LAST OF HOMELESS LEAVE CAPITOL INN

NEW YORK AVENUE SHELTER WAS LABELED 'HELL-HOLE'

The Capitol City Inn, the city's largest motel shelter for homeless families, ended seven years of business with the District last night as the last two families living there packed their clothes and headed for new, private homes where the federal government will subsidize their rent.

Sadrudin Haji, who is estimated to have received more than $10 million in city funds over that time, said yesterday he plans to renovate the 200-room motel in the 1800 block of New York Avenue NE, for another commercial enterprise.

He would not say when he plans to reopen the complex, which is in obvious decay and was cited for a wide array of life-threatening fire code violations two years ago.

Angeline Parker and Jawanda Pearson, the two young mothers waiting for the last moving van yesterday, said they were glad to be going and celebrated quietly by splitting a quart of beer outside Rooms 207 and 205, their two-bed homes. Parker is the mother of four children, and Pearson has six.

"There's been a lot of pressure. They wanted us out," said Parker, who lived at the shelter for a year. "At least I got what I wanted. Half the people, who didn't get their paperwork done, went to other shelters."

"It was terrible," said Pearson, who is moving into a four-bedroom home in Northeast Washington. "Shelter life was not for me and my kids. Shelter life is not for nobody if they can find a place to live."

Once described as a "hell-hole" by a Superior Court judge, the shelter at Capitol City Inn was home for some of the worst social ills. Drug dealing and use were prevalent.

The closing of the shelter, often cited as the symbol of all that is wrong with the city's answer to homeless people, does not end the District's reliance on costly motels for overnight shelter.

Since its attempt this year to stop using the Capitol City Inn -- which cost about $3,000 a month for a family of four -- the city has begun renting rooms in several small hotels.

Evidence that the city government is taking a shell-game-of-sorts approach to the homeless caused advocates and city leaders, cheered by the news of the closing, to temper their congratulations. At least one, the director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, said she suspected the city has breached homeless families' rights in its effort to close the shelter.

Suzanne Sinclair-Smith, director of the legal clinic, said that for the past three weeks she has had complaints from families being evicted from the motel.

She said she has represented three families who were accused of drug abuse or breaking shelter rules and contended they were wrongly evicted.

Anita Shelton, executive director of the D.C. Mental Health Association, said monitoring by her agency has found that families were "hurriedly moved" into their new homes, some of which have housing code violations, and that many of the families had no chance at continued social services.

"We have a great concern that these people will just become part of a revolving door," Shelton said.

Capitol City Inn's closing comes almost a year after Mayor Marion Barry promised to close the shelter. Last December, Barry had vowed that by April the city would stop relying on the motel.

The city's social services and public housing staffs worked to try to move the families into public and private housing. They achieved some success -- placing more families in permanent housing than before -- but were overwhelmed by a continuing increase in the homeless population.

In the summer, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided 200 federal subsidy vouchers, called Section 8 certificates, for families at Capitol City Inn.

The city emptied the motel by relying heavily on public housing and enforcing a city policy that called for the eviction of drug users.

According to figures from the Department of Human Services, from April to October, 95 families were placed in public housing, 38 went to private housing using federal subsidies, and 34 were evicted.

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