclusively on housing and jobs fail to recognize that having a home means more than having a key to your own place, according to adherents of this viewpoint.

"You know, we pay a lot of attention to what the big guys from the East are saying, guys like Mitch Snyder and Bobby Hayes," J. Robb Bartlett says, then pauses. "You have to understand that they're dealing with a whole different situation than we are."

What he means is that they don't have much connection to what he's about. He respects them, but what matters to Bartlett is a concept of home that incorporates the quality of connection, the quality that was lacking for many of the homeless before they became homeless, and one that he thinks is best achieved in contexts like his. "I think the most good can be done in small, private operations, like we are," he says.

It is for this reason that ordinary members of the community, volunteers, are so important to these grass-roots activists. They aren't surrogates; they are real friends and neighbors. People like John Carter, a physical education teacher in South Carolina who volunteers at a Charleston shelter, believe that private citizens are the only ones who can provide the sense of community needed by homeless people. In fact, he argues that the homeless are walking proof of what government can't -- and, even with money, doesn't -- do.

"You let the government handle the problem and you don't care what happens," he remarked as he was dispensing towels to homeless men one hot summer night at the Charleston shelter. "It's one thing to say, there's a hundred people homeless a night and staying in a shelter. It's another thing to identify each of those one hundred, and know that they're human beings, and know that those human beings feel."

Whether it's handing out a food basket, making sure a homeless child gets to school every day, or simply holding a lonely old man, "It's the unconditionality of everything," that distinguishes private, volunteer efforts from bureaucratized operations, riddled with constricting regulations. "There are no conditions placed upon your worth as a human being," says Spencer Ledbetter, Vista supervisor for the Jesus House, an Oklahoma shelter similar to that run by CCNV. "And for transients and people that are without, or people who find themselves displaced, I think that means a lot more. I really do."

At the House of Ruth, overcoming alienation is a major focus of the staff's efforts. A sort of loving tension is maintained between achievement and expectation, encouragement and the acquisition of concrete skills. It is illustrated, for instance, in the way one staffer asks a shelter guest to show a visitor her hand sewing work. For the homeless woman, the display is at once a gesture of trust and a statement of pride. Quick and engaging, she reveals exquisite garments that she created with consummate skill out of fabric that was donated to one of the shelter's workshops. And, once on the road to self-sufficiency, the homeless women at the House of Ruth know that Brawders and the staff are there to help them follow through.

"Most women, when they start succeeding, sabotage their own success," Brawders says. "So we'll say, 'Look, when you start calling in {sick} , I'm going to come over and get you out of bed. When you start doing drugs on the job, I'm going to suspend you for a week, and then you're going to come back and work here, because I'm going to find you and bring you back here to work. It's not a tough love. They've already experienced all the tough love they're going to need. They need just the opposite -- that I can holler at you, but you're gonna stay here and we're gonna work this out." While this might seem to contradict the uncontrolling attitude that prevails at House of Ruth, it is in fact an expression of caring that most of the women haven't experienced before.

"Working it out" at the House of Ruth carries on seven days a week, 24 hours a day, with a staff of 32 and a corps of a hundred volunteers.

"I can't imagine doing it any other way," she says. "It's just an ethic I grew up with. My Irish grandmother always treated our house like it was a hospice and a birthing place. It was always my role model of how you treat people."

Her results have been staggering. Within two years, she has reduced her recidivism rate from 80 to 40 percent. And once the women got out the door for the last time, they know they are welcome back anytime -- for a visit. But chances are better than 50 percent that when they return, they won't have to stay.

The House of Ruth and its counterparts around the country are not a naive or parochial expression of local do-goodism. And they don't represent a return to the mission model of the '30s in modern guise. They are much more than that, based as they are on a complex understanding of the nature of homelessness and in the commitment to eliminate it with concrete, and practical, programs.

And for all her inspiring dynamism, Brawders is far from unique. There are Sandra Brawderses and J. Robb Bartletts and John Carters in almost every city in the country. It's just that their approach until now just hadn't been dramatic enough to attract much attention. One of the chief apologies for the failure of large-city shelters to provide humane and personalized programs is their size. But the House of Ruth, the largest shelter for women in a city with one of the most serious homeless problems in the country, gives the lie to that argument. As Brawders herself says, most failures boil down to a lack of action.

Brawders knows that massive federal spending, or a new War on Poverty program, isn't going to happen in the near future, and that if it did, it would almost surely destroy the rich and diverse experiment that shelters like hers have been engaged in for the past few years. What she sees in the current situation is an opportunity to approach a social problem the right way, on its own terms, drawing on the wisdom gained in the failures of the Great Society programs instead of recreating them. In her view, locally designed and administered shelters, relying on volunteers, are the best basis from which to develop the constituency and the framework for the transitional houses, and affordable permanent housing, that will be necessary components of a permanent solution to homelessness.

The program isn't quick, and it isn't tidy. It doesn't make for neat political packaging. But those who have chosen to approach the problem of homelessness on its own terms believe that the only hope for preserving the qualities that matter is to build social change from the ground up, rather than from the top down.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.