[Homestead] another corporate tax cut signed yesterday - today :
Toni Hawryluk
tonihawr at msn.com
Sat Oct 23 21:23:33 EDT 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6311176/
Gripping scenes, tales emerge from street count
By CLAUDIA ROWE
The Seattle Post Intelligencer October 23, 2004
USA - For three years, Bonita Aguillar-Gonzalez and her husband, Cisco, have lived on a 9-foot square of blanket beneath an Interstate 90 overpass, their belongings arrayed around them like furniture. Each morning, they stash their clothes and food behind a pillar of concrete and head off to look for work gardening or housecleaning or dishwashing. They have been married for three decades.During the wee hours yesterday, they became two of the 2,216 homeless tallied by volunteers aiming to survey those living on Seattle-area streets.
Figures from the annual census, sponsored by Operation Nightwatch and the Seattle/King County Coalition for the Homeless, have sometimes been questioned -- workers may mark vacant campsites as occupied and count each apparently inhabited car as housing two people -- but the point of the effort is less to generate a scientific number than to capture an atmospheric snapshot.
"We have no other way to assess who these people are and how they are living," Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck said. "They're sleeping in doorways and undergrowth, on benches and in cars. Most of us couldn't even imagine being subjected to such conditions."
In Capitol Hill, Ballard, downtown Seattle and Rainier Valley, as well as suburbs north and east of the city, Nightwatch crews peered into alleys and crept through grimy encampments. But Doug McKeehen, who was counted himself last year, said they were unlikely to glimpse even a fraction of the reality.
"The thing about being homeless is you're trying not to be seen," McKeehen said, gazing at the Gonzalez couple, huddled beneath the freeway.
Last fall, the Bellevue native, educated in engineering but crippled by depression, was crouched in an abandoned warehouse when Nightwatch volunteers found him, addicted to crack, unable even to speak to them.
Life has changed dramatically in the past six months, however. McKeehen found his way into a program at the Aloha Inn, where he has by necessity remained sober and managed to save money for an apartment. He is thinking now about a career in social work. Still, yesterday's unscientific survey was an emotional reminder of the recent past.
As the Gonzalezes described the difficulty in keeping their few possessions safe from sanitation workers, McKeehen handed them his sweat shirt. Greg Beavers, a former school bus driver who spent two years on the streets before moving into the Aloha, rummaged through his pockets to offer the couple cigarettes and a bit of money.
"This is the hardest part of the night for me," he said, gazing at the Gonzalezes, his previously chatty demeanor turning cold and slack. "It reminds me of me."
Ashamed of losing his job, Beavers said, he'd long ago stopped speaking with family members and often passed days sitting on a park bench, mired in self-doubt and recrimination. "I'd sit there and fall asleep wondering, 'What if -- what if I'd never moved here? What if I'd stayed in California? And most of all, why? Why am I homeless?'"
He stood beside McKeehen, eyes watering as the Gonzalezes described their search for work, then turned away.
Within Seattle's homeless population, there is tremendous diversity -- families, people with jobs and others without; the educated and the addicted; the mentally ill and the unlucky. The Gonzalezes, for instance, said they have three children, though none was living with them on the street, and Steinbrueck said recent national figures show that among families who are homeless, the greatest number of children are under 5.
"It's not just the older male you see on a street corner," he said. "There's a hidden face to this and it's pretty gripping."
Seattle is one of 153 communities across the country that has formally committed to ending homelessness within the next decade. A plan setting out specific year-by-year goals is expected to be released in January, and its ambitious vow is more than rhetoric, insisted King County Executive Ron Sims.
"We're going to change the culture that accepts homelessness," he told the group of 300 volunteers, before heading out for a 2 a.m. search through the International District.
If the number of homeless on the streets during any given year ebbs and flows, the ranks of those dedicated to counting them has increased steadily from the 12 who began the effort with the Rev. Rick Reynolds, executive director of Operation Nightwatch, in 1995.
"It's really astounding to see how people are surviving, living under Highway 509, in lean-tos and in shanties," he said. "And it's amazing to me how far people will go to avoid being counted."
This was the first year that Reynolds has counted in White Center and the Eastside, and the second that he has sent counters to Ballard, the University District, Kent and the North End.
Organizers reported a 12 percent increase comparing areas counted this year and last, and said the figures suggested that homeless people are moving out of the city core and into the suburbs.
Federal officials who joined Seattle and King County representatives said they found 79 people living in the South Lake Union area.
John Meyers, regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was jarred by the sight of a young woman, no older than 20, living in a car.
Paul Carlson, regional coordinator with the National Interagency Council on the Homeless, was pained by a lonely man found sometime around 3 a.m. "No place to go, no place to go," the man said in broken English, wandering into the dark.
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P-I reporter Claudia Rowe can be reached at 206-448-8320 or claudiarowe at seattlepi.com
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