CENSUS NOTEBOOK : To Count the Homeless, You Have to Find Them
After 2 a.m. Wednesday, when the television crews had gone home and the newspaper deadlines were long past, the first-ever attempt to count the nation’s homeless slipped into the surreal.
For the next four hours, census takers left the safety of shelters and rescue missions to enter the nation’s skid rows, parks, canyons and freeway underpasses, where the most hard-core homeless might be found--or might not.
In California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, census spokesman Franca Garbiulu said mountain dwellers had left booby-traps, “such as land mines,” to discourage trespassers.
In Houston, census takers were showered with bottles and shoes by grumpy homeless men who were awakened from their sidewalk slumber. The count on that particular corner was abandoned.
In San Angelo, Tex., where an estimated 100 homeless people live, 10 census workers spotted lots of wildlife--deer, cottontail rabbits--but no homeless. Judi Chappa, a homeless advocate there, allowed that, “It’s not like New York City.”
New York was indeed in a class by itself, with more homeless even than Los Angeles. At one census office, workers carried on strained phone conversations with field operatives who had met unexpected difficulties:
“There’s how many? A thousand people there? You’ve got two hours; you’ll have to stay there until you talk to them all. Stay there until you finish.”
Until you finish.
How could anyone finish, really, in a nation whose homeless lurk in every neighborhood and may not want to be counted?
At 4 a.m. on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, census takers roamed the streets against an eerie backdrop of illegal curbside fires--set by the homeless--that lit up the night sky.
But here, as in most cities, many of the homeless refused to participate. Despite their filthy clothes and sometimes unsteady appearances, these people offered up personal philosophies one might have expected from better-educated men.
“For me, they can just forget the count, when domestic funds are going overseas,” said Willie Roberson, 37, who stood on a corner littered with sleeping crack addicts. He said he had “avoided getting counted by walking off whenever I saw (the counters).”
“They used food as fish bait and got people to sign the census,” grumbled Kim Lewis, 27, who earlier had refused to participate. “I told them no, because the federal government is too corrupt.”
But beyond the refusal to be counted, other factors unfolded in the dark morning hours that seemed to doom the count’s accuracy.
In the upper San Fernando Valley, a team of four census takers traveled 40 miles, getting out their car only twice--once to buy a box of candy. They relied entirely on flashlights, shining them into parks. But their lights did not penetrate, and they found only one homeless person all night.
Others, like Neil Resnick’s team in a badly blighted North Philadelphia neighborhood, tried mightily. They trudged through freezing wet snow, but they too failed to locate a single homeless person in the dimly lit neighborhood.
“There’s no homeless on the street in this weather,” said a disgusted Resnick. “They’re all inside abandoned buildings. And we’re not allowed inside.”
In Houston, 24 men lay in a row on a porch, asleep and protected from the night air by thin blankets wrapped so tightly they looked like cocoons.
Census taker Anthony Ross and his two partners approached the men, who were awakened by the sudden flash of a new photographer’s camera.
“Hey, get out of here! We’re trying to sleep!” was the only printable thing they shouted. Even as Ross tried to explain his presence, he knew it was hopeless.
To his partners, Ross murmured, “Do not interview. Simply take the count.” But they fled under a threatened siege as one homeless man grabbed a baseball bat and started toward them.
Many other homeless people were apparently missed during the wee hours.
For instance, not a single census taker was sighted by a team of journalists who traveled for three hours in an 80-block by 20-block sector of South-Central Los Angeles.
Leo Jacobs, 41, moved briskly toward 47th Street just before dawn, pushing a grocery cart filled with his belongings. He had spent the night criss-crossing South-Central, walking 70 blocks in search of cans and bottles to recycle.
“I’ve seen a bunch of homeless out here tonight, just like me, but I haven’t seen a single person from the government,” he said, guffawing with delight because a reporter and photographer had appeared suddenly to chat with him.
“You all be careful out here, you hear me now?” he waved, resuming his search.
In crime-ridden MacArthur Park, the special effort to count the homeless ran up against a daily police routine, as officers herded people out of the area in a continuing crackdown on the drug trade.
“We tried to count as many as we could when the police pushed them out of the park and into surrounding side streets,” said a census taker, homeless himself for eight months. He did not want his name used.
In Los Angeles’s eastern barrios, census workers were sometimes unnerved by the frightful qualities of the city’s backwaters.
Four men and two women faced their first assignment--an unlit parcel of marshy land covered by three-foot-tall grass near Opal Street and Boyle Avenue. Out came the flashlights.
“There’s no one here. Do you see anything?” Ronald Chow, 17, asked a fellow counter, peering into some bushes. “This is some scary stuff.”
Unsuccessful after 20 minutes, the group headed to an area of East Los Angeles where curving freeway ramps have created cubbyholes adopted by the homeless.
Forty minutes later, the sight of four homeless men sleeping under an overpass brought with it a bittersweet moment of triumph.
“I knew we had to find someone under the freeways,” said Robert Rosales, the 37-year-old team leader. “Shhhhh, be more quiet. We don’t want to wake them,” he whispered.
The warning came too late. One of the sleeping men roused, looked around and quickly covered his head. Rosales apologized, “Sorry, amigo. “
Finding the elusive homeless in the great outdoors inspired some census takers to more creative heights.
Near a set of little-used Southern Pacific railroad tracks in Sacramento, counter Gerald Igilsrud spotted a pair of shoes under a blanket-covered bundle.
“One pair of shoes--that’s one person,” he declared. Then, on closer inspection, Igilsrud amended his description. “Two people,” he said. “A young man and woman.”
If there was any message from the night’s events it was that, like the light thrown by the partial moon Wednesday, the count left as many things in the dark as it illuminated.
“It’s just the people in their ivory tower drinking their mint juleps and counting noses,” said George Whitney, a homeless resident of Baloney Joe’s shelter in Portland, Ore. “Nobody can help the homeless because nobody understands the problem.”
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Irene Chang, Jeordan Legon and Jack Cheevers in Los Angeles; Daniel Weintraub in Sacramento; Shawn Pogatchnik in New York; Lianne Hart in Houston, and Mike Clary in Miami.
