Left Out in the Cold

By KURT ANDERSEN

With winter approaching, the ranks of the homeless swell

People with nothing much to do and no fixed address--hobos, drifters, tramps--used to seem almost romantic: accountable to none, their lives serendipitous and free. The truth, of course, has always been different. Rootlessness is usually endured, rarely chosen. "Knowing you don't have a place to live, the stark realization . . . it hurts," says Rose Harmon of Chicago, who has had no real home since 1978. But today in the U.S., instead of a few vagabonds here and there, legions of people are homeless, shuffling and stumbling over the national landscape. Indeed, late last month the Department of Health and Human Services estimated the U.S. homeless to be an astonishing 2 million, more than at any time since the Great Depression.*

For 230 million luckier Americans, bundled up and cheered by signs of new national prosperity, next Thursday's winter solstice will pass practically unnoticed amid the Christmas rush. But to the homeless, the change of seasons means that it gets harder to survive. During the past two years in New York City, at least 29 street people froze to death. Last February in Atlanta, Roosevelt Richardson, a drunk, climbed into an abandoned car to sleep; gangrene followed frostbite. "I didn't have a blanket," he says. "I guess that's why I lost my feet."

The misery, in fact, is year-round.

"They've got tuberculosis, Salmonella, all the dysenteries," says Rodger Farr, a psychiatrist who ministers to the homeless of Los Angeles. Those dire circumstances are attracting attention: the U.S. Conference of Mayors and two foundations just announced a $20 million program aimed at delivering medical treatment to the homeless in 14 large cities.

Governments and charities will spend relatively little, about $500 million, to help the homeless this year. But the budgets are lurching upward. Since April, Congress has appropriated $140 million in special aid. New York City's expenditures on its 60,000 homeless people more than doubled this year, to $135 million. Officials at all levels seem to be scrambling to address--or dismiss--the problem. Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese caused a furor last week by dubiously claiming that "people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that's easier than paying for it." In San Francisco, declares Deputy Mayor Bo-tea Gilford, the homeless are "the most difficult problem we have ever faced."

They are also probably the nation's most visible social failure. The homeless are everywhere. Theirs, however, is an ad hoc, nook-and-cranny geography. Hunkered down near a fence between a San Francisco freeway overpass and a grammar school. Asleep in the back room of an unguarded Chicago mortuary. Squatting near by in the dark eighth floor of an abandoned rooming house. Scrunched, and occasionally killed, inside Anchorage garbage dumpsters.

Who are they? "Since we opened in April," says Patricia Flannery, director of a Milwaukee shelter, one of a thousand in the U.S., "we have had only two classic bums." The tribe of the homeless has changed in character as it has grown. Among them now are displaced families, unable to find jobs or afford housing, or both. There are more women and many more young people: in San Francisco's seven public shelters, the median age is 35. A great many are illiterate, but surveys in New York City and San Francisco found about the same proportion of college graduates as in the general population.

At least a third of the homeless are mentally ill. Most have been released from state asylums during the past two decades as part of a well-intended campaign to free patients whose disorders can be controlled with drugs. "It was a good civil libertarian idea," says Dr. John Talbott, presidentelect of the American Psychiatric Association. "The trouble was that city and state governments failed to set up a safety net for those who don't cope well." On Los Angeles' Skid Row, says Social Worker Herb Lester, "I get a lot of people who say, 'They gave me a bus ticket in Oklahoma and said to come here because they couldn't help me any more.' "

Rachel, 28, wanders around Los Angeles wearing sunglasses, one sneaker, a stained sweatshirt, baggy jeans. She is bright, well-read and terribly out of kilter. "I need to be in a normal situation around normal people," she says. One moment Rachel is cogent and socially deft, the next she is twitchy and incoherent. "I just want to be out in the forest by myself. I want people to leave me alone, so I tell them I'm O.K. and go my own way. But I get a block away and lose it. I freak out."

For the homeless, downtown can be a terrifying bedlam, a place of cold stares, harassment by police and occasional attacks by violent punks. "You walk the streets out of loneliness," says Salvation Army Sociologist Ronald Vander Kooi, "and you start talking to yourself." Joseph Hanshaw, 19, has kept his bearings so far. Last spring he was kicked out of a Job Corps camp for selling marijuana. "Stupid," he admits. "I blew it." He has spent most of 1983 sleeping where he could around Manhattan. A job has eluded him, but, he says, "I'm trying to prove that I can make it on my own." Indeed, he would rather bunk down in a concrete corner of a bus depot than check into any city shelter. "I went to one once, but there was nothing there but bums. I ain't no bum and it will never come to that. I'm a normal guy," Hanshaw says. "I just ain't got a home."

Most families who take to the streets are only temporarily homeless--poor people whose predicament is the result of some personal catastrophe. Of the families lodged by New York City, a third have been evicted from apartments for not paying rent; the rest were driven out by fire or building condemnation. Ronald Thompson, a welder laid off in Texas, moved his wife and two small boys to Seattle last summer, hoping to find shipbuilding work. He did not, and the Thompsons, broke, finally spent weeks in a barren charity apartment. "I always thought I could give my family a home," he says. "Now, well, it just feels hopeless."

Despair has its own momentum. At loose ends and with no place to live, the luckless become scruffy; odd-looking, they are denied jobs; finding an apartment is all the harder. Says Les Brown, an advocate for Chicago's homeless: "They tend not to worry beyond getting through each day--how they're going to eat and avoid being hassled. It's difficult to get back up on the bottom rung of the ladder."

At the very least the homeless tend to become vague creatures of the moment. Doug, 31, arrived in Orlando almost a year ago and lost his job as a golf-course groundskeeper, he explains, because of a toothache. Says he, "I'm kind of in limbo." David Midgley, 29, who says he was a burglar in Oklahoma, has lived on the streets of San Francisco for ten months. What are his plans? "When it rains," he says, "I'll probably go on welfare." Howard, 40, was a house painter who now just roams downtown Washington, D.C. "I get dizzy sometimes," he says. "I'm walking along the sidewalk, and the next thing, I'm in the middle of the street with cars zooming by."

In Washington, as in most places, religious workers seem to be doing more than anyone else to care for the 5,000 street people. One volunteer group sends out two refitted Good Humor trucks to give away sandwiches and soup. At Rachel's Women's Center, run by Roman Catholics, 40 former mental patients can do laundry or talk to therapists, and once a week a hairdresser-turned-monk coifs all comers.

The urban missionaries know their almshouses are stopgaps. A recent article in the neoconservative quarterly Public Interest warned against "allowing the clients to 'adapt' " to a homeless "life-style," and Washington's Father Jack Pfannenstiel agrees. "These people are on the verge of taking over park benches and grates for good." He believes half of the homeless can be trained to work, and his new McKenna House shelter will aim to do just that.

Some governments have also begun to reconsider their quick-fix schemes. New York City has been paying an average of $1,400 a month to keep each of 2,300 families in sleazy way stations, but now the state and city have embarked on a plan to renovate 5,600 empty, publicly owned apartments for the homeless at a cost of $9,000 apiece. A Massachusetts law passed this fall permits welfare payments to people without permanent addresses and requires the commonwealth to underwrite a few months' rent if a household's eviction is imminent.

Phoenix is taking a different approach. Since 1979, city authorities have closed three shelter-cum-soup-kitchens and torn down 27 single-room occupancy hotels. In 1981, the city council declared garbage public property; it thus became a crime to scavenge through trash cans. Now the Chamber of Commerce is distributing anti-bum stickers (a silhouette of a park-bench sleeper overprinted with a slash) and last month held a "Downtown Is Fighting Back" rally to discourage tolerance of the homeless. Yet after all that, the number of homeless in Phoenix has doubled, to 3,000. If nothing else, living hand to mouth breeds resilience.

Such campaigns have failed before. Massachusetts Puritan communities like Hadley tried 300 years ago to exclude "unworthy persons or those liable to become a town charge." The town wound up with paupers anyway and felt obliged, after all, to board them somewhere. The homeless are unpleasant to contemplate, especially in a prosperous country. But if they are a public disgrace, they are also a public responsibility. --By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Meg Grant/Los Angeles and Thomas McCarroll/New York, with other bureaus

* About 2 million were homeless in the 1930s as well, and virtually every city had a shanty "Hooverville."

With reporting by Meg Grant/Los Angeles, Thomas McCarroll/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.