Home street home

NEW YORK, N.Y., Oct. 2 — In the deep night, when office workers have gone home and the subway rhythm lulls, the homeless emerge to reclaim the city streets. From the polished marble of Columbus Circle to the sleazy lingerie shops of Hell's Kitchen, the city belongs to them. A black woman in a burlap coat pushes a shopping cart stuffed with scrap and plastic bags along the sidewalk. A white man with unkempt beard, wild eyes and long fingernails rummages through trash cans, oblivious to the din of unloading trucks. The night is redolent with peculiar smells: the scents of coffee and fresh bread, trash and urine mingle in the niches and doorways where homeless people curl up to sleep.

The stories of homeless people in New York City — a city in which 45 billionaires live, according to Forbes Magazine's latest list — share a common thread of neglect, despair and hope, as University students discovered Monday night when they helped take a census of homeless people in Midtown Manhattan. The census was conducted by the charity Common Ground as part of its Street to Home Initiative (S2Hi), a new approach to tackling homelessness that aims to put chronically homeless people — those who have been on the streets for a year or more — into affordable housing.

Wilson School graduate student Frankki Bevins organized a group of 17 graduate students to volunteer to help take the census.

"There are a lot of people who come up to New York and feel like they know the city, but they only know the beautiful areas, the tourist attractions," Bevins said. "They have the luxury of overstepping and overlooking the homeless people who line the streets. This is a different view, a different perspective ... I thought this was something we could do as a school to reach out to our community."

The students who took part in the census had a range of reasons for getting involved.

"I wanted to know what the world is like outside of sunny Princeton," politics student Sandra Field said. Wilson School student Midori Valdivia said she is "really interested in urban policy" and that the census was "a more compelling way to spend a Monday night than working."

According to New York's Department of Homelessness Services, more than 33,000 people — approximately seven times the size of Princeton's undergraduate class — are currently without shelter across New York's five boroughs. West Midtown in Manhattan, where Common Ground focuses, has the city's densest population of homeless people.

At a briefing session before the census, Princeton students and approximately 80 other volunteers were taught the basics of outreach. "Do treat homeless people with respect. Don't wake them up if they're sleeping. Do try to ask them their names and how long they've been on the streets," Kristin Barlup, who leads the five-year-old S2Hi outreach program, said.

Students then split into teams of three, each including one experienced outreach worker and one male for safety, before fanning out across a 250-block area of Manhattan: from Chelsea in the south to Central Park in the north and from Madison Avenue in the east to the Hudson River in the west. The team The Daily Princetonian covered saw 19 people, mainly sleeping hunched in doorways or drifting aimlessly through the streets.

Peter, 51, jiggled change in his hand and shuffled from foot to foot as he talked in rapid-fire sentences. He wore a stained purple sweatshirt and white pants but the baggy clothes did not mask his gaunt frame. He said he once killed a man: "He tried to slit my throat. I got him back. I got caught." Peter served 15 years for manslaughter in New York's Sing Sing federal penitentiary.

When he was released in 2004, he came here to the city. Now he panhandles outside the Gem Circle flower shop at the corner of West 54th St. and Eighth Ave., carrying a red washcloth in his pocket and riding the Q train back and forth when he wants to sleep. He spoke enthusiastically of the day when he will leave this place and have a home of his own.

Peter is what Common Ground calls an "anchor" — the bedrock of a homeless community, someone who "might leave to get a shower, clothes or drugs, but I know I can find them, either on that same park bench or within a radius of a few blocks, within a day," S2Hi director James McCloskey said.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Instead of using traditional methods, Common Ground decided to target anchors. "If you house chronically homeless people, the message goes out that you can sleep in the shelter, not outside. This really cuts down on the episodic homeless, the person who says 'I'm going to hang out and party with John tonight as I have nowhere else to stay.' "

The census plays a critical role in this effort, McCloskey said, adding that he would love to have more Princeton students involved in the count.

"We're never going to find everybody. But unless you have some sort of estimate, you can't even begin to solve the problem."