Down for the Count : Critics of First Census of Homeless Say the Tally Destined to Be Low
Census takers this week will make a historic first attempt to count the nation’s homeless in a single night, but local officials fear such a “slapdash” effort could burden poverty work in Southeast cities for a decade.
Some cities have spent a year preparing for the 12-hour venture into shelters and urban streets, which is set to begin at 6 p.m. Tuesday. Still, local social service workers are virtually unanimous in their pessimism that the count will woefully underestimate the number of dispossessed.
“It is going to be a massive undercount, and for the next 10 years politicians and administrators will be pointing to it as ‘The Statistic,’ when, in fact, it is flawed from the outset,” said John Suggs, executive director of the Los Angeles Countywide Homeless Coalition.
Whatever figure the census yields is sure to be the basis for government aid to charities and social service organizations through the year 2000, threatening to squeeze already under-funded efforts to help a swelling population of homeless people, officials say.
Officials in Long Beach have posted flyers encouraging homeless people to go to the National Guard armory to be counted, and the city plans to distribute kits of soap and shampoo to attract them. But the homeless themselves seem apathetic, according to advocates, and without their commitment to come out of the shadows, the head count promises to be a fraction of the reality.
“I don’t think the homeless people are taking this very seriously. They are sort of laughing about it, saying, ‘You want to count us? Ha. Ha. Ha,’ ” said the Rev. Gary Erb, director of Christian Outreach Appeal in Long Beach. “I think we’re going to get stuck with (a low) census figure. I almost wish they weren’t trying to do this.”
Critics say the homeless census was doomed from the start, relying on approximately 15,000 workers nationwide who will receive one day’s training to spend one night counting a population that by nature lives in hiding.
The event has been dubbed “S Night”--the “S” stands for shelter--although experts say that only a fraction of the homeless people sleep in shelters in any one night.
Even if all nine shelters that serve Long Beach and the Southeast cities fill up Tuesday night, census counters would tally fewer than 800 people. Some observers believe there are between 3,000 and 5,000 homeless people in the city of Long Beach alone.
“We want to make sure the people in Long Beach are all counted, but there is only so much you can do in one night,” said Sheila Pagnani, the city’s homeless coordinator. “There are people in Washington who have called this a fool’s errand.”
According to the census schedule, counters will visit emergency shelters, all-night theaters and low-rate hotels from 6 p.m. to midnight. They will walk the streets from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. and count anyone they find, but without awakening them to ask the standard questions of name, age, sex and marital status. From 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. they will stand in front of abandoned buildings and count anyone who comes out, but workers will not go in.
Critics say such a system is designed to miss the mentally ill and scores more who sleep along railroad tracks, in alleys, river beds, liquor store dumpsters and vacant apartments.
Long Beach census officials admit that they are unprepared. As of last week, abandoned buildings, parks and other places where homeless people are known to sleep still had not been identified to census workers who were scheduled to start counting in less than a week, said Demetrece Pearson, head of the city’s 1990 Census Complete Count Committee, which was organized in November.
“I am concerned that we will not be able to fulfill our obligation,” she said. “There has got to be a better way of doing this.”
Mitch Snyder, a nationally known advocate for the homeless, has called for a boycott of the census. Locally, advocates say the homeless are neither endorsing the boycott nor cooperating with the census. The reasons, they say, are resentment and fear.
The county’s decision to give shelter at the National Guard armory in Long Beach on Tuesday night, which generally is opened only when the temperature is 40 degrees or below, seems to have offended more homeless people than it stands to attract. The county has refused to open the armory when the temperature was even 1 degree above 40, and some homeless people are angry that the census commands a higher priority than warmth.
“A number of homeless people have expressed their frustration and outrage that emergency shelters are not open when it is near freezing, but are open on this occasion,” Suggs said.
Census officials are offering to pay homeless people $7 an hour to work as counters, a plan they had hoped would give a source of income to the poor and employ workers who know the streets better than any bureaucrat.
But employment requires two pieces of identification--which many homeless people do not have--and an FBI clearance check, which many do not want.
“Homeless people don’t believe the census information won’t be shared with law enforcement. They get harassed on a daily basis. When you live on the streets you get harassed for everything imaginable,” said Martha Bryson, a former homeless person who is now head of the Long Beach Homeless Organizing Committee, a coalition of homeless people and people on the brink of homelessness.
BACKGROUND A city task force estimated in 1987 that there were between 3,000 and 5,000 homeless people in Long Beach, a figure that has since been disputed by some as too high and others as too low. Critics have accused city officials of underestimating the homeless crisis to avoid spending money on the poor. It looked as though the 1990 Census would put the debate to rest, but local experts say the Census Bureau’s plan to count an elusive population in one night is doomed to fail.
