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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.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P-I reporter Claudia Rowe can be reached at 206-448-8320 or 
claudiarowe AT seattlepi.com