Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 21, 1990 TAG: 9003232659
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Free meals, blankets and parties helped lure the homeless to government workers carrying clipboards and flashlights. But the counters, some of them homeless themselves, also encountered gunfire in Brooklyn, a spring snow in Vermont, robbers in Florida and the protests of critics and elusive targets everywhere.
And many of the homeless fell, once again, between the cracks.
Although results of the homeless census won't be known for months, the Census Bureau declared it a success. "Nationally, the operation went very smoothly," Census Director Barbara Everitt Bryant said at a morning news conference in New York.
Bryant noted that there were a few spots, including Cleveland and Washington, D.C., where the census workers didn't finish and would return tonight.
Around the nation, some homeless people took comfort in the very fact of being counted.
"It shows that they're starting to recognize us as humans and not the scum of the earth," said Chester Broadwell, 21, a resident of the Waystation shelter in Burlington, Vt.
But in Toledo, Ohio, 28-year-old Robert Allen snubbed U.S. Census officials.
"What are they going to use the numbers for anyway? To tell us there ain't no homeless problem? Hell, I'm a living example that there is a problem," Allen said. "We need jobs, not surveys."
A total of 15,000 enumerators - the federal term for head counters - were dispatched to seek the name, age, sex, race and marital status of a segment of society that considers itself forgotten.
The $2.7 million effort, the most ambitious ever undertaken to count the homeless, focused on every city of 50,000 or more residents. The tally will be added to the conventional census that begins April 1 as part of the constitutional mandate to count citizens every 10 years.
The homeless were sought out at shelters, missions, flophouses, cheap hotels, bus depots, subway cars, underpasses, bridges, railroad trestles, bank machine chambers, park benches, trash bins and abandoned buildings.
In St. Paul, Minn., census workers waited outside limestone caves along the Mississippi River. Once the domain of bootleggers, they now are frequented by the homeless.
In New York City, enumerators in Brooklyn ran for cover early today when a gunshot came from a building they were approaching, according to Fernando Armstrong, assistant regional census manager. No one was injured, and Armstrong said it wasn't clear that the shot was aimed at the census-takers.
In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., two census takers were robbed at a homeless shelter by a man who followed them after being interviewed, Census Bureau spokesman Ken Baldowski said. The workers were not injured and they pledged to continue their work, he said.
No count was made public, and the nationwide survey did little to settle the debate over the size of the homeless population, now estimated at a low of 250,000 to a high of more than 3 million.
by CNB