TRAILERS FOR HOMELESS GAIN BACKING

D.C. HOUSING ADVOCATES URGE TIME LIMIT, CARE ON LOCATION

D.C. housing advocates voiced guarded optimism yesterday about a proposal to house homeless families during cold-weather months in trailers that would be located in a city park or on federal land.

D.C. Council member H.R. Crawford (D-Ward 7) has recommended that the city rent about 200 trailers, some of them recreational vehicles, to reduce the high cost of housing families in hotels. Under Crawford's plan, each trailer would be occupied by one family, whose members would be required to cook their own meals. Currently, city hotel shelters provide meals for families.

"What we are doing now is providing everything {for families} and it is getting expensive," Crawford said. "It is not in the best interest of the general public to spend that kind of money."

The city now spends about $100 a day to feed and house a homeless family of four in a shelter hotel. Crawford estimated that the city could rent the trailers for $200 a week each, or $1 million overall for the cold-weather months. Under Crawford's plan, families would rely on their income and food stamps to provide their own food.

Randy Minor, a Neighborhood Legal Services lawyer who has represented homeless families in disputes with the city, said the trailers could be a big improvement over some of the city's past efforts to house families, including placing families in a former high school gym.

"If the families would be able to cook and shop for groceries, that would foster independence," Minor said. "The trailers would also give families private space where their possessions would be secure and where the family could be alone."

At the same time, Minor and other advocates stressed that the real solution is permanent housing and that the benefits of using trailers would depend largely on where the trailers are located.

"I hate to criticize a new and creative effort," said Susanne Sinclair-Smith, a lawyer with the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, "but I am concerned that this could turn into a situation where {the homeless} are shipped off and out of the public eye so that people don't have to deal with them."

Sinclair-Smith said major transportation problems could arise if the trailer site were not close to schools, shopping areas and jobs.

Crawford said he plans to explore the possibilities of using a city park or federal land for trailers but he is not yet recommending a specific location. The council member said he hopes that by spring, when the trailers are retired, the city's network of transitional and permanent housing for the homeless will be large enough to absorb the families.

Meanwhile, officials in Los Angeles, where trailers have been used, said finding land that is suitable for families and politically acceptable may be the District's biggest obstacle.

Since last year, when Los Angeles purchased 102 trailers, the city has used only 24 of the trailers and has been forced to store the other 78 at a cost of $5,000 per month, said Deputy Mayor Grace Davis.

Davis said public housing tenants initially rejected a plan to place the trailers on their properties "because they feared it would increase the criminal element in their area." At the same time, pressure on city officials from neighborhood residents made other sites unacceptable, she said.

Davis said she recently has persuaded some public housing tenants to accept some trailers after emphasizing that the homeless families are just people who are facing hard economic times. Other trailers, she said, may end up on church parking lots.

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