Census Begins With the Nation’s Homeless : Count: Many on streets are wary of questioners. Critics say U.S. cannot accurately assess their numbers.
The 1990 U.S. Census began Tuesday night on a somber note, as census takers set out to measure the size of one of a successful nation’s most conspicuous failures--its population of homeless citizens.
With a budget of $2.7 million and a staff approaching 15,000, the U.S. Census Bureau attempted to count on one night a population that could number in the millions. It is the first time the census has counted such people separate from the rest of the population, most of whom are to receive census forms in the mail later this week.
Census officials concede their count of homeless people is not expected to be complete.
At a Washington press conference Tuesday, Census Bureau director Barbara Bryant said that while the homeless count would not be exhaustive, “these numbers will be believable. Is it hundreds of thousands? Is it millions? We’re going to show that kind of scope.”
In Los Angeles, John Reeder, head of the Census Bureau’s California operations, said the count would be a “conservative” one.
Speaking at a Tuesday press conference, Reeder said that the bureau was prepared to continue counting homeless every night this week if it became apparent Tuesday that there were more homeless people than the census takers could handle.
Reeder made it clear census takers would not take certain risks.
“We are not going on rooftops, looking in abandoned cars or peering into dumpsters,” he said.
Nonetheless, the novel exercise was shaping up as an all-night, national spectacle.
In San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the census takers, wary of ambush, planned to keep to the park’s lighted perimeters, calling out for any homeless persons hiding in the bushes to come forward and be counted. In the nation’s capital, wary homeless advocates were attempting to thwart the census, refusing to allow counters inside a shelter where 1,000 homeless were said to have congregated. And in Los Angeles, buses were being hastily arranged to haul homeless from the rougher streets of South-Central to armories and emergency shelters for counting.
Reeder said that six units of U.S. Naval Reserves would be patrolling the streets of Los Angeles to help ensure the safety of census takers.
“Obviously, we are concerned about security. We cannot take police because it would breach confidentiality,” he said. But he added that there would be an increased police presence on the streets of the city while the homeless census was in progress.
This week the Census Bureau’s western regional office released a report saying the counters “do not expect to find every homeless person everywhere, especially those who may be living in the streets and want to stay well hidden.”
Still, a Census Bureau spokesman in New York City, where the homeless population has been estimated as high as 80,000, expressed hope that the count would provide “the first handle on the magnitude of the problem, but not necessarily the true size of it.”
In big cities, small towns and everywhere else American homeless congregate, it was clear Tuesday evening that the census takers had their work cut out for them. Finding the homeless posed one major difficulty, convincing them to cooperate was another.
“I don’t want them countin’ me,” said a man named Jesse, standing beside the tarp covered lean-to he shares with his friend Marco Katz on the banks of the Platte River about a fourth of a mile from downtown Denver.
“I came back from ‘Nam and they called me a baby killer, so I don’t want them counting me,” Jesse said.
Juanita Webster, a 25-year-old census taker in New York who was recruited from the ranks of homeless people, said many people feared the consequences of cooperating with the census despite assurances that all information given will remain confidential.
“They’re very wary because they fear it might interfere with their social services,” Webster said.
People interviewed will be asked their age, race, sex, what languages they speak, what income, if any, they receive and where they usually stay.
Census Bureau officials said Tuesday that people found asleep on the streets were not to be wakened. Instead, census takers were to note their presence and try to guess sex and race.
California presented a host of challenges to census takers who were responsible for canvassing streets and parks frequented by gangs and drug dealers as well as making their way to the river banks, canyons, beaches and orange groves that provide hideouts to the rural homeless.
In Riverside County, for example, a large number of homeless people live in the city of Riverside while others can be found near the resorts of Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. There, housing is scarce and expensive, and many service and agricultural workers are forced into encampments of shanties fashioned from wood scraps and cardboard. In northern San Diego County, some homeless workers have been holing up in hillside dugouts called “spider holes.”
Despite the obstacles, the homeless count was the most ambitious ever undertaken. To entice the homeless to come in out of the cold and be counted, emergency shelters were opened around the country. Soup kitchens offered free dinners and shelters gave away blankets to people who showed up Tuesday.
Traveling in teams, carrying walkie-talkies, wearing bright, identifying vests, census takers attempted to count people in every city with a population of 50,000 or more and in smaller cities where local governments provided lists of homeless habitats.
Cindy Taeuber, who coordinated the nationwide homeless census from the Census Bureau’s Washington headquarters, said she was more confident of the accuracy of counting in shelters and other indoor locations and somewhat pessimistic about finding people in the streets.
“We just haven’t been able to come up with a reliable means of coming to grips with the hidden homeless,” she said.
As part of the homeless census, the Census Bureau funded monitoring operations in five cities, including Los Angeles. The monitors were stationed in a number of outdoor homeless enclaves to check whether census takers actually visited those locations and to assess how diligent they were when they did visit.
Taeuber said that although the monitors will find people who were not counted, the monitoring will not change the numbers reported by census takers. Instead, she said, the results of the monitoring will help the Census Bureau improve its methods the next time homeless people counted.
The U.S. census is taken every decade. A decision on whether to count homeless separately every decade has not been made.
The Census Bureau received widespread cooperation from shelters and homeless advocates. Yet, there were protests by people who do not believe that a complete count is possible and who believe that an undercount will be used to justify spending cuts for affordable housing and for the social services that many homeless people rely on.
In Washington, members of the Community for Creative Non-Violence dumped sand in front of the Commerce Department’s Herbert Hoover Building near the White House and displayed a banner that read, “Like grains of sand, the homeless cannot be counted.”
Just before 8 p.m., a contingent of census workers was turned away from a shelter operated by the Community for Creative Non-Violence, an organization formed by Mitch Snyder, one of the nation’s prominent advocates for the homeless.
Snyder, who sees the homeless count as a political ploy to understate the national problem, estimated that there were 1,400 people at the center in northwest Washington. Shortly after the census workers retreated from the shelter doorstep, a church group gathered outside to distribute refreshments and a line of 70 homeless people quickly formed.
Foul weather caused pessimism among counters in New York City, where about 1,800 census takers began combing the streets of the city with the greatest number of homeless people. As heavy rains threatened to turn to snow, homeless advocates expressed doubts about the success of the census.
“The bad weather is driving people underground. An accurate count is going to be impossible,” said Keith Summa, an official of the Coalition for the Homeless.
In Sacramento, Stephen Switzer, a spokesman for the Sacramento Homeless Organizing Committee, said he thought the count was likely to find only 15% to 20% of the homeless. Switzer said that many who live in the brush and on the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers have been intimidated by recent police sweeps of their camps and would not emerge to take part in the census.
Throughout Northern California, about 1,000 white-vested census takers were provided with the addresses of more than 40 shelters and cheap hotels and 60 outdoor locations. In San Francisco, more than 200 census takers set out to count a homeless population that has been estimated at 5,000 to 10,000, many of whom reside among the bushes of the city’s sprawling Golden Gate Park.
In the southern part of the state, about 3,200 census takers attempted to cover over 3,200 places where homeless people are known to live. About 1,000 census takers fanned out across Los Angeles in an effort to count an estimated 35,000 homeless people.
The city of Los Angeles has close to $1 million on efforts to publicize the census and to ensure all its citizens are counted.
As part of that effort, Mayor Tom Bradley announced a plan late Tuesday to ensure a better count of homeless people in South-Central Los Angeles. After learning that census takers’ maps did not include a number of South-Central neighborhoods where homeless people tend to gather, Bradley arranged for city vans to transport people from those areas to local armories and shelters where census takers would be stationed.
Over the past decade, estimates of the homeless population have ranged from 250,000 to 350,000 by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to 570,000 by the Urban Institute to 3 million by the national Coalition for the Homeless.
The Urban Institute found that 81% of homeless people are male, 54% nonwhite and 51% between the ages of 31 and 50. It reported that 15% of the homeless are children.
Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Jocelyn Stewart and Jill Stewart in Los Angeles, Jenifer Warren in Riverside, Daniel Weintraub in Sacramento, and Louis Sahagun in Denver, Shawn Pogatchnik in New York City, and Jason Johnson in Washington, D.C.
WOOING THE HOMELESS--Cities used free food and rides to lure people to centers to maximize the count. A15
