FOR HOMELESS, NO SHELTER FROM THE CUTBACKS

D.C.'S BUDGET TROUBLES THREATEN MODEL U.S. EFFORT

Bone-tired of sleeping in laundry rooms, squatting in abandoned apartments and bouncing around "from pillar to post," Stephanie Robinson showed up at 25 M St. SW one day last week and signed up for shelter.

Six or seven years ago, when the District guaranteed shelter for all in need, a government clerk would have placed Robinson and her three children in a city-funded "homeless hotel" and moved on to the next case.

But how things have changed.

All Robinson got this time around -- despite a model program for the homeless spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development -- was a waiting-list number and a bus ride to Hagan Hall, the city's hypothermia shelter for winter emergencies.

That is the contradiction, now that the D.C. government is out of the homeless business and a nonprofit group called the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness, funded jointly by HUD and the city, has devised a system for helping the homeless, not for warehousing them.

The city's sterile intake center for homeless families at 25 M St. has been transformed into a warm and caring "resource center." But with city funding slashed and the number of families in shelters down from 495 to 134, the waiting list stood at 470 families last week -- and was growing by the day.

Martha R. Burt, a researcher with the Urban Institute, recently concluded in an assessment of the Community Partnership's first year that the group "has made some remarkable progress" by providing the homeless with a rich array of counseling and social services aimed at reconnecting them with the mainstream.

But Burt said in an interview that the group still lacks resources and services for homeless families, adding that continued financial support from the city at its current level of $10.8 million a year is critical. Budget problems have left that support up in the air.

"If they don't get the $10.8 million from the city," Burt said, "they might as well just give up and go home; they're not even going to be able to run emergency services."

Robinson, 34, still remembers the old system, when voters in the nation's capital made it the first U.S. city to give homeless people an absolute guarantee of shelter.

"It was nice," said Robinson, who lived for a while in one of the hotels for the homeless downtown. "They gave you a room for you and your family. I don't know why they took away these hotels, because we really need them."

One of the reasons was that city voters soured on the shelter guarantee and rescinded it in 1990, amid reports that the city was paying lavishly for lousy accommodations. The District then had 495 families and 1,300 children in shelters and had budgeted $40 million a year for the program.

Another was a sense among experts, according to Burt's assessment of the partnership, that the city's previous "non-system" offered no more than "a continuing crisis response, providing a bed for the night but no hope, no direction, no motivation and no route to follow to move beyond emergency shelter toward leaving homelessness."

Enter HUD, which announced the so-called D.C. Initiative in June 1993. The plan: Turn D.C.'s shelter system over to a new nonprofit coalition, the Community Partnership, and make the District a national model for delivering services to a homeless population estimated at 7,500, including 1,500 people living on the street.

HUD committed $7 million a year to the partnership for three years over and above its regular funding for homeless programs. The D.C. government committed to maintaining its annual homeless spending at $14.5 million.

But the financial crisis forced the city to reduce that to $10.8 million earlier this year. And with Congress slicing even more off the city's budget, Sue A. Marshall, the Community Partnership's executive director, said that "we may be looking at deeper cuts." Congress also is debating plans to reduce funding for national programs for the homeless by as much as 40 percent.

"Philosophically, the partnership is on the right track, trying to divert people from the shelter system, if that's appropriate," said Patricia Mullahy Fugere, executive director of the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless. "But it's lacking the money to adequately address what is needed in the community."

Marshall agreed that funding cuts have hurt but said that all is far from lost.

With a budget of about $18 million, she said, the Community Partnership continues to provide emergency shelter for 1,100 single adults and, through improved street outreach, has significantly reduced the number of homeless people sleeping in public spaces.

One night last week, for example, there were just eight people sleeping in Lafayette Square across the street from the White House, according to Cornell Chappelle, the partnership's outreach coordinator. Three or four months ago, he said, there were dozens.

Stephen Cleghorn, the partnership's deputy director for programs, said the percentage of homeless men leaving shelters for more permanent arrangements increased to 30 percent from 4 percent this year after the partnership started requiring shelters to provide extensive social-work services. Previously, he said, city-funded shelters provided only cots.

Marshall said the length of time that homeless families remain in shelters has been reduced from more than a year to five months, with the partnership moving toward a goal of 90-day maximum stays.

And with only 134 units of emergency housing now available for homeless families -- compared with 495 several years ago -- Marshall said that intake workers are forced to separate the truly homeless from those who may have housing problems but don't need to be placed in a shelter.

Advocates for the homeless say the program's transformation has been remarkable.

Once a cold, sparsely furnished government bureaucracy, 25 M St. now has a play area and a constellation of services, including a clinic run by Health Care for the Homeless, a law office run by the Legal Clinic for the Homeless and a diagnostic center run by the Georgetown University Child Development Center.

Since May, 1,000 families have signed up for shelter. Judith L. Dobbins, of the D.C. Coalition for the Homeless, said that soon her staff will begin providing social work services to those on the waiting list. "When a family walks in in crisis, you embrace them," Dobbins said.

Theresa Kerrick, 27, a mother of three waiting since August for shelter, has noticed the change. Earlier this fall, she said, she and her children were put out by a family member, and now all her children have a variety of ailments, including asthma and eye problems. She has no Medicaid card to get them treated, she said, because she has no address.

But she says she's got something far more precious: Hope.

"The people who were here before, it was nothing but a job for them," Kerrick said. "They treated us real nasty. These people who are in here now, they care. They don't treat us like we're homeless -- they treat us like we're people."

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