Down and Out and Dispossessed

By Richard Stengel

A wino with rheumy eyes and a scraggly beard slumping against a skid row doorway. A muttering mental patient, his hair caked with dirt, searching for the warmth of a steam grate on a bitingly cold day. These are stereotypes of the homeless: desolate men who are still with us in abundance, causing Americans to look the other way, half wishing such unfortunates did not exist at all.

But the haggard face of homelessness is changing. It is growing younger, more feminine. A new class of homeless men, women and children is showing up in the shelters, people whose reasons for homelessness are less obvious but no less disturbing. The new destitute often confute the stereotype; they do not sleep on park benches or push around shopping carts bulging with their worldly goods. On the street they may appear neat and purposeful, with a place to go and work to be done.

The new homeless are the economically dispossessed: young men who have fallen on hard times, families who are not making ends meet, single mothers who cannot afford to pay the rent and support their children at the same time. They include blue-collar families who have been forced out of apartments when their low-income housing is converted to condominiums; some hold jobs but cannot find or afford a new place to live. Many are homeless for the first time, and deeply shamed by the experience. "These are people you would never expect to see in a shelter," says Martha Whelan, director of an emergency facility on Chicago's North Side. "They certainly never expected it."

Temperatures last week plunged to record lows in much of the country, bringing the plight of the homeless, both old and new, to an early crisis as shelters everywhere brimmed over with people escaping the cold. Some could not escape: in Kansas City two homeless men were found frozen to death, one in a portable toilet at a downtown parking lot, the other in a construction-site trailer.

At shelters across the country, the new homeless are attempting to come to terms with their daunting circumstances. Kerry Alston, 24, looks like thousands of other city students as he saunters through Manhattan's crowds on his way to a computer class, a bookbag slung jauntily over one shoulder. But when he leaves the refuge of the classroom, Alston returns to the buzzing confusion of the Fort Washington Armory in New York City, an enormous room that sleeps as many as 900 men. Alston's luck went bad after he lost his job as a security guard last July and then had to leave his apartment after a dispute with his roommate. "When I first got to the shelter," he said, "I wondered what I had gotten into. I had never been in anything like this -- the odor, the dirt, people all over the floor. Then I realized I had no choice." Pride prevents him from telling his mother in South Carolina about his situation. "I'm going to get back on my feet first." Rachel Hanson, 43, was a housewife in Anaheim, Calif., when her marriage of 19 years ended in divorce in 1985. With no skills and little savings, Hanson lost her four-bedroom house to foreclosure. Shelter workers discovered her last January in a campground, where she had been living in a car with her three children for eight months. "My life simply fell apart," Hanson said. "I lost everything. Why, I even had a microwave oven."

Christine McDuffie, 37, had a job as a nurse's aide in Atlantic City, N.J., and a two-bedroom apartment for herself and her son Paul, 17. But in the summer of 1985 illness overwhelmed her; she lost her job and went on welfare. Then her building was condemned. She packed her things and moved to New York, but the public housing she had been promised did not come through. She sought what she thought would be temporary housing in a city shelter. More than two months later, she and her son are still living in a room with 13 other people, most of them single parents with children. McDuffie is looking for an apartment and trying to find a job. "Every day I go out and try to find somewhere, but as soon as you say 'welfare' they close doors in your face."

A report by the National Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit advocacy group, says that "families with children are now the fastest-growing segment of the nation's homeless population." Jim Stewart, a director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, estimates that over the past two years nearly three-fourths of those entering the ranks of the homeless have been families, mainly young single women with children. Many of these women were either abandoned by their husbands, evicted from their homes, or both. A study of homelessness in the Boston area showed that the median age of homeless mothers was 27, that nearly 60% of them had high school diplomas, and that 38% had no history of drug or alcohol abuse or mental illness.

Activist Mitch Snyder, a shelter director who heads Washington's Community for Creative Non-Violence, estimates that one-third of all the homeless are now families and the remaining two-thirds are single men and women. Of the single women, Snyder says, about three-fourths are mentally disturbed; of the men, two-thirds are composed of the elderly poor or disabled, drug addicts and alcoholics. There is no way to take a census of the shifting homeless population, and no one is certain precisely how many of them there are. The Reagan Administration puts the number at 350,000, a figure that most advocates consider far too low. The National Coalition asserts that the U.S. has more homeless people now than at any other time since the Great Depression. Some homeless advocates go so far as to suggest that the count is ten times the Administration's estimate, or about 3.5 million. Snyder, like many fellow activists, contends that the number of homeless is growing by 25% a year. "We're seeing it in the shelters, which are bursting at the seams," he says. "They filled up this summer, which has never happened before."

Homeless advocates say the most crucial factor in the rise of the new street people is the dearth of low-income housing. A study by the National Coalition puts much of the blame on the Reagan Administration's cutbacks in subsidized housing. Federal funds have been slashed by 78% since 1980, the | study says, while at the same time creeping gentrification in cities is displacing low-income residents. "There is almost no way out of homelessness, given the housing market," says Robert Hayes, a founder of the National Coalition. "You scratch and you claw, and sometimes you find a place, but it's rare."

Similarly, cuts in Aid to Families with Dependent Children have forced many single mothers over the edge. In Massachusetts up to 90% of the state's homeless families are headed by women whose primary income is from AFDC. In Los Angeles the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $491 a month; the average monthly AFDC payment to a mother of one child is $448. Notes Kay Young McChesney, director of the Homeless Families Project at the University of Southern California: "So these women face a choice. They can buy food and diapers, or they can pay the rent. Some months they decide to eat."

Many cities are unable or unwilling to cope with their homeless problem. Providence, the National Coalition reports, has just 177 emergency beds to offer an estimated homeless population of 3,500. Dallas has 1,000 beds for its estimated 14,000 homeless. Even when cities do try to provide a roof for the homeless, they are often restrained by a vigorous outcry from nearby property owners. In New York a well-organized group of businessmen, real estate concerns and local citizens raised $200,000 to fight the city's housing of homeless families in mid-Manhattan welfare hotels. Notes Thomas Bergdall, counsel for New York's human resources agency: "It's fair to say that with very rare exceptions, the vast majority of shelters we've opened have been the subject of fierce litigation and community opposition." Chicago's human services commissioner, Judith Walker, ruefully describes the most common response to the homeless: "Everyone wants these people to be sheltered, but nobody wants them on their block."

Lawsuits seem to be the only avenue of effective action for the homeless. "As a group that is insulated from full participation in the political process," says Doug Lasdon, founder and director of New York's Legal Action Center for the Homeless, "they don't get a fair portion of government- distributed resources. Most of the resources available to the homeless today are the result of legal actions." Lasdon's organization has successfully forced New York City to provide supervision for young people released from foster care and to house homeless married couples and their children in the ) same facility.

Politically, the homeless have been a nonissue: in this year's elections they were all but invisible. Homeless people, of course, do not frequent polling places either to vote or to seek shelter. The homeless have proved to be such a diverse group, with such complex reasons for their difficulties, that politicians have been hard pressed to suggest anything more than patchwork remedies. Congressional action this year was limited to some last- minute bills providing for the use of food stamps to obtain meals for shelter residents and amending the Job Partnership Training Act to give the homeless special assistance.

The newly displaced are still greatly outnumbered by the aged, mentally ill and alcoholic, some of whom are on the street by choice. Many of the new homeless, like the old, are simply not well adapted to modern life. "The new poor," says Sister Margaret Leonard, executive director of Project Hope in Boston, "are people who in another age really could have made it." Shelters, say activists, are not solutions. They are temporary way stations for the unfortunate, not final destinations. "We're hiding people rather than housing them," says Kip Tiernan, founder of Rosie's Place, a Boston shelter, "and that is a poor alternative."

One workable alternative is programs that help the dispossessed on a one-to- one level. The Youth Outreach program in Wheaton, Ill., provides residential housing for the homeless as well as a structured program of job hunting and a savings plan. Unfortunately, such painstaking solutions may be swamped by the increasing numbers of the destitute. At the moment, with unexpected wintry blasts chasing people off the streets, it will be an achievement just to give the homeless a place to come in from the cold.

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce/New York and Neil MacNeil/Washington, with other bureaus