Hope 2009: Homeless Street Survey

This past Tuesday between 12:15am and 4am thousands of volunteers canvassed the five boroughs to survey New Yorkers who were spending the night on the street or on a subway platform. Held each January since 2003, the Department of Homeless Services conducts the survey to estimate the true number of chronically homeless- those people that cannot or will not secure indoor shelter on a midwinter night.

“Tonight is a Code Blue”, says Fernando, the district captain from DHS to the room full of canvassers at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn elementary school. Code Blue indicates that the air temperature, then dipping below freezing, made sleeping outside a critical health risk for those intoxicated or without adequately warm garments.

We were all looking at our handsomely designed Hope 2009 guide book that outlined the priorities and protocol for the survey. Fernando added that if we found a person whom we judged to be in severe risk, we were to call the vans to pick he or she up and bring that person to a shelter- a service we provided to all who were willing to accept it.

(City and private shelters are not all guaranteed safe havens. They present their own set of risks throughout the night. Theft or bodily harm occurs unobserved and the setting can be more dangerous than the streets. )

The main goal of tonight was not to reach out, but to obtain information. That information would be culled from a questionnaire we carried with us. We were instructed to administer this questionnaire to anybody we met on the street, regardless of appearance. There are potentially 11 parts to the questionnaire, but Question 6 is the most important.

“Do you believe that this person is homeless? (If the answer is “Yes”; then you have several questions about the individual’s identity, age and location. If the answer is “No”; then you write down the time and your done. )

Most of our encounters never really went beyond Question 2: “May I ask you a few questions?” Answer: “No”.

Our team was made up of five people, four of whom worked for the City or in health care respectively: a grade school speech therapist, a Board of Education claims advisor, a nurse, and a Department of Transportation construction worker. None of us planned to go to work the next day and until then we took a four-hour walk in Bay Ridge.

Our leader, the claims advisor, carried the maps - printed swatches of street grids outlined and bordered with arrows tracing our route.

So we headed out.

Even if a stranger on the street cooperates with you asking he or she a question, that permission does not make Question 3 any less awkward:

“Tonight, do you have some place that you consider to be your home or a place where you live?”

“Yes? You pry further, “What kind of place is that? A room/apartment/house/hotel/dorm/drop-in center/shelter/subway/bus…car?”

Most people we met were clearly going home as they jangled keys nearing a house or a car, but accordingly to guide book rules we were to ask these people just the same.

If we skipped anybody we might miss one of the several hired decoys spread around the city to keep tabs on survey quality. The decoys could appear in a suit made of either fine wool or deli bags. We had to be vigilant.

We walked the Arab, Irish, Italian, Chinese and Greek enclaves of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park. We crossed the Gowanus Expressway and Bay Ridge Parkway. We examined brownstone lined streets, the alleys behind large Italianate homes, and the garden store lot that sells make your own wine kits.

The speech therapist talked about growing up in this neighborhood and the people that cut holes in the fence to go below the overpasses. The construction worker talked about patching those holes.

The claims advisor deciphered the switchbacks on our route. “Haven’t we been on this street already?” We stopped in for hot cocoa at the 24 Hour diner.

The guidelines state that we walk until we have completed the turf or 4am, whichever arrives first. The time approached 3:30am. One cut through a park and then we go back to the school.

We found no homeless in our 4-hour tour of the neighborhood and we felt a bit cheated. It's an odd point of view to take on other people’s destitution, but when roaming the street with a script and an agenda you want to show something for it. I imagine however, nobody with a full folder of accounts relished their hull. The format is to yield data, but it is ultimate people counted on those sheets. Now more than ever the recession is making us all consider the tenuousness of survival in the land of plenty.

I will be back next year for HOPE 2010 and my hope is still to find no homeless in Bay Ridge.