Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, December 14, 1993                   TAG: 9312140275
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE HOMELESS

Providing basic shelter so people can survive is a worthy goal in itself, but offering shelters as a permanent way of life for large numbers of people is no solution. The cost is too great both to taxpayers and to the homeless.

With the Clinton administration's efforts to introduce personal responsibility into the government's social services formula comes a pilot program in Washington, D.C. It encourage "treatment resistant" homeless people to use available services that can help stabilize their lives and get many of them on track toward self-sufficiency.

In downtown Washington, which has a sizable homeless population, federal and local agencies will open two new 24-hour drop-in centers that will offer showers, lockers and free laundry machines. For their part, the homeless who drop in to take advantage of the improved facilities must agree to job counseling, mental health services or whatever rehabilitation program is necessary to get at the conditions and causes of their homelessness.

No participation, no services.

Skeptics say such a proposal is based on exaggerated estimates of the numbers of long-term shelter inhabitants, who tend to be disabled people and are often mentally ill. Most of the homeless, these critics say, are simply out of work.

Their numbers will decline when - and only when - the unemployment rate drops.

But the organizers of the D.C. experiment say that three-quarters of homeless single adults and one-fifth of homeless families have what social service agencies refer to euphemistically as "special needs." They need mental- health treatment and counseling.

The rest of the homeless will be offered more access to job training and more opportunities for affordable housing, organizers say. So even if the critics are right, the program promises to benefit not just those needing serious treatment intervention, but those whose homelessness is created by no disability other than joblessness.

And those who have spurned social services because they are disabled will be encouraged to seek help at the assessment centers by a coalition of specially trained police and volunteers from nonprofit organizations.

The merits of providing not just emergency shelter but counseling and case management to the homeless have been proven, year in and year out, at Roanoke's Transitional Living Center and in similar institutions around the country. It makes sense to encourage the homeless to view their condition as transitional.

Will the D.C. program secure work for all of the able, cure all of the mentally ill, put all of the addicted on the road to recovery? We all know it will not.

But if it can make a dent in any of those areas, it will improve the picture on the streets of America's capital. And it may offer a model for the kind of shelters, like Total Action Against Poverty's in Roanoke, that work.

With the onset of another winter comes a renewed sense of urgency to do something to get the homeless off the streets. The solution is not to sweep them out of sight, but to help them meet basic needs we all share - the need for shelter, snug and secure, and the need to make plans for a better future.