As the sun set on Saint Patrick's Day, and the taverns
overflowed with green beer and laughter, a motley crew
of volunteers armed with flashlights and clipboards
fanned out across the city streets on a difficult and
unprecedented mission--to count the city's homeless
population.
Organized by JOIN, a local nonprofit agency, the
pilot project was an effort to gauge the true depth
of homelessness in central Portland. Since the early
'90s, Multnomah County has conducted a twice-yearly
census of men, women and children staying in shelters
or transitional housing. But the county has never
tried to count the people sleeping under bridges,
in parks, in abandoned buildings and in their cars.
"There's been a feeling it was just about impossible,"
says Rob Justus of JOIN.
For advocates, bureaucrats and service providers,
arriving at an accurate count of the city's homeless
population has considerable significance. "Everybody
wants the numbers," says Barbara Hershey, who coordinates
the shelter count for the county. "The numbers are
data, and with data you can document your need."
But counting street people is a daunting task. Methods
typically used to track respondents--addresses, telephone
numbers--clearly do not work on the street. "The housed
population is tagged and identified," says Bill Boyd,
a JOIN volunteer who coordinated the survey. "The
homeless population is sort of invisible."
That's partly by design. Homeless people deliberately
choose obscure sites for their camps; the locations
are usually a jealously guarded secret. In addition,
campers are often wary of giving out personal information.
Throw in high rates of chronic mental illness, alcoholism
and drug addiction, and you get a demographer's nightmare:
How do you conduct a door-to-door survey of people
who don't have doors?
As the sky over the West Hills deepens to a dull
purple, Stoney, a sturdy 54-year-old former hobo,
directs his team through an industrial section of
North Portland to a lonely dead-end street, overshadowed
by the massive concrete pillars of Interstate 5. Clambering
up the steep cliff beneath the freeway, Stoney performs
the hobo's equivalent of a polite knock on the door.
"Huh-low!" he booms, his voice mixing with the snarl
of the 18-wheelers rushing overhead. "Huh-low in the
camp! Anybody home?"
No one answers. Undaunted, Stoney climbs to the top,
just a few feet below the freeway's underside, where
a narrow trickle of land is sheltered on three sides
from the wind and the rain. Here, in the fading twilight,
the dusty, barren landscape resembles the surface
of the moon, the cliff face pockmarked by the shadows
of a thousand boot prints. The ground is littered
with flattened cardboard, newspaper, piles of old
clothes, boots, cans, broken glass, plastic razors,
and cigarette butts, all jumbled with the stench of
piss and stale tobacco. A sleeping bag is stretched
out on top of a gray blanket, with a neatly folded
T-shirt in place of a pillow. An army jacket hangs
from a concrete girder, and, improbably, a battered
reclining armchair is propped against the wall. "It's
kind of early," Stoney explains, sweating with exertion.
"No one's home yet."
One of the many obstacles facing the census is that,
strange as it might seem, homeless camps share the
same diurnal rhythm as any suburban bedroom community--their
inhabitants tend to rise early, go about their daily
routine and return after dark.
Stoney knows that rhythm all too well. A former bartender
and cab driver in Seattle, he hit the streets in 1987.
"Things started to go wrong for me," he shrugs, popping
a stick of Wintermint gum. A "self-taught" hobo, he
rode the rails for 12 years, hopping the hot-shots--fast
freight trains--from Seattle to Minneapolis to El
Paso and every place in between. In November of last
year, he came through Portland, stopping in at the
St. Francis Church for dinner and a chance to get
out of the rain. He volunteered for odd jobs and chores
and found a place to stay. Now he works at JOIN full-time,
managing the laundry and clothing programs.
The next camp Stoney finds is situated under a highway
alongside a rail yard. "This is where you'll find
the Mexicans and Latinos," he explains, dashing across
a set of train tracks, the bright rails curving into
the night. Ducking under a cable, he scrambles up
a bank, past blackberry vines and pigeon feathers,
to a tiny plywood shack cobbled together against the
underside of the highway. "We've got a house here,
folks," he announces, peering into the shack's interior.
Like any good canvasser, he is careful not to cross
the doorstep without permission. But again, there's
no one home. Further on, nestled between two girders,
the crew finds more evidence of recent occupation:
a fresh red apple sitting on top of a Spanish-language
Bible.
After almost an hour, the crew finally encounters
its Dr. Livingstone beneath another freeway underpass.
As Stoney bellows hello, waving his flashlight over
piles of trash and rags and the remains of two beat-up
bicycles, a weak voice calls out in response. Seconds
later, the spotlight reveals a dirt-smeared face with
a droopy moustache. "Hey, brother, we're doing a little
survey," Stoney explains, describing the project.
"Well, I don't really plan on being homeless that
long," the man replies, rubbing his eyes. "As soon
as I start feeling better, I'm going to look for day
labor." He agrees to answer the survey anyway.
After all the anticipation, the survey itself is
a bit of a let-down: a few shouted questions, a few
scribbled notes. The respondent is male, white, in
his 40s and not a veteran and has been homeless for
several months. He chose this spot, he says, because
it's close to Emanuel Hospital, where he is a frequent
patient.
Stoney hands him a hygiene kit and a Burger King
coupon. The crew wishes the camper good luck, then
heads back down toward the street. There are many
more camps to visit, and it's getting late.
Despite the volunteers' efforts, the homeless population
proved elusive. In the end, the census discovered
just 123 people sleeping outdoors, with unconfirmed
evidence of another 60 campers. The low numbers are
due in part to the survey's limitations--JOIN did
not canvass the dining halls, soup kitchens or parks,
for example, because of a shortage of volunteers.
JOIN now plans to refine its procedures and repeat
the survey in the next month or two.
"We learned a lot," says Justus, who estimates the
census covered about 10 percent of the city. "What
we've learned is how not to do it."
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Willamette Week | originally
published March 24,
1999
