Similar exchanges occurred all over Manhattan between midnight and 4 a.m. on Tuesday as 1,000 volunteers canvassed the city in a first-ever effort to gauge the size of New York’s street-homeless population. “We’re doing this because we believe that if you have a problem you need to know what it’s all about in order to solve it,” says Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the New York’s Department of Homeless Services. Ultimately, the city plans to conduct surveys on a regular basis in order to chart shifts in demographics of the homeless. Boston, London and Philadelphia have all conducted similar homeless censuses in order to fine-tune policy, but Tuesday’s was the first such effort for New York.
And a flawed effort at that, according to some homeless advocates. Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, has argued repeatedly that tallying the city’s homeless is an impossible task, destined to result in an inaccurate count. The census covers only sections of Manhattan considered to have a high density of homeless people, as well as portions of medium- and low-density areas–the total number of homeless will be extrapolated from that sample within the next two weeks. Homeless people rarely remain in plain sight and are often hiding underground, in subway tunnels and other places where the city’s canvas of public space would miss, Markee, has complained. Still, another homeless advocate, Rosanne Haggerty of the nonprofit group Common Ground, contends that any one-time number the city winds up with is immaterial. “Doing multiple counts,” she says, “you do get a sense of how it’s changed or moved,” and, by extension, whether your homeless policy works.
But on a night when the mercury dipped below 25 degrees, there was an additional benefit of the city’s sweep through homeless-dense neighborhoods–volunteer counters convinced about 20 people to come in out of the cold and spend the night in a shelter or hospital bed. The count, conducted entirely by volunteers and organized by city employees at their day jobs, cost the city nothing, according to Gibbs, who added that a final tally should be available in a couple of weeks.
At 2 a.m., volunteer leader Andrew Apicella approaches a figure huddled under a dingy cotton blanket and surrounded by plastic shopping bags crammed with food wrappers. The homeless man appears to have bedded down for the night, and even though there is still ice on the ground, his clothes look damp. He is not wearing socks under his flimsy shoes; the volunteers can smell him from 10 feet away. Apicella gently calls out “Hello?” before patting down the man’s blanket to ascertain how thick it is. “This guy’s is in bad shape–he stinks, he’s not warm enough, he’s incoherent and in a case like this we have to get EMS out here,” he says, dialing 911 on his cell phone. When the ambulance arrives, the emergency medical technicians instantly recognize the man. “He’s out here all the time. We’ll take him in, clean him up, and he’ll be back out here again tomorrow,” says one technician, helping the man up into the back of his ambulance.
Philip Mangano has worked on 10 street-homeless surveys in Boston. Mangano came from Washington, D.C., where he works at a federal agency on homelessness, to participate in New York’s survey. “This is very ambitious of New York and if they get a good response, this will be important in terms of fine-tuning policy,” he says.
A fine tuning of policy is something that New York could use–there will be more than 38,000 people sleeping in shelters on the night the survey is taken, 7,400 more than on an average night in the previous year. Census volunteer Win Peacock says the drop-in shelter he runs in Lower Manhattan is 40 percent over capacity. He agrees that the count is not the perfect way to gauge the number of homeless in New York, but adds “show me perfection in this life and I’ll show you a lie. It’s a fine first step in understanding.”
Still, fewer than half of the homeless people surveyed accept volunteers’ offers for a bed Tuesday, many saying shelters were too dangerous. “It’s a bad place,” says one man who opts instead to curl up in an abandoned doorway on an egg-crate. “There are drugs and not nice people. No.” But Juan Cruz, smelling of the alcohol he swilled earlier Monday, was happy to get off the streets he’s known off and on for 15 years. He waited nearly two hours with volunteer Christine Arin before a van showed up to take him to the 30th Street Men’s Shelter, the city’s sole entry point for the nearly 20,000 men who sought shelter last year. Andrew Apicella, the volunteer leader, calls it “the belly of the beast” and it’s easy to see why–the dank halls smell of urine, and at 3 a.m. Tuesday, at least 30 young men sulk, sit and lie on the stained floors in various states of coherence waiting for one of 800 beds. “This is a rough place,” says Apicella, leading Cruz to the front desk for admittance. Even Linda Gibbs, the Department of Homeless Services commissioner, calls the facility “disgusting.”
Cruz, waiting to sign in, says only “God bless you.”
