Posted on 02/26/2003 9:14:19 PM PST by John H K
Three men and three women gathered around a table Monday night and tied yellow identification cards around their necks with twine. With this, they became members of Group 5, crusading against homelessness in New York City.
They said it was a sense of duty that had brought them to this large conference room in this downtown office building to help New York do what it had never attempted: count the number of homeless people living on the streets of Manhattan.
It turned out to be a weird, funny and poignant ride. Before the night was over, they found themselves dodging snowballs from an irate homeless man, dodging forklifts full of fish, and fielding baffled reactions from well-dressed New Yorkers who were asked whether they had a place to sleep.
There was the guy sleeping under the Brooklyn Bridge who awoke and stared from the ground at a ring of city workers, bright-eyed volunteers carrying clipboards, reporters, flashbulbs and television cameras. The city worker began explaining the survey.
"I know all about it; I read three newspapers a day," the man said. "Come back alone one day when I don't have 10 people in my face."
Add one to the city's homeless population.
Then there was the human-sized lump draped with blankets under a ramp of the Brooklyn Bridge. The lump did not respond to a wake-up call. Add another.
The group came upon Richmond Nicandro, who was taking a cigarette break outside the Best Western Seaport Inn in downtown Manhattan. Reading off a clipboard, Bill DiStefano of the city's Department of Homeless Services asked Mr. Nicandro if he had "someplace that you consider to be your home or the place where you live?"
Mr. Nicandro, 27, digested the question and mustered a weak nod. Only after he mentioned his apartment in Jersey City did they move on.
"They're not going to find too many homeless, asking guys like me," said Mr. Nicandro, looking sharp in his double-breasted blue suit with a lapel pin identifying him as the hotel's front-desk agent.
Nobody said it was going to be easy. In fact, nobody had ever tried to tally the homeless population for the obvious reason that homeless people don't stay put long enough to be counted. But this year the city vowed to try anyway, with the commissioner of homeless services, Linda I. Gibbs, declaring bravely, "In order to end street homelessness, you have to understand how many people are out there and where they are."
The theory was that by taking 1,000 volunteers and sending them to places where the homeless are known to congregate, officials could count enough people to do a statistical sampling that would amount to a pretty good guess. Some advocates for the homeless said it would never work, but that didn't stop the city from trying.
By the end of the night, the census takers had found 17 homeless people who agreed to go into shelters, department officials said. The total count would not be available for several weeks.
The night started prosaically for the six volunteers of Team 5. They rehearsed scripts outlining how to identify, approach and interview homeless people.
They carried flashlights, clipboards and a certain amount of New York chutzpah.
Their canvassing area was District 23, a dozen windswept blocks off the East River between the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Fulton Fish Market. Officials from the Department of Homeless Services, who divided Manhattan into 1,000 districts for the count, classified the district among those in Manhattan most densely populated with homeless people.
The first twist of the evening came when the team was introduced to several journalists who would tag along to cover the census: a reporter and photographer from The Times and a three-person television crew including the newscaster Melissa Russo of WNBC News.
Department officials invited the journalists to accompany the teams of volunteers, but a press officer warned them to keep their distance from the actual interviews, to avoid causing a "media circus."
Still, the gang was quite a sight, with their notebooks, clipboards, television cameras and sound booms. People on the street stopped and stared.
This did not sit well with a middle-aged Hispanic man who awoke when the group approached and suggested in no uncertain terms that the team move along.
"You don't want to be around when I start swinging," he said, and hopped up and began chasing the group.
"Get those cameras off me," he yelled. "I know when my intelligence is being insulted." To drive home his point, he began throwing snowballs at the team and cackling further threats. The team beat a hasty retreat but recorded one more figure in the homeless column.
Survey guidelines dictate that teams approach everyone on the street and ask about their housing situation. On Peck Slip, the team approached a man in a snazzy orange Gore Tex jacket who was pulling his portable CD player out of a leather satchel. He had a loft in TriBeCa, he said. The man they stopped in an oversized black hooded sweatshirt under the F.D.R. Drive said, "I'm just going to work," and pointed toward the Fulton Fish Market, which was bright and bustling and reeking of its main product.
Soon they encountered Reginald Yearwood, who was happy to chat. He was 56, he said, from Trinidad, and had spent 10 years homeless in New York.
He lay next to the East River, in a sleeping bag on wooden packing pallets draped with a cardboard box with the words Frozen Fish." The spot afforded him a spectacular view of the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges.
Mr. Yearwood said he had tried living in the Bellevue men's shelter but "escaped" when he realized that the city had implanted an electronic transmitter in his bladder to track him and was using a chemical in food to control the minds of the homeless population. Time to move on.
The final count was five, hardly the bonanza that some team members expected. In fact, some volunteers seemed a bit disappointed, their once strong sense of purpose deflated. One member, Nick DellaCave, began smoking and staring off at the river. Another man chatted about the new seawall on his house in Marine Park. The women — Michaela Soyer, Emily Ford and Nazli Parvizi — were making small talk, and the reporters were thinking up fallback story angles. It was 3 a.m. and a light snow was beginning to fall. Mr. DiStefano's suggestion to wrap it up an hour early encountered no resistance.
So today one of the City Supervisors is blocking use of the fingerprint readers because it infringes on the "privacy" of the poor saps. Kiss millions of bucks bye-bye!
You're not going to be able to end homelessness when so many of the people you're trying to save are as crazy as this.
Good thing. The old fellow might have had a lawsuit there (even if he had been panhandling).
They found one: humor!
Gee, it warms my heart knowing that there are commies in the world who care so much about us, that they wish there were more of us who were homeless. How much they care for us! Thanks, commies!
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