Rethinking the Amazing Shrinking Shelter

The way things have long worked at the Franklin School, the stately Civil War-era building that bizarrely serves as Washington's main shelter for homeless people downtown, if you're not there to claim your bed by 5:30 p.m., you're on the street that night. Rules are rules.

Now there's a new wrinkle at Franklin: If you miss the cutoff time, your bed just might be dismantled and permanently removed, its parts moved behind the locked door to the shelter's third floor, the part of the building I was not permitted to see on a recent visit.

This grim game of musical beds is designed not to torment the homeless but to move toward Mayor Adrian Fenty's goal of shutting down the shelter by Oct. 1 -- a plan the D.C. Council blocked Tuesday, voting to prevent any closing until Fenty proves he has alternative housing.

For those such as Eric Sheptock, who has called the shelter at 13th and K streets NW home for three years, Fenty is a turncoat, reneging on his promise to maintain a downtown facility for hundreds of homeless men who roam the city's center. But City Administrator Dan Tangherlini argues that the gradual shutdown of Franklin is the most humane course, that "it's finally time to close a terrible place."

The dispute over Franklin has split Washington's advocates for the homeless, sparked street protests and renewed the debate over whether public buildings should be sold for private use. Despite the strong view among some homeless men that Franklin should be maintained for their use, there is general agreement that the building is a pit -- a sad, poorly maintained, ridiculously expensive symbol of the city's failure to make good use of its resources or to do right by the homeless.

There's also consensus that in a perfect city, homeless people would not be warehoused in dank dormitories with few services; instead, they would be given real apartments, with medical, mental and addiction care and the job training and counseling that could put them back among the self-sufficient. Although Fenty says this is his goal, neither the council nor most advocates for the homeless believe the city is anywhere near that point.

So: Should Franklin be shut down, and if it does close, where would its 300-and-dwindling nightly residents go?

Faced with being sent to a city shelter on the grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast or to transitional housing that gives residents only six months to find a job, some men prefer to stick with the hell they know.

"You have a lot of homeless services close by here," says Sheptock, a dynamic, wiry 39-year-old who argues that it's good for the men and the city to keep the homeless near soup kitchens, health clinics and counseling meetings.

Even those who are eager to get out of Franklin say it's essential to maintain a "low barrier" shelter downtown -- a place where no questions are asked, no identification is required.

"Of course, I'd rather be in my own apartment," says D'Juan Bean, 44, president of the Committee to Save Franklin Shelter. "But this is a well-run place, and if it had AA meetings and job training, it could really make a difference for many of the men."

Tom Howarth, who runs the McKenna Center, a Catholic facility for the homeless in the Sursum Corda area of Northwest, agrees that Franklin should close eventually but says shutting it down before alternative housing is available would tell the homeless that "downtown is too good a location for people like them, that we want you out of sight and out of mind."