THE SPEAKER FOR THE HOMELESS

Momentum, the political word used quadrennially for fast-gaining presidential candidates, is now being applied to those on the furthest margins of American politics, the homeless. Two pieces of legislation -- one providing $50 million in emergency funds, the other a $500 million long-term package of programs -- are rolling with the kind of momentum that seems to have sure thing written all over them.

Or so Rep. Jim Wright, the new speaker of the House, is betting. He is backing the two bills as strongly and visibly as possible, as well as bringing the rest of the House leadership with him. On Wednesday, Congress sent the $50 million bill to the president. In rallying support for both bills, Wright has done everything but spend a night on the heat grates with Mitch Snyder.

It was Snyder, currently in a statesmanlike mood that Congress much prefers to his snarling one, who persuaded Wright to visit the Community for Creative Non-Violence's 800-bed shelter near the foot of Capitol Hill. The speaker of the House didn't speak much in the poorhouse. Most first-time visitors don't. They gape, listen and wonder privately what kind of government and economy allow human beings to sink this low. At the shelter, Wright pledged that he would support -- no, speed through Congress -- a $500 million program for 1987 that would provide medical care and shelters for homeless citizens.

Either Wright is a born-again liberal looking for a lost cause or he thinks he can score a fast political victory that will enhance his new power. At the shelter, Wright said that $500 million is "not very much ... That's the very minimum thing, it seems to me, that we ought to try to provide for everybody." The sum, he explained in an effort to silence the carping of those who shout "Deficit| Deficit|" whenever a nickel is spent on something besides the military, factors out "to $2 per capita for our citizenry. I just don't believe that the American people would turn their backs upon the needs of their fellow Americans for a clean and warm and safe place to spend the night for $2."

Wright was at the shelter Jan. 10. Others in the House leadership, including Rep. William Gray, chairman of the Budget Committee, would also come by. On Jan. 27, Wright, in his televised reply to the president's State of the Union address, said the Democrats would do what the Reagan administration didn't: side with the homeless. Reagan, in his hymn to "we the people" that evening, did not include the homeless among his kind of people. Wright said that the legislation would be one of the House's three main political efforts in the weeks ahead.

The specifics of the proposal, as drafted by Reps. Mike Lowry (D-Wash.), Thomas Foley (D-Wash.) and Stewart McKinney (R-Conn.) and backed by 60 other House members, would provide:

An increase of $100 million to the $10 million now distributed under emergency-shelter grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

$100 million to use surplus government buildings to house the homeless. Half the money would be for facilities for families and children. Children are now being born and raised in shelters.

$100 million for rental subsidies, to be administered by HUD in its Section 8 low-income housing program.

$100 million for health care.

$70 million for emergency food and shelter programs as currently administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

$30 million for a transition housing program for group homes and supportive services.

The money is about 15 years late. It was in the early 1970s, when deinstitutionalization and the effects of the spending excesses of the Vietnam war were first felt, that church groups and religious orders began to inform the public that they could not handle the overload of homeless people. Then the media, after repeated shakings, awoke. Now the mayors, in whose cities there are currently more than 4,000 soup kitchens, shelters and food banks, are aroused. The National Coalition for the Homeless reports a population increase of 25 percent in 1986.

Though late, the zeal of the new House leadership is close to being unreal. A sum of $550 million has been the kind of money Congress orders untapped only when the Pentagon wants a new toy. Maybe the politicians are hearing it wrong, thinking the money is for the USS Homeless, a new Trident III submarine that will be needed when the Trident II is declared obsolete because it can only annihilate half of Russia.

If Wright succeeds and the homeless get their $2 from each citizen, the backers of the legislation who have come to Congress in recent years are in for a political first: voting for the poor and being on the winning side.

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