CALL TO REOPEN D.C. SHELTER

Advocates for the homeless and Hispanics called on District government officials yesterday to reopen an abandoned shelter in the Adams-Morgan community and put it under Hispanic management.

"We need a multicultural shelter that is run by a Hispanic group that understands the peculiar problems of the Hispanic homeless," said Juana Martin, excecutive director of La Mirada shelter on Irving Street NW, a facility that Martin said has often housed 170 homeless people in a shelter with 61 beds.

Martin and other homeless rights advocates, including Mitch Snyder, want the city to reopen the old Hines Funeral Home at 14th and Harvard streets NW, which was used one winter as a shelter and has been boarded up for the past two years.

Currently, the lobby of the Reeves Municipal Center at 14th and U streets NW is being used as emergency shelter for Hispanic and other homeless people in the Adams-Morgan area.

Martin said the community needs a more permanent facility to handle the overflow of homeless in the area, who she said sleep on the streets if they can't go to a shelter where Spanish is spoken.

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