Not All Homeless Are Down for the Count--Nor Up for It : Census: Enumerators trying to list the homeless encounter both cooperation and resistance. And as good weather kept many homeless outdoors, many say they were never asked to participate.

About 75 census takers roamed through the San Gabriel Valley on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, descending on shelters and soup kitchens and directing bold forays at some notorious outdoor sleeping spots, but they appear to have done a patchy job of counting the region’s down and out.

At least one shelter was bypassed entirely by enumerators. Many denizens of the region’s parks, underpasses and flood control channels said Wednesday that they had slept through the night without being counted.

It was the first time the census, which in the past has been criticized for undercounting the nation’s destitute, has sought to separate the homeless from the rest of the population.

The homeless greeted the effort with gratitude, icy skepticism or ridicule. One man, waiting in a Covina shelter for enumerators who never showed up, described the effort as the “U.S. senseless.”

But many who spent the night in shelters from Pasadena to Pomona, which had been kept open to accommodate the tally despite Tuesday night’s warm weather, said they were glad to see the counters and their clipboards.

“I’m glad they want to count me,” said William Jones, 47, a former prison counselor and a recovering alcoholic, who was eating chili at Union Station in Pasadena. “It shows I’m alive.”

Though census administrators described the special count as a success, advocates for the homeless worried that it would drastically underestimate the region’s homeless population.

Because it had been so warm Tuesday night, they said, most of the homeless had bypassed the shelters and dispersed into the night. “You’ll only see a lot of people in the shelters when it’s cold or pouring down rain,” said Sylvia Franco, director of the Interfaith Community Outreach, which provides food and clothing for the homeless in El Monte.

“The long-term homeless get claustrophobic,” added Mike Ruggles, manager of the same program. “They just do not go to shelters.”

“I estimate there’s easily 500 homeless people living in Pasadena,” said Joe Colletti, director of a shelter at the Pasadena Covenant Church, “and there could be as many as 1,300 if you include doubled-up families and people living in garages. I’m concerned they’re going to say there’s only 150 homeless in Pasadena.”

In Pasadena, the census takers--including a psychiatrist, a retired firefighter, a mortgage banker and an unemployed electrician--hit the shelters in a large group.

At the Door of Hope, a turn-of-the-century house converted into a shelter for homeless families, the 19 census takers outnumbered the 15 residents.

Ron and Rachel Winchell and their three small children, who have been staying at the residence for a month after being evicted from a Glendora motel, cooperated eagerly. The husband is an unemployed locksmith and magician.

“This lets everybody know we are people and we exist,” said Rachel Winchell, who is pregnant. “People have the misperception that, just because you’re homeless, you must be mentally unstable or an alcoholic or a drug addict. That’s how they tend to look at you. . . . We literally had the roof pulled off from over us.”

Despite assurances of confidentiality, there were concerns from many about divulging details of their private lives.

For example, in a West Covina-based shelter for battered women, where 12 women and eight children live, “JoAnn” emerged nervously from the room where two census workers were seated with notebooks and clipboards.

“I gave them a different name,” the slim 21-year-old blurted out. She said she came to YWCA Wings Shelter two weeks ago, after her alcoholic husband beat her. “He busted my lip and doesn’t know I’m here. I’m never going back.

“It doesn’t matter if I gave them the wrong name, does it?”

At the same time, the women knew it was important to participate.

“For the first time we’ll be able to have an accurate count to see how many women are homeless because of being battered,” said Linda Patrick, a family advocate at the shelter.

At Our House in Pomona, temporary home to 22 people, census counters Dottie Diaz and Cealphus Sanders were guided through a narrow hallway to a crowded family room, where adults were seated expectantly on sofas and chairs. Children of all ages were sprawled on the carpet.

“Is my son going to be counted in this?” James Earl Jones, 36, wanted to know. His wife, Conchetta, 20, cuddled their infant son, Ernest Earl, born on Monday in Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center just across the street. Jones, an auto dismantler who was laid off from his latest job, said he and his family moved to the shelter three weeks ago. He said he is looking for work.

A few minutes later, Diaz and Sanders asked them to sit at a nearby table and handed them five forms for themselves and their three children. James Jones picked up a pencil and whipped through the papers with few questions.

“It’s real simple,” he said, scribbling away. “All you have to do is have a name and the year you were born.”

But as he finished up the last of the forms, he worried about his friends on the street who may have been missed in the count.

“That person next door who lives in his car--he’s not going to be counted in any kind of census,” Jones mumbled. “One guy I saw today, I was telling him about this place, but they don’t have no place like this for single males.”

Some of the homeless refused to cooperate.

“All this signing this and answering that don’t mean nothing,” said a man in a baseball cap, who refused to fill out census forms at Colletti’s shelter. “The next day it’ll all be in the trash can. People are tired of being dragged through this stuff and told what they have to do.”

A woman at the same shelter was more reserved but just as adamant. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’d rather you don’t take my census.”

Dorothy Kumar, director of the Pomona Neighborhood Center Inc., said some of her regulars had stayed away Tuesday night in response to a call for a boycott of the census by some advocates for the homeless. “They said they weren’t going to participate, and they didn’t show up,” she said. “They thought they weren’t going to be counted accurately.”

A sore point for some of the homeless was the shortage of census takers from among their own ranks.

Paul Betz, administrator of the Pasadena district office for the census, said nine homeless people had been recruited to work in the western end of the San Gabriel Valley, but he could not say how many actually had worked. No homeless people were employed in the eastern valley, said June Wallin, office manager for the census bureau’s La Verne center.

“Give me some census forms, and I’ll find you 500 people,” said Danny Martin, an unemployed construction worker who has been homeless in the El Monte area for two years.

He and others at a shelter in the United Methodist Church of Covina said that only they knew how to find some of the hidden sleeping-out spots, but that they had been rejected as census takers.

“The census said they had to take a test and present identification,” Franco said. “They’ll never get people that way.”

But Larry Bryant, a spokesman for the Bureau of the Census, said that homeless people had met the qualifications. “They have to be able to read and write, and they have to pass an FBI check to show they don’t have any outstanding felonies against them,” he said. “And they have to have something to show they are who they say they are. Most people do have that kind of ID.”

The census takers skipped the Methodist church shelter in Covina, where 22 people spent the night, and they bypassed the Mayfair Hotel in Pomona, which is temporary home to about 100 unemployed people.

“I was surprised they didn’t show up here, really,” said Gerald Mathes, 39, who has lived in the $77-a-week hotel for four months and whose girlfriend was working as a census taker in San Bernardino.

“I guess they’re going to count me somehow,” Mathes said, wandering around the hotel lobby at about 11:30 p.m., half an hour after the census takers had finished in the La Verne center. “Maybe the IRS will get me.”

Some of the census takers came away with a sense that they had participated in a worthy effort. “If this is done right, it will help,” said Robert Burdick, 54, a retired service supervisor for U.S. Steel. “It should help bring the plight of the homeless to somebody’s attention.”

Times staff writer Edmund Newton contributed to this story.