Coming in From the Cold

By Evan Thomas

On the morning that Ronald Reagan stood under the Capitol dome and delivered his Inaugural paean to boundless opportunity, Leander V. Gilmore, 61, of "no fixed address," was found frozen to death in an abandoned house a few miles away. The cold was kinder to many others of the capital's 10,000 or so homeless. When the icy weather kept home Inaugural partygoers, several of the hosts, including a bank and a law firm, donated their uneaten goodies to the poor. Outside a Washington shelter for the homeless, ragged street people gaped as a purple van from Ridgewell's ("caterers to the elite") pulled up and tuxedoed waiters hopped out to unload leftover canapes, whole hams, mounds of crab claws, shrimp and quiche. That night at the shelter, 1,000 homeless dined like lobbyists. Though the gesture smacked slightly of "let 'em eat cake" largesse, Mitchell Snyder, director of the District of Columbia Community for Creative Non-Violence, which runs the shelter, was heartened by the heightened public concern. "Four years ago this wouldn't have happened," he said. "Americans now know that there are lots of people out there suffering."

As a record-setting arctic cold wave gripped much of the country from the Midwest to Florida last week, the plight of the nation's homeless once again became painfully apparent. Authorities and private citizens scrambled against nature's bitter blast to protect those least able to protect themselves. Even as the U.S. economy booms, so, perversely, does the number of homeless. Experts put the figure as low as 300,000 and as high as nearly 2 million. Certainly the homeless have become more noticeable as they shamble through bus depots, sleep on steam grates and occasionally die in public. The nation was shocked last December when Jesse Carpenter, a decorated World War II hero, succumbed to exposure in Lafayette Park, just across the street from the White House.

The emergency efforts made during the deadly winter assault provided some temporary relief. In Chicago, where the temperature dropped to a record -27 degrees F, police picked up those in danger of freezing and delivered them to makeshift dormitories in schools and park recreation centers. As the temperature plummeted to -18 degrees in Pittsburgh, most of the city's 1,500 street people squeezed into shelters and missions, while some slept in jail. In New York City, where the temperature dipped to -2 degrees, a record low for the date, 19,269 of the homeless (another record) jammed into city shelters. Mayor Ed Koch followed the precedent set by Mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia and ordered that whenever the temperature, including the effect of the wind- chill factor, dropped to 5 degrees, police were to remove homeless from the street and take them to shelters or hospitals--whether they wanted to go or not.

The New York Civil Liberties Union promptly denounced the mayor's decree as an unconstitutional restraint on personal freedom. Scoffed Koch: "Does this make any sense? Do people have a right to simply go out, if they are not in full possession of their faculties, and kill themselves?" In fact, few of the homeless chose to be out in the cold. On the first night of the sweep, the police picked up only 14 street people, two of whom went against their will. One, a woman of 66, protested that she was "waiting for a ship to take me back to Panama." The other said simply, "I'm an alcoholic, and this is my life."

Across the nation, shelters resembled vast human warehouses. The Roberto Clemente center in The Bronx, with 200 beds on a basketball court, is "more of a refugee camp than a shelter for the homeless," says Robert Hayes, a lawyer for the Coalition for the Homeless. At the center one evening last week, homeless mothers sprayed lumpy mattresses spaced three feet apart with disinfectant while their children scurried about; in upper Manhattan at the Fort Washington Armory shelter, 300 grimy and tattered men stood in the chow line in a haze of marijuana smoke. "You get all kinds here--mental patients, bums, criminals," says Cecil Alexander, 32, a sometime construction worker. "But it beats being out in the street."

In Los Angeles, where the temperature at night is usually mild enough to allow people to cling to pride, the homeless have a choice of sorts. They can, for instance, sleep under the stars at Thieves Corner, a bizarre outdoor bedroom of old couches and car seats strewn amid broken glass and garbage on the city's Skid Row. Or they can cross the street and stay in the city's first public shelter, a sparse structure with 138 beds and a few portable toilets that opened last week and was quickly dubbed the "plywood palace." Outside, Eddie Gamble, 41, and his wife Rosie, 28, pondered the alternatives. "Can I sleep with Rosie in the shelter?" asked Eddie. The answer was no; men and women are segregated. Said Rosie in a barely audible voice: "I'd rather have my privacy."

Eddie is an example of America's "new poor," the newly unemployed caught in a vortex of downward mobility. A Viet Nam veteran who lost his job as a welder at Ford, he fled the Midwest for a warmer clime. Says Charles White, commander of the Nashville Salvation Army: "Our normal client is no longer the wino, the freeloader or the bum. We've got a lot of men on their way from the North looking for work."

Some surveys have found that the homeless are now about as well educated as the public at large. More and more are women and children. In New York City, where homeless families have doubled in the past two years, from 1,695 to 3,300, children are miniature bag people, dragging around their toys in plastic bags as they shuffle between welfare hotels. At least a third of the homeless are mentally ill, many released from mental hospitals under a nationwide "deinstitutionaliz ation" movement that began in the 1960s. (Thirty years ago, there were about 559,000 people in state mental hospitals; now there are 132,000.)

Publicity about the homeless is uncomfortable for the Reagan Administration, which is under attack for slashing programs for the poor. Reagan conceded a year ago that the homeless are a problem "even in the best of times," but suggested that many are that way "by choice." The Administration has tried to combat the problem with minimal appropriations by creating a Task Force on the Homeless, a kind of Government baglady that casts about the federal agencies looking for spare clothes, tents or unused Government buildings. In addition, Congress has appropriated $210 million during the past three years to be dispensed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which normally handles crises like the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The money, funneled to local governments and charities such as the United Way and the Salvation Army, is "only a Band-Aid," concedes Mark Talisman, member of the National Board of Emergency Food and Shelter.

State and local governments are all wrestling with the problem, with varying levels of cash and conviction. New York City now spends $173 million a year, up from $14 million in 1978. But the number of homeless individuals seeking shelter has grown too, from 2,000 a day in 1978 to 7,400 a day now, in part because of an apartment shortage so severe that there is a ten-year waiting list for public housing. Since the $270-a-month housing allowance from welfare will not cover the cost of a New York apartment, the city absurdly winds up spending as much as $1,470 a month to put up the homeless in flea-bitten welfare hotels. Buffalo, by contrast, has 450 beds for 300 homeless, including Robert ("Pastor Bob") Timberlake's brand-new $2.2 million, 153-bed mission, all paid for by private donations. Baltimore has no city-owned shelters; 100 street dwellers are turned away every night from jam-packed private missions. The city is helping private agencies raise money for the homeless by staging a Valentine's Day "Love Boat Party" at which, for $25 a head, revelers are supposed to "have a heart for the homeless."

Some municipalities have tried to drive out their homeless. In Phoenix, a Sunbelt mecca for jobless Northerners, the city in the past two years has closed three soup kitchens and torn down ten welfare hotels. The city still has 3,000 street people. In Santa Cruz, Calif., last summer, there were 19 attacks on homeless people, known locally as trolls because they live under bridges. Many of the assaults were attributed to teen-agers, some of whom later sported TROLL BUSTER T shirts.

"People must address the question of whether human beings in the U.S. have a right to better shelter than a dumpster," says Gary Blasi, a Los Angeles lawyer for the homeless. In Washington, Homeless Advocate Snyder managed to get a referendum passed "guaranteeing adequate overnight shelter," which if approved by Congress could make the city responsible for housing 5,000 to 15,000 people a night. Because last week's freeze served to focus national attention, Snyder said, "we were rooting for the cold." He is afraid, though, that the homeless may soon be conveniently forgotten, returning to their semivisible status once milder weather returns.

With reporting by Melissa Ludtke/Los Angeles and Jack E. White/ New York, with other bureaus