Census Begins With the Nation’s Homeless : Count: 15,000 fan out for monumental overnight task. Many meet difficulties. Incomplete count expected.

The 1990 U.S. census began Tuesday night on a somber note, as census takers set out to measure the size of a successful nation’s conspicuous failure--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 has been estimated to number anywhere from 250,000 to more than 3 million. Census takers went to 11,000 shelters and an equal number of outdoor haunts, from heating grates in New York City to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park; from river banks in Colorado to “spider holes”--man-made burrows in Southern California canyons.

The monumental effort marked the first time the census has counted homeless people separate from the rest of the population, most of whom are to receive census forms in the mail later this week.

Counting the homeless was not expected to go smoothly, and it didn’t. Throughout the day, there were glitches and missed opportunities by the score.

In Vermont, 22 inches of snow slowed the count. In Detroit, there weren’t nearly enough census takers to take inventory of the army of squatters living in the city’s 10,000 abandoned buildings. There were plenty of people who refused to be counted, and a few who caused consternation by the answers they gave to the census.

In New York City, there was a man who insisted he is Jesus Christ.

“He was nice and cooperative,” said census taker Craig Lebin, “but he kept telling me he was married to God.”

Census officials conceded 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, it will “get the vast majority . . . these numbers will be believable. Is it hundreds of thousands? Is it millions? We’re going to show that kind of scope.”

Byrant herself, however, encountered evidence of flaws in the counting. She toured New York’s Port Authority bus terminal, where she found at least 100 homeless persons--but no census takers to count them. Bryant promised to dispatch counters to the terminal tonight.

In Los Angeles, John Reeder, head of the Census Bureau’s California operations, said the count would be a conservative one.

Reeder said the bureau was prepared to continue counting homeless people every night this week if it became apparent Tuesday that there were more people than the census takers could handle.

But he 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 more than 1,000 homeless were said to have congregated.

In Detroit, several homeless people telephoned the Census Bureau from the office of a wrecking company, where they said they had broken in to spend the night. They invited census takers to come out and count them. Five enumerators were dispatched, and the survey was completed with the promise that police would not be informed of the callers’ whereabouts.

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 reservists 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.

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.

In Houston, a pony-tailed young man named James, who declined to reveal his last name, said the census takers’ questions “stunk. A lot of the questions didn’t apply to us--like, ‘Are you here on business or vacation.’ ”

Toni Davis, 32, worried that census questions would probe too deeply into her past. Davis said that she and her husband were prospering from a methadrine lab, allowing them and their five children to own a house, “until we were arrested.” She said that the census form asked “whether we had income from this or this. They didn’t ask about illegal activities,” she said with a sigh of relief.

The all-night homeless census took place in three phases. From 6 p.m. to midnight, census takers went to armories, shelters, missions, church basements, flop houses and hotels that cost $12 or less a night.

Between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m., the effort focused on bus stations, night owl theaters, subways, bridges, highway underpasses and the myriad outdoor locations favored by the homeless.

In the final phase, lasting until 8 a.m., the census takers were to station themselves near dumpsters and abandoned building, waiting to interview people as they emerged in the morning light.

Census Bureau officials said 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.

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 uniform 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 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.

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.

For instance, the Homeless Outreach Program in Los Angeles and Los Caballeros, a businessmen’s organization, sponsored a dinner for 1,000 homeless people, served them steak and pudding pie and urged them to take part in the census.

Census takers were welcomed at the Miami Rescue Mission, a 250-bed building and the largest transient shelter in Florida. But the manager, Stan Cagle, said he didn’t think the Census Bureau had done enough to alert homeless people to the count.

“They say, ‘What’s this all about?’ And I just tell them to do it,” Cagle said. “I don’t think the bureaucrats on the street did enough on the street to explain what the census is for.”

In some cases misinformation about the census caused people to be left out. In Alondra Park, outside Los Angeles, a group of about 25 men who had read about the census in a Spanish-language newspaper arrived to be counted at 10 a.m.--eight hours ahead of time.

After an hour of panhandling, the group gathered money to purchase some beer. When they ran out at 1 p.m., the men became disgruntled, lost interest in the census and wandered away.

In Santa Monica’s Memorial Park, census takers arrived to count homeless congregated at a temporary shelter only to discover that they had forgotten a crucial tool: their pencils.

There also 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 were 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 homeless advocates.

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. However, Snyder said that about 80 of the shelter’s residents filled out census forms, and he turned over the completed forms to a Census Bureau official.

In Sacramento, Stephen Switzer, a spokesman for the 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 2,000 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 spent close to $1 million on efforts to publicize the census and to ensure all its citizens are counted.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Darrell Dawsey, Julio Moran and Jocelyn Stewart in Los Angeles, Jenifer Warren in Riverside, Daniel Weintraub in Sacramento, Miles Corwin in Santa Barbara, Mike Clary in Miami, Lianne Hart in Houston, Jim Heron Zamora in San Francisco, Louis Sahagun in Denver, Shawn Pogatchnik in New York City, James Risen in Detroit, and Jason Johnson in Washington, D.C.

MIXED REACTION--Census workers fanned out to find that not all homeless people want to be counted. A15

Questions for the Homeless

Census-takers seeking to count the nation’s homeless Tuesday carried a list of 33 questions to ask of those who chose to cooperate. Among the questions were:

When did you come to the United States to stay?

Have you ever been on active duty military service in the armed forces of the United States?

Do you have a physical, mental or other health condition that has lasted for six or more months and . . . prevents you from working at a job?

Because of a health condition that has lasted for six or more months, do you have any difficulty going outside alone (or) taking care of your own personal needs, such as bathing, dressing or getting around inside the home?

How many babies have you ever had, not counting stillbirths?

When did you last work, even for a few days?