Disappointed Area Census Takers Rarely Saw Homeless They Sought

An unprecedented effort to count the nation’s homeless appears to have turned up dramatically low numbers in Long Beach and other Southeast cities, where the counters sometimes outnumbered the counted, census takers said.

Census Bureau officials said city-by-city results of the historic count would not be released for several weeks and they refused to venture a guess. But the disillusionment of census takers hired for the night indicated that the 14-hour attempt to take “a snapshot” of a national crisis had yielded scarcely a glimpse, either because the homeless don’t exist or the Census Bureau failed to find them.

“We didn’t even see a stray dog,” census taker Julie Whitmore, who is herself homeless, said after trudging through Whittier parks looking for anyone curled up on a bench or sleeping beneath a bush.

A wide sweep of the Long Beach coastline near Redondo Avenue by two workers swinging their flashlights in the mist revealed nothing but an expanse of wet sand. A walk around an abandoned building on one of the empty streets of downtown turned up only an empty sleeping bag.

It was as though the streets had been purposely emptied, some of the census teams lamented at the end of their 14-hour search of alleys, freeway underpasses, abandoned buildings, emergency shelters and cheap motels from dusk Tuesday to dawn Wednesday.

Some census officials suspected the police conspired to chase street people away and minimize the homeless crisis with a low count. Some blamed the homeless themselves for taking part in a national census boycott. But many more faulted the U.S. Census Bureau for employing too few people to look in all the wrong places for a population that hides from authority.

“We all encounter the homeless in our daily lives and there seemed to be fewer on the streets than there usually are,” said Susan Silberstein, a supervisor at the Long Beach census office. “I suspect the police moved people. Possibly the city would rather not be identified as having a large homeless population,” she added, reflecting the opinion of several census takers.

Some homeless people said they were rousted by police in the night. But Long Beach Police Lt. Columbus Lowe dismissed the idea as absurd.

“There is no truth to that,” he said. “We have no stake in whether they count people or not.”

About 200 census takers were deployed in teams to cover territory from Long Beach to Compton to Santa Fe Springs in two shifts. Critics said such a small number couldn’t hope to find hidden pockets of homelessness in an area so vast.

One team of three men and a woman straggled into Long Beach headquarters at 7 a.m. Wednesday reporting that in six hours they had counted fewer than 10 people. They said a visit to the Greyhound bus station, expected to be a gold mine, turned up one homeless man.

“We obviously weren’t where they were,” census taker Bill Davies said. “I just feel the government in general was directed to get as low a count as possible. That way the public isn’t going to raise a hue and cry about just a couple of thousand homeless people.”

Attendance was uneven at area shelters, where census takers visited as part of their first-shift tour from dusk to midnight. Handouts of polyester shirts and hygiene kits with soap, deodorant and candy helped attract a full house to the National Guard Armory in Long Beach.

But an outbreak of measles and chicken pox had depleted the capacity crowd usually in residence at the nearby Family Shelter from 50 to nine, director Lupe Macker said.

“It was terrible timing,” she said. “It just seems like you couldn’t find another thing to work against this. It hasn’t gone smoothly at all.”

The second shift’s task was more difficult--finding homeless people under bridges, in parks, alleys and some of the county’s meanest streets. There were no violent incidents reported and few workers even complained of danger. The biggest letdown was the count itself, they said.

“We had a really enthusiastic group, people who couldn’t wait to get out there and start counting. They were really fired up,” Silberstein said. “But when they came back, they were disappointed.”

The Census Bureau had asked cities weeks ago to come up with an itinerary of places the homeless are known to congregate. Critics warned it was misguided to rely on bureaucrats for such information rather than the homeless and their advocates.

Marine patrol officers and poverty workers said they offered to direct census takers to spots frequented by the homeless and the mentally ill, but the offer was refused.

Advocates warned that a low count is worse than no count at all, since the census number will probably be used for years to determine government aid to social welfare programs.

“We knew it was going to be low, but now we’re concerned it will be even lower,” Long Beach Homeless Coordinator Sheila Pagnani said.

By 9 p.m. it was clear at the Salvation Army shelter in Bell that the homeless were not embracing the idea of a census. Attendance was slightly less than usual, and some who were there refused to be counted.

“This is a bunch of crap,” said Keith Robinson, who has been homeless since 1985. “It ain’t going to help me. Tomorrow, I’m back on the road again.”

Emergency shelters the county opens only when the temperature drops to 40 were beckoning street people to take shelter in almost balmy weather Tuesday night. Because the county has refused in the past to bend the rules even when the temperature hits 41, some of the homeless were bitter.

“We done had some bad nights here this year and some bad days, and the armory wasn’t open,” complained a drunken man at the Long Beach armory who wouldn’t give his name. “Now we have 90-degree weather at night and the armory is open. . . . We’re being counted tonight for what? For dollars, that’s it.”

But others at the armory, where the air reeked of alcohol and an occasional whiff of body lotion from a hygiene kit, were eager to be recognized.

“I wanted to be counted. I’ve never been counted before. I wanted to be one of the people of the United States,” Donald DeWitt, 37, said, sitting on an Army cot.

A city-appointed task force put the Long Beach homeless population between 3,000 and 5,000, an estimate that has since been disputed as too high by some and too low by others.

It was doubtful by dawn Wednesday that the first-ever census had settled the debate or put a reliable number on the nation’s despair.

The scene at a park behind Long Beach City Hall, where street people were beginning to gather early Wednesday, seemed to sum it up.

Three homeless men were sitting in the morning sun. One of them had been counted. Two had not.

“I wasn’t crazy about it,” 68-year-old Melvin Behning said of his census experience at the local rescue mission. “I really had hoped to avoid it, but I didn’t.”

James Hutchinson, 63, said he been among the city’s homeless for 12 years, but no one stumbled on him sleeping behind a downtown liquor store Tuesday night.

Rudy Banda, 53, spent the night in his car. But no one looked there, either, he said.