In N.Y., Humane Gesture for Homeless Goes Awry : Shelter: The city provides a bed for anyone who needs it. The question is how to get people out the door.

The Ft. Washington shelter for homeless men in Upper Manhattan is a sprawl of 700 bodies, a wasteland of crackheads, a makeshift asylum for the insane, a catchment of melancholy and, in its own way, a humane gesture.

For a decade now, New York has supplied shelter to anyone who seeks it. Each night, this spares about 24,000 people from the city’s mean streets, yet it has also created several dreadful barracks-style poorhouses that are at once fearsome to live in and hard to escape.

Many of the homeless stay years, slowly adjusting to converted armories like “The Fort,” their emergency turned into monotony, their very adjustment to shelter life a further loosing from the tethers of society. They have become a class below even the welfare dependent: the shelter dependent.

“Five years in a shelter--I mean what is that? How much longer can someone handle it?” asked Raymond Diaz, the city official who runs the shelter system for single men and women. “We have to get them out of there.”

But how? Increasingly, experts agree that if the shelters cannot be replaced by housing, they at least need to be much smaller in size--and they must offer some potent antitoxin against dependence: drug treatment, job training or actual work. If the programs are good, they ought to be required.

“Shelter has to remain No. 1--get people off the streets,” said attorney Robert M. Hayes, New York’s best-known advocate for the homeless. “But secondly, a shelter should have the objective of getting people back out the door. My suggestion is some kind of public works program . . . .

“And for the addicts? The most useful thing is to get them into a drug program. If they won’t go, and if that means kicking them out of the shelters, that’s OK. Absolutely.”

There is some irony in this. Hayes was the guiding hand in a lawsuit in state court that effectively turned New York into a laboratory for a national experiment. In 1981, the city signed a consent decree obliging it to provide shelter on demand to any homeless man with a physical, mental or social handicap.

That opened a huge door never meant to close, no matter what the wind blew in. And while most of those who sought refuge merely needed a stopover on the way back into society, many others wanted a hideaway outside of it.

“People, all kinds of people, couldn’t find affordable housing,” said William Grinker, who headed the city’s Human Resources Administration in the late ‘80s. “If you were a drug addict, a shelter was a good place to go. It was also kind of a halfway house for people going in and out of prison.

“The race was on just to keep up with the numbers. I don’t blame the advocates, though they were terribly naive and simplistic. The city’s response was also simplistic, creating these horrid places like Ft. Washington.”

At The Fort, the 700 cots are tightly spaced across the drill floor, like cars bumper-to-bumper on a 25-lane freeway. There are few rules beyond a 10 p.m. curfew. Many of the men lie around all day. Their wounded spirits seem to pack the air. The place is at once tedious and seething, a murmur and a howl.

At least 25% are mentally ill; it is a chicken-or-egg kind of thing. How many were sick when they got here? And how many surrendered under the weight of the adapting?

The paranoid sleep within feet of those they rightly need fear. Crack is sold in the bathrooms, and the psychotics are as likely to smoke as the others. A gang of thugs is regularly on the maraud. Men mold themselves into shelter survivors, too tough to mess with or too worthless to bother.

Cleveland Jones, 41, has been at Ft. Washington for four years. He is stir crazy. He longs to be free of it, but by now his life is all caution and habit. It is a curious thing to speak with him.

His caseworkers have gotten him a job, but he is afraid to return to the daunting spin of the world. “I figure three more years here, then I’ll leave,” he said as if this revealed a trove of determination.

Both city officials and advocates for the homeless urge that something be done about such erosions of will, often called shelterization. But each side is suspicious of the other.

Advocates insist that the city wants the shelters to remain deplorable so fewer people will enter the system. Bureaucrats complain that the advocates only care about petty grievances, such as the locks on toilet stalls.

For a time, it seemed that a good man to bring everyone together was Mayor David N. Dinkins. He said the homeless were a passion of his and pledged to put an end to vast human warehouses such as The Fort. But after 16 months in office, his excuse is the same one the poor often use themselves: He has no money.

So the lab experiment goes on, badly out of control. “The courts forced the city into a business it had no aptitude for,” said sociologist Peter H. Rossi, author of the book “Down and Out in America.”

“Lesson one: Don’t sign that kind of consent decree.”

Despair has accrued for much of New York’s effort, but certainly effort is what it is. Since 1983, the city has built or rehabilitated 27,000 units of low-income housing. It operates the largest shelter system in the nation, spending $39 a day on each single adult, or $14,235 a year. The annual budget is an extraordinary $389 million.

The debris of the failure owes much to the crush of the task. Homelessness is not merely another social problem but rather an outcome of the rest: drugs, racism, poverty, broken families, a depleted housing market, the discharge of mental patients into nothing more than the open air.

With little federal leadership, most local governments across the nation have foundered in the coping, and the homeless have been forfeited to doorways and gutted buildings and the other crannies of the geometric cityscapes.

What is there to do about them? And who is willing to pay? Most often, the responsibility has fallen to private charities with some government subsidies. Whatever the system, it frequently is inadequate and perplexing and cruel.

In Los Angeles, bureaucratic red tape so often comes between the homeless and a bed that the city has sued the county, alleging that its general relief program is designed--at least in part--to deny emergency shelter.

A few major cities have attempted a system of shelter on demand, including Washington and Philadelphia. Both called it quits after brief trials, in large part because of concerns about high costs and shelter dependence.

Washington will soon restrict stays in a shelter to a fixed number of days. Philadelphia demands the homeless obey rigid rules of behavior. What’s more, they must save 60% of any income--whether from a job or a relief check--toward permanent housing and pay 15% more for shelter costs.

In the 1980s, good public relations work was done on behalf of the homeless in New York. Nancy Wackstein was an advocate then. “We would focus on white bag ladies; they were the most sympathetic--or focus on people who have lost their job,” she said.

Wackstein now heads the Mayor’s Office on Homelessness, which advises Dinkins on policy. She still considers herself an advocate, but the images in many of her descriptions have changed to tough young men, social misfits, crack addicts mooching off the public.

“We’re the dumping ground for people who have burned every friend and relative they have.” she said. “Drugs, drugs, drugs. They break up families, make good people throw out their bad relatives. Where do they go then? More and more, they come to us.”

The druggies often scare off the others. “Maybe we need to discriminate among people’s needs, harsh and callous as that sounds,” she said. “But we don’t have enough to go around. If people are using the shelter system just to flop day after day, that’s not right . . . .

“Shelter on demand is a very onerous responsibility for a municipality to fulfill. Wouldn’t we be better off with drug treatment on demand? Where the hell is the federal war on drugs, that’s what I want to know.”

Mervin Johnson and his friends use The Fort as a kind of way station while they strip cars and sell off the parts, then spend the profits on crack. “We stay here to chill out and to sleep,” he said. “For that, it’s OK.”

They are deft auto strippers. Motor, radiator, tires, seats: They get it all. Auto parts stores in the neighborhood buy the stolen goods. It’s a nice living for a homeless man, sometimes $1,000 a week, though it smokes up fast.

Johnson and his best pal, Gary Scott, once stole the cars themselves, but that can get you 1-to-3 in prison and they’ve already been busted enough. Now they hire a “guinea pig” to swipe one or wait for “an insurance job.”

The other day, some guy drove up with a 1990 brilliant red BMW 535i. He kept the Blaupunkt radio but told them they could have the rest. He reported it stolen for the insurance money, and they made a quick $1,600 on the parts.

The scavenged BMW was left on 167th Street, not far from Amsterdam Avenue. The streets near there are always loaded with eviscerated cars. “We don’t worry about what’s left; the city comes to get it,” Scott said.

As is their custom, they celebrated with a two-day drug binge, then came home to the shelter where they keep their expensive Craftsmen and SK tools in a briefcase downstairs by the security desk.

Ft. Washington has a Narcotics Anonymous program, which hard-core users such as Johnson and Scott consider a joke, something like an aspirin tablet for a brain tumor. They are not against drug treatment per se, but they would only consider an approach as intense as what comes out of a crack pipe.

Delbert Browne is the The Fort’s director. Day after day, he sees men lessening before him, gone from ink spots on a police blotter to bed numbers in a shelter system. They shrink so small in their own eyes that they do not know where to look for themselves.

If it were up to Browne, he would do more with the carrot and more with the stick. Everyone in the shelter would have a contract. The city would provide drug treatment and job training. Those deemed able to participate would have to do so “or we kick their rusty ass out.”

Ray Diaz, Browne’s boss downtown, has similar ideas about the importance of programs, but he sees no way to force participation. New York, after all, is bound by the court. “I can’t throw people into the streets,” he said.

There are other concerns as well. Job training and drug treatment are costly; success rates are low. Society must be willing to pay.

Then, too, there is a danger that the programs would be used punitively, just another set of hoops to trip up the already-staggered. Intentions would have to be pure--and there is little purity in the shelters.

On another day, Mervin Johnson explained that stealing auto parts is only some of his work. He also does illegal dumping: oil, tires, name it.

“I’m like Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars,’ ” he said in a jovial way he has. “I’ve gone over to the other side.”

A tall man in a greasy red sweat shirt, Johnson, 36, is a veteran of the Army, the state penitentiary and two marriages. The marriages have produced five children, four of whom he sees “maybe once a year.”

He and Gary Scott enjoy boasting of their antics. They have been together for a long time and have their own way of talking, especially about crack.

“Everybody and their mom smokes it,” Scott said.

“It’s outrageous,” Johnson agreed, approving.

“It’s the ultimate quickness.”

“Except there are times . . . . “

Except there are times it makes Johnson so paranoid his bones seem about to come up through his skin. His head flinches. He knows he has enemies, people who once blamed him for stealing someone else’s drugs.

“You’ve got to watch your back,” he said earnestly, though he wonders if it is the enemies or the crack that truly causes the anxiety.

Whichever, he is stuck with it--and he may as well ride it till it crashes.

On the drill floor, the men understand the deal pretty well: They get a cot and a sheet and a pillow. Not much else is supplied to them--and not much is expected of them as well.

Those who stay around for years smugly call this “sitting on the system,” as if they are craftily on top of a good swindle. But there is also a quotient of resentment in their voices.

They suspect another scam may be going on, possibly one even more cunning than their own. In the dreary interior of the armory, their bedraggled, threatening presences are out of society’s precious sight.

The system is sitting on them, too.

On yet another day, Mervin Johnson confessed that he hates it, the shelter, the rip-offs, the whole mad scramble of his life. “This crack is killing me,” he said, the joviality vanished from his eyes.

His cheeks are turning redder all the time, almost to the color of smashed tomatoes. He thinks the drug does it, that it is filling his face so full it may soon explode. His teeth are already rotted and gone.

Guilt gouges at his heart, but he is unsure what causes it, just this and that. “I’d like a job, but I don’t have the clothes,” he said, seeming to believe this. “I think I’ll get some clothes.”

His thoughts jumped along. “Did I tell you that my mother died of a heroin overdose?” he asked. Had he mentioned that he once worked a freight elevator at Macy’s? Did he say that he has a brother who has tested positive for HIV?

Now he too is falling, within himself and without. Regaining a grip would be very hard. Johnson let his eyes take a quick tour of the shelter, at the stunning desolation of the 700 cots.

How did this happen to him, to these others? In the night, with the lights down and his spirit eddying back, he made a vow to change his life.

It would last until the morning.

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to the reporting of this story.