ALL BACK HELPING HOMELESS BUT DISAGREE ON WHERE

D.C. JUDGE HOLDS HEARING ON SHELTER STANDARDS

A plan to provide "fair, reasonable and adequate" overnight housing for homeless adults in the District was endorsed overwhelmingly yesterday by the homeless and by community leaders who voiced reservations about where new shelters would be located.

Superior Court Judge Harriet R. Taylor listened for two hours to residents commenting on a consent decree for improving city shelters that was negotiated a month ago by the District government and lawyers for the Community for Creative Non-Violence.

The decree establishes, for the first time, what standards the city must follow in providing emergency shelter under Initiative 17, which obliges the city to make overnight shelter available to those who request it. Taylor is expected to rule in two weeks whether the plan will be modified.

Many in the courtroom praised the order, but Taylor heard repeated complaints on a provision to house 54 more homeless men in trailers at either 14th and Q streets NW in the Logan Circle area or 14th and Irving streets NW in Columbia Heights.

"We have compassion and concern for the homeless and those who have fallen on hard times," said Tedd Miller, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission chairman in Columbia Heights. "But we want to do our fair share . . . . We would like to see the burden shared equally by the District of Columbia as a whole."

Business owners and residents from Northwest neighborhoods that encompass sections of 14th Street said their communities already were home to more emergency and group homes than other sections of the city. According to documents submitted by community groups, Columbia Heights contains 275 beds used for emergency shelter.

Grafton Biglow, a resident of Logan Circle, said he and others were increasingly frustrated by the city's reliance on his community.

"It appears the 14th Street and Logan Circle area has been designated by the District government as a dumping ground," Biglow said. "I have three kids, and it's almost impossible to raise children in this environment. When they {the homeless} walk around, panhandle, drop trash, they're taking away my rights as a citizen."

"We've been open to the homeless," said Jacqueline Reed, owner of a bed-and-breakfast inn at 1310 Q St. "But we just can't take this concentration. It's ruining our neighborhood."

Several homeless people cautioned their neighbors that they are not the problem. Theodore G. Thompson Jr., a retiree from the Air Force who is now a resident of the Federal City Shelter, said the city is using "a Band-Aid approach . . . . All of your efforts should be directed toward finding housing."

The proposed consent decree divides the city into five geographic areas to determine the location of city-run shelters and requires that each area be the site of at least 25 beds for emergency care.

The decree also requires that residents at the city's eight shelters receive clean linens, soap and toilet paper, live in properly ventilated quarters and be given as much privacy as possible.

It also obligates the city to open additional shelters for adults when existing shelters are at 95 percent of capacity for six days.

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