BARRY DEFENDS HOMELESS PROGRAM

JUDGE REJECTS CITY'S REQUEST TO SCRAP COURT-ORDERED IMPROVEMENTS

D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, facing court orders to improve the city's homeless program, yesterday defended local government efforts to provide shelter and other services to the growing population of homeless people.

"We are looking at this problem comprehensively," Barry said, adding that his administration is "not a Johnny-come-lately to the whole issue of homelessness."

Flanked by nearly a dozen of the key officials involved in the city's homeless program and a series of charts, Barry told a news conference that he had been "too modest" about the quality of the District's homeless program. He said that the city spends more per capita on the homeless than any other city -- about $27.3 million last year to provide services for an estimated 7,513 people.

As Barry was presenting his views to reporters, D.C. Superior Court Judge Harriett R. Taylor amplified and amended the order she issued last Saturday requiring major improvements in the city's homeless program. In her ruling yesterday, Taylor turned down a request from the city that she delay or abandon the earlier order.

But she deleted her previous requirement that the city protect the property that homeless people bring into emergency shelters, and she said the city need not create new shelter space for homeless single women beyond the 50 beds recently opened in the District Building at 1350 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

Along with her revised order, Taylor released a pointed summary of the conditions of the city's homeless:

"Many homeless persons spend the night on the street because of the lack of available overnight shelter; many others do so because the shelter space purportedly available to them is grossly inadequate."

Homeless people without shelter "face serious imminent injury . . . including . . . beatings and other assaults, rat bites, and tuberculosis."

"With few exceptions, homeless single persons who sleep on the street . . . do not do so by choice. If there were safe, clean and accessible shelter for them, they would take advantage of it without hesitation . . . . {But the city's permanent shelters} are virtual hell-holes."

At the Barry news conference, Peter G. Parham, director of the city's Department of Human Services, said that spending on the homeless program has risen from $9.2 million in fiscal 1985 to $27.3 million in fiscal 1988. The number of homeless people served has increased from 4,423 in fiscal 1984 to 7,513 in fiscal 1988, Parham said.

"Our position is that both the numbers served and dollars expended are essentially 'uncontrollable,' " Parham said, because of Initiative 17, a 1984 referendum passed by District voters. The initiative requires the city to "provide health-maintaining and accessible overnight shelter space" to all homeless persons.

Barry told the group that he favors "refining" Initiative 17. "I voted against it, not because I didn't care, but because I knew it would come to this point, {that} it was uncontrollable," he said.

Mitch Snyder, an advocate for the homeless whose Community for Creative Non-Violence had sought the court order along with several homeless persons, said that city costs for the homeless program are higher than necessary because, among other things, "they stuff them into hotels like Capital City Inn, which is a rat trap which costs them thousands of dollars."

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