SOCIAL ISSUES : Miami Nailing Together Ambitious Homeless Plan : With thousands on the streets, a dining tax, private funds and HUD money are fueling a model program. Shelters and other aid are in the works.

In Bobby Bradley’s neighborhood, a booming shantytown of plywood and plastic that has popped up under a downtown freeway, the visit by a top government official with a $15-million grant to support a model homeless initiative went pretty much unnoticed.

“Fifteen million?” repeated Bradley a few days and just two blocks away from the courthouse steps where Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros last week addressed business and civic leaders.

“I don’t know about that. I do know that I’m getting tired of being here. But I guess it’s OK for now.”

For Bradley, a 35-year-old former truck driver who said his problems with alcohol put him on the street six years ago, plans are hard to hold on to and the future looks fuzzy.

He is not alone.

The experts say that there are between 6,000 and 10,000 chronically homeless people in the Greater Miami area, including people displaced by 1992’s Hurricane Andrew in the Homestead area and the hard-core drug abusers and mentally ill who roam the inner city.

But here’s where Cisneros, the $15 million and an ambitious plan come in.

Earlier this month, Miami officials approved construction of the first of three 350-bed homeless shelters, to be funded in part by a one-cent restaurant tax that is expected to produce $20 million for homeless programs over the next three years.

In addition, the nonprofit Community Partnership for Homeless is more than halfway toward its goal of raising $8.5 million in private funds for related programs.

And Dade County (Miami) is one of four U.S. communities to be awarded an “innovative cities” federal grant, which must be matched by local funds and will be doled out only as performance goals are met. The other cities are Los Angeles, Denver and Washington.

But only Miami has a dedicated meals tax to pay for homeless programs. “I don’t know of any other city in the country that has shown the kind of initiative that Miami and Dade County have shown,” Cisneros said.

Andy Menendez Jr., director of homeless programs for Dade County, said that the first new shelter--along with residential drug treatment and mental health counseling programs--could be in place by December. But he also knows that bureaucratic delays are likely.

“We see people in crisis out there in those encampments, and we want to move them, but there are just not enough beds,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”

Indeed, Greater Miami’s homeless encampments are caldrons of crisis, unplanned communities of dashed hopes and volatility. In the last few months, the shantytown under Interstate 95 has taken over three city parking lots. And while some of the makeshift dwellings show touches of engineering genius, there is little sense of permanence here.

“It’s dangerous,” said Bradley, who lives in a small hut furnished with a cot and a candle. “Things don’t settle down till 3, 4 in the morning. But it’s hard to sleep any time.”

Three times a week, Roberta Brown and fellow parishioners from New Way Baptist Church show up with day-old pastries and rolls donated by a grocery chain. “Some of these people would like to work, but some just can’t do any better,” Brown says. “They have drug problems, and when you get so far down, it’s hard to get back up.”

Miami’s infamous Mud Flats, a squalid homeless encampment under a freeway a few blocks away, has been cleaned out, and that area fenced off. But an estimated 300 to 400 people now live in the parking lot shantytown, while hundreds more spend their days in nightmarish conditions in Overtown, on Watson Island next to Biscayne Bay and under overpasses and in vacant lots all over the county. Health problems are rampant.

“We’re seeing a marked increase in HIV and tuberculosis,” says Dr. Pedro Jose Greer Jr., a nationally known gastroenterologist who in 1993 won a MacArthur Fellowship grant for his work as a street doctor to Miami’s homeless. “And in the clinic, we’re just seeing more people: 30,000 office visits through June, which is as many as we saw all of last year.”

Sergio Gonzalez, director of the Homeless Trust, says that with money, housing, treatment programs and community involvement, Miami has a chance to become the model for other cities faced with daunting problems caring for the homeless. “I don’t think we’ll ever eradicate homelessness altogether,” Gonzalez said. “But if we can provide alternatives and treatment for those who want them, we don’t have to have these encampments.”