D.C. SHELTER PROGRAM ATTACKED ON ALL SIDES

CLAMOR RAISES QUESTION OF PLAN'S VIABILITY

It was the talk of the fall meeting of the Foggy Bottom Association: six trailers to be used as emergency overnight shelters for more than 100 homeless men and women were being planned for a slice of city-owned land just off the Whitehurst Freeway.

People who live and do business near the Kennedy Center were upset. The location, at 27th and I streets NW, was too close to high-speed traffic, they argued. The number of people to be housed was too high, they said, and the trailers would draw even more homeless people to an area that had its share of street people living beneath overpasses.

"You're dealing with highly vocal, articulate, intelligent people," Elayne DeVito, group president, said after the meeting last week. "And I don't think they're going to let it rest here. There will certainly be a lot more noise made."

Join the roar.

In the next few weeks, the Barry administration will face off over the homeless issue with neighborhood groups opposing additional shelters in their area, and with the courts, the D.C. Council and advocates for the poor whose funds are jeopardized by city budget cutbacks.

All are clamoring that homelessness in the nation's capital has become a crisis that threatens to ravage this community's fabric and its future.

What rises from the debates is heightened awareness of the impact of a vote, taken five years ago in the District, on legislation known as Initiative 17. Approved overwhelmingly by the city's residents, the initiative mandated the city to provide overnight shelter for anyone who requests it.

Since that referendum, which created the District's Right to Shelter Act, the city has filled nine shelters for single men, three shelters for single women and five privately-contracted motels with hundreds of families. D.C. shelters house about 6,000 homeless people. An additional 1,200 live at the shelter operated by the Community for Creative Non-Violence and an unknown number live on the streets.

The cost of providing care for the homeless has jumped from $4 million in 1984 to $27 million this year. The price tag in the 1990 budget tops $32 million, with nearly 75 percent of the money paying for family needs.

Despite this expense, some say the city still has not adhered to the intent of the law. Today, lawyers for the District will again be in court defending the city's shelter program.

A group of single homeless individuals sued the city this year alleging poor, unsanitary and unsafe care in its shelters. The city and the homeless group came to an agreement last spring that gave the city until this week to improve its adult shelters and to provide extra space whenever existing shelters became nearly full. The court agreement also said the city was to create a plan to provide shelters in five service areas of the city.

Attorneys for the homeless, headed by John W. Nields Jr., a former majority counsel of the Iran-contra congressional hearings, say the city has again fallen far short of its goals.

They note that the city is only now publicizing the establishment of a few new shelters -- such as the first ever planned near Georgetown off 27th Street -- and that poor conditions still exist elsewhere. The city should be fined daily for having such disregard for the law, they contend.

That court battle, as well as anticipated debate among council members this month over the city's handling of the homeless, underscores a question posed by Mayor Marion Barry when voters went to the polls in 1984: Initiative 17 is certainly a good idea but is it a workable one?

The District has been criticized for carrying out Initiative 17 in a way that has driven up its cost. But one city official said the government can't control the cost because of the way the initiative is written.

"One thing that needs to be done is a modification of Initiative 17 that does not back off the commitment to provide shelter care," said Sue Marshall, the mayor's coordinator for homeless services in the city. "But we need flexibility to allow us time to place people . . . . The real problem here is the lack of affordable housing. To the extent we provide overnight emergency shelter, we're not providing housing. And that is largely driven by Initiative 17."

"I don't think Initiative 17 should be thrown out," said Anthony Russo, executive director of ConServe, an innovative nonprofit home placement service that helps people in shelters get private apartments. "It's a far-reaching bill that, in some ways, the District should be proud it has. But I think advocates and District officials have the responsibility to sit down and try to make it work for everyone."

Russo's $300,000 program, acknowledged by city leaders and homeless advocates as one of the most successful bridges for people leaving shelter space and trying to be self-sufficient, was gutted last week in a city budget cut.

The reason? City officials said ConServe, and another group called New Endeavors for Women, which operates a home for single homeless women that also received $300,000 in city funds, were providing "transitional" shelter, not "overnight emergency" care.

The court agreement, which the city is still trying to obey, demands "overnight emergency" shelter. In effect, ConServe and such programs, which provided counseling and monitored participants' progress, were doing more than the court order demanded and more than the city was willing to pay for in light of the court order, according to city officials.

In letters to Russo and New Endeavors last week, the city said neither would be funded anymore. ConServe's funding was to be cut off by the start of this week and New Endeavors officials were told they had until December to close their program. New Endeavors' base of operations, a city-owned building at 611 N St. NE, is to be filled with beds in a few months to provide emergency care only, according to a city bid request released last week.

Homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, who runs the Community for Creative Non-Violence shelter and who instigated the vote on Initiative 17 in 1984, said that by cutting programs such as ConServe, city leaders are seeking to avoid a mandate they never wanted to follow.

"The city is {enforcing Initiative 17} bitterly, so therefore, it's doing it badly," Snyder said. "Obviously $600,000 doesn't break the city. The effort here is to pit shelter against shelter."

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