D.C. BILL TO LIMIT AID TO HOMELESS MAY CRIPPLE RIGHT-TO-SHELTER LAW

The District government's escalating tab for sheltering homeless families in hotels has triggered a controversial D.C. Council bill that local advocates for the homeless fear may gut a landmark law guaranteeing overnight shelter to all who need it.

D.C. Council member H.R. Crawford (D-Ward 7), the bill's author, has revived a debate over the scope of city services to the homeless by making it plain that he wants to weaken the city's right-to-shelter law, a far-reaching initiative approved by D.C. voters in 1984.

Crawford's proposal includes limiting a homeless family's stay in an emergency shelter to 180 days and reducing the amount the city is allowed to spend on shelter. He views his proposal as one of several "compromises" needed to ease the shelter law's "awful impact" on the city.

Also, Crawford's bill would exclude families who have received 30 consecutive days of assistance from another program, would require families receiving public assistance to pay for some of the services they receive, and would prohibit any family from refusing an offer of permanent housing as long as it is sanitary and secure.

Sheltering the city's large population of homeless families is one of a number of major social issues facing the city, and Crawford, as the new chairman of the D.C. Council's Committee on Human Services, will be heavily involved in all of them. He has signaled plans to exercise heavily the broad authority his committee chairmanship gives him, and he is well aware that he makes social program activists nervous.

A landlord, a property manager for more than 20 years and a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development official during the Nixon administration, Crawford says the negative reaction to his shelter bill is partly because of his image -- created by the media, he says -- as "some bad guy who is coming along trying to take away things from people in need."

Crawford maintains that the city, which spends about $90 a day to shelter and feed a family of three, is wasting thousands of dollars by allowing families to stay in shelter hotels for months. The city spent about $3.7 million last fiscal year to house homeless families and expects to spend $1 million this fiscal year on hotel bills alone.

Crawford says the city has failed to use its resources. For months, the District has been trying to spend $15 million set aside for a rent subsidy program for which 10,000 qualified applicants are on a waiting list. In addition, Crawford said he discovered 410 unused housing vouchers issued to the city's housing department by HUD. A HUD official said that the vouchers are worth $10 million in rent subsidies and that the city was notified recently that it must use or lose the vouchers.

"We're using D.C. taxpayers' dollars on emergency shelter, and it is going to drive our taxes through the wall if we don't stop it," Crawford said. ". . . I think it is criminal the amount of money we're paying now for shelter, and I want to dissociate myself from it. I'm going to get my bill passed, and nobody is going to be put on the streets."

Although a typical stay in the District's emergency shelters ranges from 74 to 90 days, some families have stayed as long as a year. Housing activists say that the long stays are because of the shortage of low-cost housing in the District and that they oppose Crawford's measure because it fails to attack this underlying factor.

"I think the bill tends to be punitive in nature," said Tony Russo, executive director of Conserve, a nonprofit group that helps homeless families find shelter. "The assumption behind that bill is that families don't want to move out {of the shelters} , and we haven't talked to any families that want to stay there."

Russo and other critics say Crawford's proposal is contrary to the spirit and intent of Initiative 17, approved three years ago with 72 percent of the vote. Several jurisdictions, including New York City, Philadelphia and West Virginia, have right-to-shelter policies, but the D.C. initiative represented the first time that a group of American voters had ordered their government to guarantee overnight shelter to all the homeless.

Mayor Marion Barry's administration has lost several legal battles in an attempt to invalidate the law, and it has until next week to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.

"I think what Mr. Crawford is trying to do is put a cap on the city's response to homeless people, and I think that is unconscionable," said Mitch Snyder, a nationally known advocate for the homeless and leader of the Community for Creative Non-Violence here, chief sponsor of the initiative. "I see {Crawford} attempting to carve out a role of a public official who is fiscally responsible and maybe fiscally conservative."

Crawford characterized his critics as "liberals yelling at me because they don't believe me when I say no one is going to be put on the streets." He called the criticism premature and said he has an extensive plan for housing the homeless, including asking landlords to accept more homeless families -- and, if they refuse, declaring a state of emergency and taking over their buildings.

Crawford said he plans to introduce a measure to create 400 housing units for homeless families, 50 units in each ward. Families without a permanent place to go at the end of a 180-day emergency shelter stay would be placed in these shelters, which would be leased or purchased by the city and subsidized by federal and city funds, Crawford said.

Crawford said his proposals revolve around making better use of housing programs and shifting funds spent on emergency shelters to job training and other social programs.

Since he became human services committee chairman in January, Crawford has lambasted officials for housing homeless families temporarily in a "posh" downtown hotel next to the World Bank and has tried to reduce the fiscal 1988 budget for the city's emergency shelter program by $1 million to force the city to decrease its reliance on hotels.

"In many instances, we have supported measures that have not served the public and didn't take into consideration all of the housing resources available," Crawford said. "We have got to work at changing that, and we can't do it by whistling 'Dixie.' I can't let all the advocates plan my legislative agenda."

When District voters adopted Initiative 17, the District government housed 68 homeless families in emergency shelter hotels. Last week, the city's two shelter hotels housed 237 families, including 577 children.

Ricardo Lyles, chief of the D.C. Office of Emergency Shelter and Support Services, said he is unable to say whether the influx of homeless families is "driven by Initiative 17" because many of the families say they are not aware of a right-to-shelter law. Still, he said, the existence of the law has made it virtually impossible for the city to evict the homeless from hotels.

New York City, which has the oldest court-ordered right-to-shelter policy, houses 4,887 homeless families, 3,621 of them in a network of 65 hotels, said Suzanne Trazoff, spokeswoman for the New York Human Resources Administration. Trazoff said that families are not given a time limit and that the average stay is 13 months. At least 180 families have been in the shelters between three and four years, she said.

D.C. Council member John A. Wilson (D-Ward 2), a member of the human services committee, agreed that there is a "dire need" for low-cost housing in the city. But he said he is willing to consider a limit on shelter stays because he believes that Crawford is trying to create a sense of urgency in the Barry administration and because Crawford is convinced that housing is available.

"If this bill passes, there had better be some housing available, because {otherwise} we would have an absolute disaster on our hands," Wilson said.

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