Census Reaches Into Night to Count Homeless

Homelessness is a bigger problem in Orange County than many people want to believe, Frank Fletcher told fellow passengers in a van cruising Walnut Street in Santa Ana one night last week. “All of you probably know someone who is homeless and don’t even realize it.”

Twenty minutes later, Fletcher climbed out of the van into a throng of homeless people at Civic Center Plaza and, as if on cue, promptly illustrated his point. He ran into George, an acquaintance and biking partner, whom he had not seen in a while and who, unknown to Fletcher, had fallen on hard times.

“He had everything--a house, a good car, a wife and family; he’s just like you or me, and now he’s here,” Fletcher said.

The people who call the harsh environs of the Civic Center home--men in weathered clothing carrying equally weathered backpacks, women with children and spindly shopping carts that contain all of their worldly possessions--should not be ignored, Fletcher says.

And as the Census Bureau’s Santa Ana coordinator in charge of counting the homeless, he is taking steps to insure that at least their numbers are acknowledged.

Fletcher has come out on a cold night, on his own time, to case the back alleys, parks, railroad nooks and freeway overpasses where the homeless congregate, in order to draw a sort of homeless road map for Census workers.

It is his task to identify places that do not fit the usual Census categories.

“We started putting together a database--looking at small pockets, like people who have been living under an overpass for four or five years,” he said.

It may not be a traditional dwelling but someone lives there, and for Fletcher that is what the Census is all about.

Dozens of workers will swarm over the county in the late evening and early morning hours of March 20 and 21 in the most significant effort to include the homeless as part of the nation’s Census.

Many local governments, convinced that minorities and the poor were grossly undercounted in 1980, want to insure an accurate count this time in order to qualify for more state and federal funds.

The first phase of the count will include shelters and other social service agencies where the homeless are likely to gather. The second phase however, will be conducted on the streets, where the homeless are harder to find.

To expand the local database and confirm some of his own impressions, Fletcher accepted an offer to accompany volunteers of a Newport Beach-based organization called Street People In Need, or SPIN, as they made their rounds Tuesday, handing out sandwiches, sweat shirts and stiff, white, generic-brand tennis shoes to the homeless, mostly in Santa Ana.

Census takers will return to most of the locations when the actual count is conducted, Fletcher said.

SPIN director Sam Boyce said it is important that the homeless be counted.

“I hope our action is a signal to other social service agencies that help the homeless,” he said. “Instead of not cooperating for some specious political reason, I think we should do the opposite and not turn our backs.”

Boyce was referring to the stance of some homeless advocates--most notably Washington-based activist Mitch Snyder--who have called on the homeless and their support groups not to cooperate in the Census.

Snyder argues that it is impossible to locate and count more than a small fraction of the nation’s homeless, and that the government knows this and will use the numbers to minimize the problem of homelessness.

“By reducing the magnitude of the problem, on paper at least, we take from the homeless what little is left them, their very existence,” Snyder said last week from Washington. “In turn, this will postpone the day when responsible . . . solutions are enacted.”

Fletcher conceded that Synder’s premise holds “some validity” but argued that it is better to attempt to document the homeless and to begin to build an apparatus that will lead to a more accurate count of them.

However, not all homeless agree.

“The Census is a big joke,” said Gloria, a 35-year-old Idaho native who has been homeless for four years. She is among about 15 homeless people waiting as the van pulls up to the Salvation Army Hospitality House on East 3rd Street.

“All they are trying to do is sweep the problem under the rug,” she said, clutching a bag lunch and new sweat shirt. “I’m not going to worry if they miss me.”

Gloria, who declined to give her last name, said she sleeps on the streets around 3rd and Garfield Avenue. Slight, with glasses and dark hair, she is afraid to use shelters. “They have a lot of weirdos coming in and you are more likely to get ripped off.”

Gloria said that people on the streets are leery of strangers. They have been harassed and abused too often. They are not likely to look kindly on a Census taker who, with clipboard in hand, wakes them up with a shining flashlight, she said.

Census officials acknowledge that they are faced with a difficult task. Fletcher said, for example, that Census takers will not force homeless people to submit their names or even to talk to them. They will not wake someone who is sleeping but instead will attempt to determine as best they can the person’s sex, age and race.

Fletcher admitted that he is concerned that most “enumerators,” as the Census field workers are called, may not be able to relate to people on the street. Even though the Census Bureau has committed itself to enlisting the homeless in the count, so far none have been hired in Orange County, Fletcher said.

Applicants are required to show two forms of identification and are given a language skills test. It is also “preferable,” according to the Census Bureau, that they own a car.

Still, the homeless project has been an eye-opener for many of his colleagues, Fletcher said.

“I brought my boss out at lunchtime along the railroad tracks (at the end of Walnut Street) and he said it looked like something out of ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ It shocked him,” Fletcher said.

Similarly, when he pointed out a crowd of people standing in front of the county welfare office, his boss “thought it was normal,” Fletcher said. “He didn’t realize they were there because they didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Local Census officials originally estimated that the county’s homeless numbered between 3,000 and 7,000, as a base line for hiring and other purposes. After talking with homeless officials, however, the estimate was raised slightly.

The number of the homeless that Fletcher has seen on his outing with SPIN has reaffirmed his own assumptions about their population and will probably mean another revision upward.

On a corner near the county welfare office on Walnut Street, more than 50 people gathered as the SPIN van pulled up. Many of the them find shelter at the nearby Orange County Rescue Mission or at Center Park.

At Civic Center Plaza, more than 150 people, including Fletcher’s friend George, formed a line to await bag lunches. Most are familiar with Sam Boyce and the SPIN volunteers, and many are boisterous and joking.

Steven Simpson, 29, a carpenter, said that he has been living in the plaza since the first of the year, when he was injured on a job. “I went from $50,000 a year to zero,” he said.

He has read about the Census in the newspaper, but no one had taken the time to talk to street people about it before now, Simpson said.

“I think it’s real important,” he said. “If the majority of people on the streets are not counted, then there is less representation; there will be fewer funds for cities. We need to be counted so that cities will support programs that help us.”