EMERGING 'CITIES' COULD REDUCE BURDEN OF D.C. SOCIAL PROBLEMS

As the population of homeless people, drug addicts, prison parolees, the mentally ill and the retarded saturates the District, it is encouraging to find that other "cities" are springing up in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Now is the time for them to assume their share of this burden.

For too long, the District has attracted a disproportionate number of wanderers simply because it had more office buildings from which they could panhandle and more heating grates on which they could sleep. Few homeless people beg along a suburban subdivision tract, when there is a Dupont Circle in town.

That may change. According to a report Sunday by Washington Post staff writer Joel Garreau, there are 14 emerging cities in the Washington metropolitan area, from Columbia to what may now be called "greater" Leesburg.

An emerging city is one that has at least 5 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of retail space, more people commuting into it than out of it each day and more jobs than housing.

Most important, in my view, is the qualification that "it must be perceived by the public as 'having it all' -- being an end destination for mixed use: entertainment, shopping and jobs."

"Having it all" should include adequate facilities for the area's population in need of residential treatment facilities.

This is not an attempt to rush the suburbs into a state of urban blight. It's just that residents of the District are aware that they did not produce all of these people with problems. They also know that police and human resources personnel from Maryland and Virginia have picked up homeless people in those jurisdictions and dumped them in the city to avoid responsibility.

The entire metropolitan area shines in the symbolism of activist Mitch Snyder's sympathy for the homeless, but it has been the District that has been most aggressive in dealing with the reality. The city already has 550 residential treatment facilities -- more than 9,000 beds. Plans and hearings are under way for more.

But no amount that the District provides will be enough to deal with the onslaught that the region faces.

The new cities of the suburbs will bring to light the poverty, displacement and homelessness that already exist in those areas but that have so far been hidden around malls and back roads. The ongoing crunch in the District will make it less attractive for the suburban poor to migrate into downtown.

The new cities could learn a lot from the old D.C., which is desperately grappling with the integration of an unprecedented number of deinstitutionalized people into its neighborhoods. The key is space -- and planning. When residents have been given ample time to discuss the pros and cons of accepting a facility into their neighborhood, when they feel the place will be properly run -- and safe -- there is little opposition.

But this kind of communication and cooperation is rare, for there is so little time and so little space that people are literally being dumped out onto the streets.

The result has been a scramble to find the cheapest facility, which means that too many facilities end up in particular neighborhoods, destroying the character of those neighborhoods.

Sometimes, an ideal facility is rejected simply because residents feel it had been forced on them. One District neighborhood already has nine residential treatment facilities. When Mount Pleasant neighborhood residents recently came out in force in opposition to a proposed drug treatment facility there, it was part of a growing feeling among city residents that enough is enough.

Such sentiments are understandable because the populations of Forest Haven, St. Elizabeths mental hospital and the Lorton Reformatory are a part of the metropolitan community. The new space and financial resources of these new suburban cities could help the metropolitan area out a lot.

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