The HOPE Count

On Monday I participated in New York City’s annual count of unsheltered homeless individuals. Our team of five, including two West Point students who’d been bused down to volunteer, canvassed some 16 blocks between midnight and 4 a.m., asking everyone we encountered whether they had a place to sleep that night, and if they would like help. A few people laughed – we told people we were supposed to ask everyone, but the implication that we thought they might be homeless was comical to the briefcase-toting executives heading home, and to the jovial beer-drinking group of Eastern European-sounding men who had perhaps just gotten off work. 

Between moments of levity were scenes of profound despair. We passed a group of five white people scattered on the sidewalk with their dirty blankets and personal detritus, faces scabby and gaunt, with the prematurely withered air of drug addicts. They told us they were staying there for the night and no, they didn’t want to go to a shelter. 

We passed a lone man in an entryway shooting something into his arm, trying to shield his face and arm from view as he declined to answer our questions. 

We passed a young couple walking down the street who told us they had no place to stay. Jay told us Sarah had been pregnant and miscarried due to the stress of living on the streets. Sarah said the city didn’t recognize their domestic partnership and wouldn’t get them housing together. They wanted help, they wanted off the streets. We took their contact information to pass on. I don’t know if everything they said is accurate, but the sadness in their eyes expressed a deeper truth about fear and desperation.  

Others did not want to share their stories. We passed an older African-American woman around 2 a.m. sitting on a box by a small suitcase, wearing a Sunday-best blue hat and staring into the street. “I don’t need help,” she said quickly. She said she was not homeless, but we weren’t so sure. 

We passed a man with long dirty hair and a mean disposition who was standing on the street. He said he wasn’t homeless. He told us to go get some sex at a club and spat on the ground in front of us, twice. He kept spewing insults and saliva until we walked away. “Do you think he’s homeless?” our data-entry team member asked. No, we said, he’s just an asshole. 

We passed five sleeping bags end to end along a sidewalk, zipped up and filled with slumbering humans, with a few feet between each. An overpowering smell of fetid urine permeated the block. Our instructions were to gently try to wake anyone who was sleeping. Gentle is a subjective term, and one of our group members spoke and prodded more enthusiastically than the rest of us might have. To my surprise no one expressed anger when they were awakened to hear, “Excuse me, we’re volunteers with the City of New York, and we just want to make sure you’re ok.” The five along 47^thwere white, and all looked to be over age 60. One woman with long soft white hair and a pretty face looked at us groggily for a second before saying, “I’m ok, thank you,” and retreating back to sleep.  

Several people told us they didn’t want help from the city and they didn’t want to go to a shelter. They didn’t like the rules, or the shelters were dangerous, they said. No, I don’t want to go to shelter, they said. 

One man standing in front of Grand Central Station said yes, he’s homeless, and yes, he would like a ride to a shelter. He said extra words and made extra movements. I dialed the four numbers we’d been given for van drivers, and by the time I got through – to the last one – the man had disappeared into the station. I felt like part of the problem. 

Some people were eager to talk. One guy headed home to his apartment in New Jersey wanted to tell us his thoughts on affordable housing policy. We didn’t have the heart to tell him that wasn’t what our “survey” was about. 

At Grand Central Station, the stationmaster regaled us for 15 minutes about homelessness with no discernible message. I think his daily life involves a lot of interaction with all facets of humanity, and he needed something to do with it all. He told us he sees one woman every day rolling a suitcase and he knows she’s homeless though she won’t admit it. Others collect money and pretend they’re homeless but they’re not, he said. He talked so long the station closed and we got locked in. A security guard helped us find a way out.

Our assigned area included a subway station. We were to check the platforms; other teams were assigned to check the subway cars themselves, which draw scores of people seeking warmth and shelter through the night. The conductor told me when he gets to the end of the line there are always homeless people sleeping in the cars. I asked if he has to remove them, and he said he calls an agency to do it. 

In all, we talked to 67 people, of whom we deemed 29 “street homeless.” We logged the information in the app, part of an annual effort called HOPE, for Homeless Outreach Population Estimate, mandated by the federal government. An estimated 4200 volunteers canvassed all five boroughs that night. Results will be available in the spring; last year, the count found 3,675 unsheltered people. 

Two things surprised me. The first was Ben Carson. My friend Emily had signed us up to volunteer at PS 116 in Manhattan -- where we were joined by surprise guests Mayor Bill de Blasio and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. I was admittedly agog to see a member of the Trump cabinet in the flesh. Secretary Carson talked like he was on downers, but I have no argument with his message:

Most of us after this long cold night will go home to a nice warm comfortable bed with a roof over our head and security. But think about all those people who aren’t doing that, who are sleeping on the street, who don’t have security, who don’t know what horrors await them that night or the next day. We need to always keep them in mind, and work hard to change the status that they have. … We as a society have placed a lot of barriers [to affordable housing], a lot of it due to NIMBYism. We can do better.

The secretary and the mayor went out and canvassed – along with a coterie of reporters.^[1]

The other surprise was the gratitude we encountered. Spitting Man didn’t shock me as much as the people who thanked us for checking in on them. I imagine I would feel exposed and vulnerable sleeping on a sidewalk in New York City, even if I could get warm. If someone nudged my sleeping bag with their boot, I would recoil in terror. Perhaps living outside, you become inured to hardship and fear. What’s more amazing is that humans don’t become inured to love and caring. 

And yet … there is a part of me that is horrified that I am no longer horrified at the sight of any human living in conditions of such fundamental insecurity and indignity. It should always bother our conscience. 

“We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

            -Martin Luther King, Jr. 

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^[1]See this TV news story: https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/01/28/hope-homeless-count

 

The HOPE count 2020 - PS 116 team 13, NYC

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Any outing to Cape Ann is really an excuse to eat at Zeke's. Gloucester, MA. 

Rosie and our friend Lilla and Lilla's robot embroidery machine made this!

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Alder and I took a pop-up card class. Recognize this scene?