Shelter

The first time I saw Jack, my daughter's pup of choice, 11 years ago, I was certain she had lost her mind. There I was picking up her dog with her at Howard County Animal Control, unaware until that moment that Jack was very, very large. Called Polar Bear by his previous owner, this Great Pyrenees was going to live in my daughter's Ikea-like townhouse with the postage stamp back yard? She had to be kidding. Yes, I had known since she was a small child that she wanted a big dog with down ears.

The harvest is on, and the nights are getting colder. So some Marylanders have begun to wonder when the stink bugs will show up. The experts say it won't be long. But they disagree on whether there will be fewer of them this time around, or more. "I personally have more than last year. Others have told me they have less," said Mike Raupp, a University of Maryland entomologist. "But at this stage of the game it's like predicting the track of a hurricane. I will have a better answer in a few weeks.

Sitting alone at the edge of the parking lot outside Baltimore's 24-hour homeless shelter, Robin Bolden watched the dozens gathered nearby Saturday to remember her husband, Dana, who was stabbed to death at the facility earlier this month. Tears stained her face while she listened to Tony Simmons call on the homeless individuals and activists assembled to demand city leaders step up plans to find permanent homes for the more than 4,000 men, women and children who sleep outside and in shelters every night.

The Howard County Council is about to wade into the thicket of disagreement over how much aid for the poor and the homeless is too much.Specifically, the council will hear arguments today on the merits of a proposed shelter for homeless men in the county.Grassroots, one of the primary shelters in Howard, would operate the men's facility with the help of a $30,000 grant from the county's Grant-in-Aid program. In addition to providing a place to stay, the shelter would offer services such as job training and substance-addiction counseling.

Mayor Sheila Dixon ceremonially broke ground on Baltimore's first permanent 24-hour shelter yesterday, the centerpiece of her 10-year plan to end homelessness in a city where more than 3,400 have no place to live. Dixon called the building, a former city Department of Transportation brick warehouse at 620 Fallsway in downtown Baltimore, a "gateway to independence" that is not meant to "warehouse" homeless people but will serve as a one-stop resource center where they can receive counseling and other help.

The weather has finally turned nippy and Baltimore officials are rightly planning how to help the homeless through the winter. By the end of November, they plan to open a temporary winter shelter in an abandoned school building on Guilford Avenue, a city-owned property in a once-vibrant area that is experiencing some revitalization. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, some members of the Greenmount West community are threatening legal action. Instead, they should concentrate on holding the city to its word that the shelter will close in March, and that proper security will be in place until then.

A leading Howard County opponent of long-term shelters for homeless men urged the County Council this week to resume funding short-term shelter programs for single men."The county does not use any of its homeless dollars to house single men," said Dorothy Moore, director of the county's Community Action Council, a nonprofit agency that helps the poor."That's not a policy I agree with."The county ordered private social service agencies that receive county money to stop housing all single adults in hotels in 1993, leaving homeless adult males with no county program to shelter them short-term.

Victims of domestic violence made up 42 percent of Howard County's homeless population in the three-month period ending Oct. 31, according to the first-ever quarterly report on the county's homeless.The report, released this month by the Howard County Department of Citizen Services, surveyed the 213 homeless people who were first-time clients at the county's three primary shelters in August, September and October.It found the percentage of domestic violence victims among the homeless to be 16 percent higher than the department reported Oct. 26 at the county's first summit on the homeless.

As advocates for Howard County's Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center look forward to a major expansion of the county's only homeless shelter, some are driven by memories of people they have met who are in dire need, people unlike the stereotypical homeless person who is mentally ill or addicted and wandering the streets. "Homelessness is a kind of subterranean problem" in Howard County, said Richard M. Krieg, president and chief executive officer of the Horizon Foundation, because it might be a single mother with children or any middle-class resident who has fallen on hard economic times.

Thirty-seven-year-old Reginald A. Barnes reached his lowest point two weeks ago when he sought shelter and warmth in the laundry room of a Columbia apartment complex.Mr. Barnes, who has been disabled since age 3 when he developed polio, has held a handful of jobs over the years -- cook, dispatcher, janitor. But he's been unemployed since 1988 when he fell and seriously injured his hip.He's been homeless since last September when his mother asked him and his brother to leave her Columbia apartment because of a family conflict.