THOUSANDS MARCH ON MALL IN MASS APPEAL FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Tens of thousands of people, buoyed by music from marching bands and later entertained by the likes of Los Lobos, Tracy Chapman and Stevie Wonder, marched through Washington yesterday to demand greater federal government support for housing.

In what Housing Now! organizers called the largest housing demonstration since the 1960s, bricklayers from Pittsburgh, schoolteachers from Boston, small-businessmen from Florida and celebrities from Hollywood moved across a breezy, sun-splashed Mall in a show of support for legislation to increase housing subsidies.

"You are part of history today," said Barry Zigas, a coordinator for the march and president of an advocacy group, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. "We are here today because we believe any one person's homelessness diminishes us all . . . . We're here today because we believe housing is a right, not a privilege."

Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the NAACP, had a more direct message to politicians and managers of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has been mired in allegations of scandal this summer: "Tell them to stop stealing the money and start spending it on housing."

The number of people attracted to the party-like demonstration came into dispute later in the day as U.S. Park Police estimated that 40,000 trekked to the Mall for the housing rally. A total of 75,000 people were at the Mall and the Ellipse to see the rally, the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and other tourist attractions, they said.

Housing rally organizers had estimated that at least 100,000 would attend the rally and said late yesterday that based on the number of buses here from cities across the country, 250,000 had attended.

"Labor alone brought 1,500 buses with 40 people each," said Donna Brazile, Housing Now! organizer, in disputing the official estimate. "At the height of the rally, we had Third Street up to Seventh Street filled. The size of the crowd shows that housing and homelessness is the number one priority in the country."

Park Police Capt. Hugh Irwin, who has been estimating the size of crowds at the Mall for 15 years, said he was "very comfortable" with his estimate, despite Housing Now! rebuttals.

"We had officers counting and we know we had 27,500 come into the Mall from the Monument at Seventh Street and we had 8,600 come from the Pentagon," which was used as a second staging area for the march, he said.

"Our last meeting with organizers was on Wednesday and they said then 700 buses would be parked at RFK and 204 buses would be at the Pentagon," he said. "That itself adds up to no more than 45,000."

Irwin said the figure could be adjusted, however, based on ridership figures supplied by Metrorail officials later in the week.

Regardless of the actual count, the day was special for people such as Patricia Maye Wilson, a 43-year-old divorced mother from Boston who rode a bus nine hours to send a message to the White House and Congress. She lives in a subsidized apartment in Roxbury with her 9-year-old son, Amani. Wilson said she doesn't know when she'll be able to afford to buy a home.

"People in the federal government need to realize everybody is concerned about this -- whether they have a home or whether they're on the street," said Wilson, a public school teacher who works with children with special needs.

"I work with students who are homeless. And I know how hard it is. I'm proud of them for coming to school, holding on and still trying. I've had kids who literally sleep outside at night. And it's painful. It's very painful."

Debra Haley, 37, is paid $25,000 a year as a sales manager for an electronics company in Orlando. In her spare time, she volunteers once a month, on Saturday afternoons, at a soup kitchen. When she heard about the rally, Haley said she really had no choice but to foot the bill -- about $400 -- for a weekend in Washington.

"I'm a Republican and I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of my party and I'm ashamed of President Bush because he lied when he said he wanted a kinder, gentler nation," said the soft-spoken woman, who said she too cannot afford to buy a home. "I can't see how he can even justify buying five more stealth bombers at the price they are and not giving people a decent place to live. It doesn't make sense."

Natleen Chance, a D.C. Department of Human Services coordinator for transportation for the homeless, walked with her 10-year-old daughter, Leslie, to heighten both their perceptions of what goes on in the streets here. They have a nice home, she said, but so many others don't.

"She needs to see this," Chance, 41, of Southeast Washington, said of her daughter. "This summer, she played with some of the kids, the shelter kids, and it's a whole different aura. They need so much . . . . I'm scared to think what those children will evolve into.

"I can't imagine children who've had only hardship will be able to lead us. And they're our future," Chance said.

Those were the concerns of a crowd remarkable for its diversity.

Dozens of celebrities who have embraced affordable housing concerns -- entertainers Valerie Harper, Susan Dey, Rita Coolidge, Jon Voight and Esther Rolle -- met a crowd that was frankly more concerned with homelessness than Hollywood.

"TV later, housing now," the crowd roared in a spontaneous chant when Harper spent a bit too long introducing the West Coast crowd.

Homeless people brought in by buses from Brooklyn or from local motel shelters such as the Capitol City Inn stood next to college students from St. Cloud, Minn. Ronald Lints, 41, who is unemployed, said he had traveled from Cooperstown, N.Y., to Florida, and to a dozen other states before he ended up in a mission in Findlay, Ohio. With the mission workers, he stood listening to speeches yesterday.

"If Congress listens and if we say it loud enough and long enough, maybe something will happen," said Lints, holding a multi-colored cloth banner calling for "Affordable Housing Now." "Because I have been in 48 states and there are people sleeping out on the streets in every one of them."

Rally speakers, such as D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste, Jesse L. Jackson, Del. Walter E. Fauntroy (D-D.C.) and Coretta Scott King, chastised the federal government for cutting back dramatically on housing subsidies during the Reagan years.

"Let's tell President Bush to stop spending $300 billion a year for defense and give that money to the homeless, the elderly, the retarded . . . the American people," said Barry, who received a mixed crowd response and at one point was jeered at the rally.

Celeste, who roused the crowd throughout his speech, wondered aloud how the federal government found money to help homeless victims of Hurricane Hugo, which hit South Carolina and Puerto Rico and other islands last month, but could find no money to help the "homeless from Hurricane Ronnie."

"The real scandal is not the $4 billion" lost from the HUD scandal, "it is the $24 billion that was denied to the poor and the powerless who depended on HUD for housing," Celeste said.

Jackson criticized both Presidents Reagan and Bush for the HUD cutbacks and the scandal. "They cut the HUD budget 75 percent and then they stole the other 25 percent," Jackson said. "There should be {adequate} houses for the poor. There should be jailhouses for those who stole the money."

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