WHY CLOSE A MODEL SHELTER?

EVERYBODY who sees it is high on New Endeavors by Women, a transitional program for homeless women. HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, who visited the clean, bright building at 611 N St. NW last week, was no exception.

Kemp spent almost an hour with a dozen residents as they went through their morning "Reflections," a daily exercise in their newly structured lives. They talk about what they have been and what they hope to be.

Alumna Michelle Wilson told a riveting story of a previous life of addiction and trying to find a job while living in a city shelter -- "you couldn't go to work with bugs."

"I prostituted myself -- I would do anything to get the hell out of there," she explained in a husky voice. "Here you don't have to prostitute yourself."

She now works at the American Bar Association on a homeless project.

Another recovering addict named Lorena spoke of the "intelligent ladies" in NEW and "positive vibes."

NEW, the invention of local shelter providers, costs only $300,000 a year -- including salaries for its 13 staff members -- and has a success rate of 85 percent. One hundred of its 140 graduates have come out of its psychic intensive care to find permanent jobs and housing. Even so, Mayor Marion Barry wants to close it down on Dec. 31 and turn it into an emergency shelter. He doesn't pass any judgment on it; he's never seen it. He says the city cannot afford it.

There is some dispute on this point, and it surfaced in the sunny dining room as the "Reflections" were under way. Kemp's chief adviser on homelessness, HUD Asssistant Secretary Anna Kondratas, observed that the District still has $26 million in unspent community-development block grants.

The mayor's representative, Maudine Cooper, hastily and a little defensively, said the money was "committed."

Kondratas muttered that it was not, however, "obligated" and Kemp stepped in to say there must be "no confrontation" between the city and the federals on the vital question of keeping NEW open.

Cooper then went on to say that the mayor is "between a rock and a hard place." He is mandated by law to give shelter to every homeless person. The homeless advocates have further -- and unreasonably, in his eyes -- demanded that the shelters be clean and habitable. He is under a court order to provide 200 more places, Cooper added.

Melodramatically, she said that 50 women sleep every night in the District Building -- "women who look like me" -- which seemed doubtful, since she was wearing a sharp lipstick-red suit and pearls and gold. "You help us find a building," she said to the silent residents.

They need the NEW building, which recently was remodeled for transitional housing needs, with small single bedrooms arranged in clusters, "because," said Cooper, "there is nothing else available."

Initiative 17, which orders the city to shelter all homeless, is much resented by the mayor. If he has to kill a model transitional program to show how put-upon he is, he will do it -- and send 37 women back to the horrors of emergency shelters.

Immediately, Kemp formed a completely contrary opinion. As he toured the downstairs clusters with Director Ann Ryan, Kemp suddenly stopped and said, "To turn this into an emergency shelter would be a crime."

Ryan is a former Peace Corps volunteer, as is Jackie Joyce, who runs the job-hunt program. The NEW philosophy is quite simple, as Ryan explains it: "We flood them with expectations and encouragement." For aimless women, there is order, routine, accountability. Nothing goes unremarked. One hallway is covered with colorfully lettered signs that hail achievements great and small, a job or an apartment found, a job interview completed, a chore well done.

Housing counselor Carey Schneider conducts daily classes in how to bank the rent, how to get along with a landlord, how to avoid eviction, how to beat a bad credit rating. When Sister Loretta, a sister of Notre Dame, conducts the "life lab" in the laundry room, she shares her personal failures with them, suggests ways to overcome doubts, fears, insecurity. She cheerfully dogs a resident who thinks one call to a potential employer is enough. "You make 10 if you have to," she says.

As he was leaving, Kemp ran into Maudine Cooper and told her it would be "silly" to turn a facility he hoped will become an example to the nation into an emergency shelter. He said again that "it is important to avoid confrontation with the city."

But it is already a classic confrontation between bureaucrats who want to change a law and reformers who want to change lives. What they are doing at New Endeavors is not just taking women out of homelessness but taking the homelessness out of women. "God's work," Kemp called it. It will be interesting to see if he can prevail on Barry to let it go on.

Mary McGrory is a Washington Post columnist.

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