HOMELESSNESS FRUSTRATES DISTRICT'S BEST EFFORTS

MOTEL SHELTERS STILL HOUSE MANY FAMILIES

Nearly a month after the deadline D.C. Mayor Marion Barry set for closing the Capitol City Inn, the city's largest motel sheinsertsihome to hundreds of people who have nowhere else to go.

About 160 families live in the two-story motel off New York Avenue NE despite an unprecedented five-month cooperative effort by housing officials and social service workers to find alternative housing for the homeless.

Why can't the city close the Capitol City Inn, Pitts Motor Hotel, the General Scott Inn or Budget Motor Inn, costly shelters the mayor wants to empty because they provide little more than one-room homes for children and their parents?

The short answer is a matter of simple arithmetic. The number of families channeled into such housing of last resort keeps rising and "there's no other place to put them," said Suzanne Sinclair-Smith, director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

In 1984, 550 families sought shelter in the District. In 1988, 1,230 lived in motel shelters -- at a cost to taxpayers of $3,000 a month for a family of four. Right now, 440 families are in shelters around the District.

The long answer encompasses several variables, according to people trying to help the homeless. Among them are: Initiative 17, the city's mandate to provide overnight shelter for homeless persons; too little affordable housing; landlords and politicians who don't want the poorest of the poor in their buildings or neighborhoods; and a lack of support services to keep families afloat so they won't have to return to shelters once they leave.

"It's overwhelming and now the drug epidemic is compounding our problem," said D.C. Council member H.R. Crawford (D-Ward 7), chairman of the council's Human Services Committee.

In the past two weeks, federal marshals have evicted 209 households suspected of drug use. Human services officials have said an increase in evictions, often based on nonpayment of rent, may well be sparking an increase in the number of homeless persons.

In the first three months of this year, 337 families were added to the list of people seeking shelter. That was 22 families more than at the same time last year. But the city has handled the crush more effectively than in previous years.

By the end of March, homes had been found for 390 families, more than triple the 103 families placed during the same period last year.

Specifically in the case of the Capitol City Inn, the city began in December trying to locate housing for the 190 families there, but by the end of April it still had 176 families at the motel.

"We've made diligent efforts," Roland L. Turpin, acting director of public and assisted housing, said in an interview this month. "But despite the best efforts that the Department of Human Services and we have made, more people keep coming into the system."

As it has tried to keep the promise the mayor made in December to close the Capitol City Inn, the housing department coordinated its effort with the the Department of Human Services for the first time. Human Services workers screened shelter residents and determined which families would be best suited for any housing that became available.

The housing department took advantage of a new federal regulation that, since January, allows persons living in emergency shelters to be put at the top of the waiting list for public housing. About 7,800 people already are on the public housing waiting list.

The housing department renovated 175 public housing units and began relocating the homeless families there. Of the 390 families placed in the first three months of this year, 90 were placed in public housing apartments, 105 were placed in private housing subsidized with federal or local funds, 47 were placed in unsubsidized private apartments and 20 were placed in transitional shelter apartments or homes.

About one-third of the homeless, however, left the shelter system on their own or simply are unaccounted for, according to statistics from the Department of Human Services.

It is these "unaccounted" homeless who pass through the city's motel shelters who are beginning to trouble people such as Sue Marshall, coordinator of the mayor's effort to close Capitol City Inn. Marshall said she believes a high recidivism rate, caused by people who leave the shelters to live with family members or friends and then become homeless again within weeks or months, may be skewing the statistics on homelessness.

"I couldn't find anything to quantify that, but based on what we're seeing in the shelter, I think that's true," Marshall said.

A recent study by the city and the Greater Washington Research Center has found a "strong, troubling link" between families that share residences and those that become homeless..

Nearly half the 495 families who became homeless between January and May 1987 and were living in city shelters had been sharing homes with relatives or friends before they entered the shelters, according to the study.

When asked why they became homeless, one-fifth of the families said they had to leave because of crowding. Another fifth indicated that they became homeless because of a family dispute, according to the study titled "Doubled-Up Households in the District of Columbia." Human Services officials believe the others lost their homes because they weren't good tenants: They didn't pay their rent. Landlords around the city are leery of accepting families whose last addresses were shelters because they suspect they won't be good tenants.

One Virginia-based developer, Tom Gallagher of Edmondson & Gallagher Construction, said the city has contacted him about moving families from shelters into new apartments in a 408-unit complex in Southeast Washington.

Gallagher said he has accepted about 20 low-income families so far but none were from shelters.

"The city's support programs for Capitol City Inn are nonexistent," he said. "You just can't take entire buildings and say we're going to put all poor people here. It won't work." Similar reasoning persuaded council member Wilhelmina J. Rolark (D-Ward 8) to help stop the Department of Human Services' plans to move 50 families into a privately owned building on Brandywine Street SE. Rolark, who has complained repeatedly at council meetings about the city's inability to close Capitol City Inn, said she sees no contradiction in her stand against relocating the families.

"It looked like they were going to reinstitute another Capitol City Inn in another area. That's just not fair to the community or to the people being relocated," she said.

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