As Economy Worsens, the Homeless are Counted

Photo by Mary Otto

Armed with clipboards, volunteers spent all day Jan. 28 counting the region’s thousands of homeless men, women and children, in shelters and at food and counseling programs.  

And later, when streetlights shone on the ice-glazed snow, they went out again, searching for the ones they had missed during the day – the hurt, the high, the scared, hidden in alleys and under bridges, or deep in the parks.  

The point-in-time enumeration sponsored by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments has been held every January since 2001, and is intended to provide an annual snapshot of the homeless population in Washington and its suburbs.  

Regionally, analysts are on the lookout for signs that the poor economy and the housing crisis may be leading to an increase in homelessness, according to Michael Ferrell, chair of the council of government’s Homeless Services Planning and Coordinating Committee and the Executive Director of the DC Coalition for the Homeless.  

“What we will be paying attention to is people who have become homeless due to the economic situation and foreclosure,” Ferrell said. Some people who have lost their homes due to foreclosure still have income and become renters, Ferrell said. But he added, others “fall into that group where the bottom literally falls out.”  

Tracking People, Tracking Need  

 

The data gathered during the count is compiled and analyzed, giving a better understanding of changes in the homeless population over time, the needs of homeless men, women and children in different communities, and the causes of homelessness. Last year’s count, conducted just months after the housing crisis broke, showed numbers virtually unchanged from 2007. Throughout the region, 11,752 people were counted, 10 fewer than in the previous year. More than half, a total of 6,044, were found in District shelters, soup kitchens, day programs and outdoor camp sites. The rest were found in suburbs throughout Maryland and Virginia, staying in a range of emergency and transitional programs as well as woodland encampments.  

Here in the District, the ninth annual count was marked by a concerted effort to reach people not included before, in neighborhoods barely touched in previous counts. Teams of volunteers searching Southeast Washington found a handful of people, including a pregnant woman hidden in an abandoned house. They also found a mentally disabled woman whose mother had recently died wandering the frigid streets, said Jeff Rustin, an outreach worker from DC Central Kitchen. While the pregnant woman chose to stay where she was, the disabled woman agreed to go into a shelter, he said.  

“This is outreach,” he said. “This is what it’s all about.”  

Hilary Espinosa fills out a homeless count enumeration form by the light of her flashlight. Photo by Mary Otto

Without extra effort, these people would not have been included in the survey – and could have remained invisible to the network of services designed to help them, said Hilary Espinosa, also an outreach worker from DC Central Kitchen, who searched behind dumpsters in Anacostia with a flashlight and scanned Anacostia Park for footprints in the snow. She found only one man, slumped in the doorway of a closed café.  

He refused to go to a shelter but accepted a blanket and answered some of the questions on Espinosa’s survey. When she left, he had a little protection from the cold and he was included in the count.  

The outreach workers’ aims are simple, yet profound, Espinosa explained.  

“We’re not the people who get things done,” she said. “All we do is help people be OK until they can make a decision” to cope with their homelessness.  

Modern Homelessness: Trying to Count a Rising Tide  

 

Over the past 30 years, factors including the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, the wide availability of highly addictive drugs and the loss of public, affordable and single room occupancy housing have all contributed to increasing homelessness across the country.  

Since the early 1980s, as modern homelessness was being defined and quantified here in Washington both in the streets and in the halls of Congress, counting the homeless has remained an inexact science – and a matter of intense controversy.  

Back in those days estimates of the local homeless population ranged from 3,000 to 10,000, with city officials placing the numbers on the lower end of the spectrum and homeless advocates, including the late Mitch Snyder and members of his Community for Creative Non-Violence saying their larger numbers were based upon the needs they saw around them.  

“The numbers on the streets were huge,” recalled Carol Fennelly, a former CCNV spokeswoman, in an interview this week. But besides that, it served officials’ purposes to present the homeless problem as smaller, and the advocates purposes to present the problem as larger, she said.  

“We were providing services to the homeless.”  

But leaders of CCNV, which completed renovations on the 1,350 bed Federal City Shelter in 1988, also liked to dramatize the point that the true number of homeless people living in the city was, by nature, practically unknowable.  

“We will know how many there are only after we have brought them inside,” wrote Snyder and CCNV colleague Mary Ellen Hombs.  

While acknowledging the difficulties inherent in counting the homeless nationally, officials at the U.S Census Bureau have recently announced efforts for increased outreach in order to provide a better estimate of the nation’s homeless population in the 2010 census.  

The news might have amused Snyder. Before his death in 1990, he and other CCNV protesters dumped a truckload of sand in front of the Department of Commerce, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau, as a way of highlighting the failings of homeless counts, Fennelly said.  

“Mitch’s line was ‘counting homeless people is like counting grains of sand.’”  

A report on this year’s homeless count is expected in the spring. 


Issues |Economy|Living Unsheltered


Region |Washington DC

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