A NIGHT ON THE GRATES

Why did 10 congressional colleagues and I spend one night on the grates as homeless people do night after night? Was it a glitzy gesture, a sort of latter-day radical chic? Did I learn what it was like to be homeless? Will a night on the grates achieve a legislative victory that might have eluded us?

These questions were put to us last Tuesday night and the morning of Ash Wednesday by reporters and onlookers. And these same questions were raised again in a Post editorial {March 4} .

The grate at Second and Independence streets SE became our accommodation for a night because Mitch Snyder invited us. He has been sleeping there since Thanksgiving. He is using the same nonviolent methods he used to get a local building for shelter to push Congress for funding to meet the national emergency of homelessness.

The explosion of homelessness among us is not an artifact of the media or Mitch Snyder. It has been documented in countless studies, most significantly by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which has reported increases in demand for emergency shelter every year since 1983 and forecasts more this year.

Missouri, New York, Massachusetts and Maryland have produced the important studies and analyses of the homeless population. Seattle (King County) and Minneapolis-St. Paul have equally good data. All these studies indicate a crisis. Clearly, state and local governments and private sector resources are stretched to the limit.

In hearings in New York, San Francisco, Houston and Washington, the House Select Committee on Hunger gathered data on homeless persons, those most vulnerable to hunger because they have no way to store or prepare food. Other committees have amassed comparable data. One thing is apparent: the homeless population is growing more diverse.

More and more families lack a home. There are families in shelters in which a father or mother goes out daily to work. There are also more young people among the homeless. A core group of drug addicts and mentally ill persons remains, although only a small percentage has been previously institutionalized.

The "Grate American Sleepout" coincided with action on the Urgent Relief for the Homeless bill (HR 558). The bill's provisions, based on hearings of three subcommittees, were carefully crafted. Negotiations were intense as it made its way to the floor. It may be possible to come up with only $500 million in fiscal year 1987, but it does not come easily, and we don't have it yet.

Last June, I introduced the Homeless Persons Survival Act. It is a comprehensive and costly bill ($4 billion). It contains what an advocacy community of 65 organizations believes is needed over five years. Nine small bills emerged from this bill. They covered physical and mental health, food assistance, housing, education of homeless children, homeless youth, Social Security and veterans issues.

A bipartisan effort included certain no-cost provisions of the "Survival" bill in the Omnibus Drug Bill passed last October. I reintroduced the bill in January and some of its provisions are in HR 558. Help for the homeless is coming bit by bit through a tedious legislative process, not instant solutions.

The coalition of advocates for the homeless is now working for passage of HR 558 with Mitch Snyder in the vanguard. The "sleepout" brought publicity and new momentum to help Americans who are going through hard times. It reminded the public that something is wrong when after 47 months of recovery there are more homeless people than ever.

At 6 o'clock on Wednesday morning, as I stood grateful for "grate" warmth, three high school students from Montgomery County came up to me. Joy Chen, Debby Wise and Adrian Alleyne had come to enlist "celebrity" support for a fund-raising concert planned by Students Together Overcoming Poverty (STOP). These students are typical of people all over the country who feel a personal responsibility to those who are less fortunate. The Urgent Relief bill backs them up with a national response.

Homeless people are suffering from a myriad of circumstances: from gentrification and redevelopment that gutted stocks of low-cost housing, from a minimum wage that has stayed at $3.35 an hour since 1981, from Draconian cuts in programs that formerly carried them through bad times. It is better to ameliorate their situation bit by bit than not at all: $500 million is more than symbolism.

In one night on the grates with friends, I could gain only a bare inkling of what homeless people endure. I am haunted by their invisibility, their loneliness. Who remembers Emmitt G. Vaughn, a homeless man who died alone one dark November morning, when he was crushed by a truck whose driver did not see him huddled in the entrance to a public garage?

The writer, a Democratic representative from Texas, is chairman of the House Select Committee on Hunger.

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