SPEAKER PLEDGES AID FOR HOMELESS

WRIGHT TOURS D.C. SHELTER, NEGOTIATES END TO SNYDER VIGIL

House Speaker James C. Wright Jr. (D-Tex.) condemned the Reagan administration's past efforts on homelessness as "insensitive" yesterday as he toured the District's largest men's shelter after negotiating an end to a six-week vigil on the Capitol grounds by advocates of the homeless.

Wright was escorted through the 800-bed shelter at 2nd and D streets NW by Mitch Snyder, head of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, whose members have been camped on the Capitol grounds by a statue honoring the homeless since Thanksgiving. Snyder said that Wright's "compassion" and a bill to provide $500 million for homeless shelters that was introduced Thursday in Congress ended the need for the protest.

Snyder said the statue will be moved as soon as a location is found.

The tour and the vigil's end occurred after Wright dispatched aides to the statue Friday night to summon Snyder to meet with him.

"This is what we had been waiting for," Snyder said of the meeting.

Wright promised to push for early passage of the $500 million bill for homeless shelters plus an emergency food aid bill. The administration's proposed budget for 1988 includes $100 million for the homeless.

"Ours is the more realistic figure," Wright said of the higher-priced measure, "but I'm heartened he's {President Reagan} at least recognized the reality and the importance of the problem."

Wright, elected speaker last Tuesday, described Congress as "not quick enough or insistent enough" in dealing with the homeless crisis. But the administration, with its cuts in low-income housing and lack of financing in the past, "has been insensitive to the problem," he said.

Wright began his tour by stepping over a cat sprawled in a worn hallway lined with elderly men sleeping or sitting on canvas cots. He described several of the large sleeping rooms as "grossly overcrowded" and walked through a wing that is under renovation with $6.5 million in federal funds. When finished, the six-person rooms will bring the shelter's bed total to 1,100.

"There are a great many buildings like this in communities around the country that should be used to shelter people," Wright said.

He described the desperation of homelessness in his home state of Texas, where he said he has talked with unemployed workers seeking day jobs and selling their blood to buy food.

"The comfortable and polite middle-income people have not wanted to focus on this problem," he said. "It's natural that you want to turn your head and avert your eyes . . . . But at the very heart of any society that considers itself humane are those who are afflicted. These too are precious children of our land."

Wright said hearings on the $500 million bill will begin Feb. 11 before the House Banking and Urban Affairs Committee. Whatever the sum, aid for the homeless cannot be appropriated in time to help this winter. Wright said he is confident the congressional bill, rather than the administration's budget proposal, will prevail.

"Five hundred million is $2 per capita for our citizenry," he said. "I just don't believe that Americans would turn their back on their fellow citizens for $2."

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