SHELTERING THE HOMELESS

For weeks District residents have been bombarded with repeated reports of the city's bungling of assistance for homeless families. When most people think of the homeless, they think of street people on grates and bag ladies on park benches, but in this case, the victims are women and young children.

In explaining the reasons for their mismanagement, officials seem to want to paint themselves as victims as well. In the most recent case, the city paid the whopping sum of $3,078 a month for each of 12 furnished Southeast apartments to house homeless families -- a cost that includes counseling services.

Audrey Rowe, the Department of Human Services' social service commissioner, explained that cost by saying: "If you've got people that you've got to find places for and you've got pressure on you and you've got everybody screaming at you that hotel costs are too high, you make some decisions for the short term."

But counseling services aside, the cost of rooms at a posh hotel would cost considerably less for a month than did these apartments.

Yet it was not only misleading to make it sound as if the city had no notice of the steady increase in homeless families, it was also wrong to suggest that there were no alternatives to the ad hoc solutions it devised to solve the problem.

As far back as August, news reports noted that the number of homeless families here had tripled. But apparently because the thermometer had not begun to drop, officials didn't gear up for action. By December, the number of families had risen by 500 percent. And what were the solutions the city came up with? In one case, it paid huge sums of money for slumlike conditions in The Annex, a rooming house where children shared restrooms littered with the paraphernalia of drug addicts, and then it suddenly found a multitude of options when hit by an embarrassing public spotlight.

Don't think, however, the District is alone in this ad hoc approach to sheltering homeless families. The U.S. Conference of Mayors noted that the problem was growing and made worse by the escalating numbers of poor people and the drop in federal funds for housing. "Virtually no city has a coherent plan," said Mitch Snyder,advocate for the homeless. "Some cities are simply turning the homeless away."

Indeed, the District's abominable situation is also akin to what is happening at the federal level, where no coherent policy exists to house homeless families. While Congress is considering legislation granting a $500 million package of aid for the homeless, a new comprehensive plan has recently been sent to Mayor Marion Barry Jr. The city's proposal calls for a combination of steps to prevent families from becoming homeless, including developing close relationships with landlords, providing extensive pre-eviction social services for families, and letting families know with greater efficiency what city services are available to them.

But other solutions should be considered as well. For example, should the city set up family shelters with supervised support services that would enable people to get back on their feet? For as the comprehensive plan acknowledges, the problem of sheltering homeless families goes hand in glove with the city's deplorable lack of affordable housing.

For example, some 213 persons are already on an emergency public housing waiting list, and 10,000 eligible people are on a list for the city's $15 million Tenant Assistance Program (TAP). And of 400 people who have been given certificates to help them pay their rent, 300 have not been able to find apartments to rent.

"It is true that the people eligible for the TAP program have not been able to find accommodations as quickly as they should," said James Banks, a member of the D.C. Coalition on the Homeless. "It is also true that some landlords are reluctant to work with the city . . . . Yet there are enough landlords who are willing . . . that we can make a big dent in the homeless family population."

Whether private landlords are willing to rent to homeless families remains to be seen. One thing is certain, however: Any comprehensive answer to the homeless problem will require not only an emergency shelter solution but also a housing solution that entails the cooperation of government and private sector -- a problem with which the mayor has to deal as well.

For in the end, the direction for solving this problem has to come from the top, and it is not clear that the mayor has made a firm enough commitment to pull in the financial and intellectual resources required to come up with good and realistic solutions. But failure to come to grips with the problem in a long-term, cost-efficient way will result not only in more bungled assistance but also in unending suffering of families.

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