JUDGE REFUSES PLEA TO OPEN D.C. BUILDINGS TO HOMELESS

Despite testimony that homeless people would rather sleep on the streets than face filth and violence in city shelters, a D.C. Superior Court judge yesterday denied an emergency request for a court order to force the District to open city buildings as shelters through the holidays.

Judge Michael L. Rankin said he did not hear sufficient evidence that the city's estimated 10,000 homeless people would suffer "irreparable damage" if the court failed to order the emergency housing. A second court hearing is to be held Jan. 3 to consider the move by advocates for the homeless to force open more city buildings.

Sister Veronica Daniels, a registered nurse who works with Health Care for the Homeless, said Blair and Pierce, two of the city's shelters for men in Northeast, "are unfit for human habitation. They are lice-, scabies-, rat- and mouse-infested . . . . The men often have problems because they've been sleeping in urine." Health Care for the Homeless provides emergency care to street people and those living in shelters.

"The men are not treated with dignity," Daniels told the judge. "They're treated as though they're less than human . . . . The majority of the staff does not seem to have any compassion." Daniels recounted incidents in which she said she saw armed shelter guards deride and bully homeless men.

She said men routinely became infested with lice at the shelters and that their wounds became infected after they slept on filthy cots. Daniels testified that between October 1987 and last April, blankets were washed only once, even though different men used them each night.

Last winter, Daniels testified, two homeless men she had taken care of froze to death on the street after telling her they preferred the outdoors to conditions at Blair and Pierce.

"They just absolutely refused to go" back to the shelters, she said. "They feel safer and that they have a better chance on the street."

Five homeless people and the Community for Creative Non-Violence filed the emergency request under Initiative 17, a 1984 ballot referendum in which city residents voted overwhelmingly to require the District to open city facilities such as the District Building and the Convention Center to the homeless at night, regardless of weather conditions.

The homeless and those who work with them packed the courtoom, filling the seats, lining the walls and prompting Rankin to invite them to sit in the vacant jury box and even in the defendant's seat.

The city last night did open a 75-to-100-bed shelter for men at 14th and Q streets NW and a 50-to-75-bed facility for women on the grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital.

But John W. Nields, arguing for the homeless, said such measures don't begin to address the need. He cited a council-contracted study given to Mayor Marion Barry yesterday that estimates there are 3,000 to 6,000 homeless people on city streets.

"There's a significant number of people out there who want shelter and who are going to die if they don't get it, who are going to lose fingers and toes between now and next week," Nields said. "What the city is offering is simply not enough."

But Assistant Corporation Counsel Roberta Gross, representing the city, argued that the District is a "compassionate government" that has spent millions of dollars to provide shelter.

"The District of Columbia is taking on itself the almost impossible task of making sure that no one dies of the weather," she said. In an apparent response to Daniels' description of harsh conditions at city-run shelters, Gross said, "It's not a home. It's not an apartment. It's a roof over your head. It's heat. There's water . . . . No one is turned away."

In an angry outburst after the hearing, Mitch Snyder, director of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, shook a fist at the judge as he left the courtroom. "He doesn't have to pick up the remains out there when they freeze," Snyder said. "He's got a warm home to go to."

Then Snyder confronted Hawkins, yelling and shaking a finger at him until the bailiff ordered the activist out of the courtroom. "I think the judge has sentenced some people to die," Snyder said.

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