Signs of Life in New Orleans

About “Signs of Life in New Orleans”

Outreach workers are still combing abandoned buildings and the broken streets of New Orleans for the most vulnerable victims of Hurricane Katrina, four years after the levees broke. The rate of homelessness in New Orleans has nearly doubled since Katrina, from 6,300 to 11,500 now. Many are living in New Orleans’ 65,000 abandoned buildings as a result of the loss of 51,000 rental units in the nation’s largest housing disaster. This blog describes our daily highs and lows as we struggle to house the most vulnerable while rebuilding our beloved community.

Two things keep us going:
1) Knowing that housing someone can save his or her life; and
2) Our belief that New Orleans is worth saving.

- Mike Miller,
Director of Supportive Housing Placement
- Shamus Rohn,
Director of No One Suffers Alone Abandoned Building Outreach Project.

Amputated in 1974 after I got shot.  I didn’t have the heart to tell the man that he lost that left arm seven years before I was born.  Mike is continuing to ask questions about his medical history when Katy and I hear someone scream out inside the building where we’re parked.  The man just came out of the same building to start our paperwork.  I was here during daylight hours last week, and only the man was here… and I only remember one bedroll.

 “Hello?” I shout as we walk into the building. 

 Hi.  

 It’s a woman.  She is in the second room of the shotgun double we’re entering. 

 “Hey, I’m Shamus from homeless outreach, mind if I try to get you housed?” 

 Okay.

 Big eyes stare up at me from the corner of the room.  The woman’s skin is quite dark and there is almost no light.  All I can see are her eyes.  After I ask if I can indirectly shine my light on her, I make out a woman in her thirties, rocking back and forth, clearly agitated by some internal stimuli.

 She agrees to work with us, and Katy lies down on the floor two feet from her to conduct the interview and the intake packet.   The act of lying on that floor alone may be enough to warrant canonization.  You wouldn’t catch me on it just to earn a client’s trust.  It wasn’t until seeing Katy’s lack of a boundary here that I realized how rigid mine can be.

 Katy is asking the normal questions.  How old are you?  What’s your social-security-number/human-barcode?  Where did you grow up?

 I am less patient.  “Let me ask you something that might sound odd.  Have you been to a hospital lately?”

 I was in the crazy house until 5 months ago.

 “Which one?”

 Jackson.

 “Where’d you go from Jackson?”

 To Orleans Parish Prison.

 “Why were you there?”

 Arson.  The fire at Claiborne & 1^st.

 “Did you do it?”

 No.

 “Didn’t think so.”  For what it is worth, we later drove past the intersection and found nothing that looked burned.

 “What’s your diagnosis?”

 Schizoprenia.

 “Medications?”

 Seroquel.

 “Got any now?”

 No.

 “Want me to help you get more?”

 Yes please.

 Personally, I can’t say I’ve read too much about the latest incarnation of whatever national health care bill is being proposed that will still leave between five and fifteen million people uninsured.  Just somebody figure out how to get this woman some damn Seroquel.

 “What about drugs?”

 Crack.  I like crack.

 Okay.  I realize there’s not a lot of sympathy out there for crack cocaine addicts.  But I can understand it when a woman has been without a regular place to live for seventeen years, has been dumped by the psych hospital back into jail and from jail back to the street.  Sure this addiction may well be a lifelong battle, but I’m willing to bet she’d be closer to clean if she had her psychiatric meds… and maybe a house or apartment with a locking door and without a hole in the sidewall large enough for a body to pass through.

 At this point, with her continuing to rock and her head nodding side to side regularly, I realize she’s experiencing a lot more than me and Katy.  “Are you hearing voices other than my own right now?”

 Yes.  They’re in the wall.

 “Does the Seroquel help you with those voices? Help you sleep?”

 Yes.

 Then something unusual happens.  This woman with absolutely no affect, rocking slowly as she tries to quiet the voices in her own head and focus instead on my voice in her ears turns those big eyes up at me and asks me to look in the fire place by her feet.  I take my Mag-Lite, shine it over top of a piece of plywood that is covering the bottom half of the fireplace, and see that the fireplace goes all the way through to the other half of the double.  “What do you want me to look for in here?”  All I can see is bricks and a McDonald’s wrapper.

 I’m just scared of it, scared something is in there.

 The voices.  Either they’re in there, too, or they’re telling her that something is in there.  Remember the boogeyman that was in your closet as a child?  Or that hand you were sure would reach up from under the bed if your foot happened to hang off its edge at night?  Those things or something like them are in that fireplace waiting for her.

 “No, dear, nothing in there.  Want me to cover it up all the way for you?”

 Yes, please.

 Katy pushes forward with the rest of the intake packet.  I find a smaller piece of paneling that I can wedge between the mantle and the plywood covering the bottom half so that the fireplace is completely covered.  Mike is still outside with the man completing his intake.  The police pull up and I hear them ask Mike what he’s doing (there is a crack house on the corner of the block 150-feet away).  Mike laughs and says, “Paperwork.”  The police drive off.

 Paperwork. 

 Paperwork.

 Paperwork.

 Funny.  We hate paperwork.  But when you’ve got a woman listening to voices two rooms back, and a coworker also doing paperwork while a third attempts to eliminate a fireplace and some voices, the only answer you have is paperwork.  

 Not sure what to make of that.  I guess it is the one part of our job that is clearly legal at 12:37am.  It is the one answer we can give without clearly exposing our clients and their living quarters.

 Paperwork… is that synonymous with: Oh nothing Officer, just trying to fix a few things where other systems of care failed? 

 Or maybe: Oh nothing Officer, Just trying to figure out how to get this woman some Seroquel?  Oddly enough, they don’t sell it at the crack house 150-feet behind you that you drove right past. 

 Or maybe: Oh nothing Officer, just trying to figure out if she is severely enough disabled or sick enough to warrant help?

 Ah, yes, paperwork.  That’s what we do.

 -Shamus

srohn

On January 12^th during the freeze, a family of six was referred to us by Senator’s Landrieu’s office. The family consisted of Gloria and her five children, ages 8 years to 17 years old. They had been living in an abandoned building on Chef Menteur Highway, with no heat, electricity, or running water. Gloria’s oldest daughter was nine months pregnant and she could not remain in the cold any longer. They were staying in a temporary emergency shelter but they were told they would have to leave after the freeze.

When Gloria came into my office she dropped down on her knees and said, “Help!”  I got down on my knees with her and said, “I got you. I am going to help you.”

When she was a young girl in Central America, Gloria was repeatedly raped by her step-father. She escaped her country at age 13 with a group of people to get away from his abuse. In the U.S. members of the group started raping her. Most of her children are a product of rape. She eventually met a man who said he loved her and had a child with him, but then he started to mentally and physically abuse her. She then became addicted to crack cocaine.

When I first saw Gloria, I felt like she was broken. This lady could not move – emotionally, mentally, physically. She was exhausted to her very being, drained.

As case managers, we can’t tell her “go do this, go do that.”  When people come to us in her state, we need to step in and take their hand and walk with them.

For two days I worked on getting the documentation together. I called Gale at Traveler’s Aid. I called the Landord. I called Catch, the manager of UNITY’s Warehouse and Community Engagement Program. Two days after coming to my office I had her in an apartment.

Gloria’s teenage daughter had her baby 3 or 4 days after being housed. Catch was able to furnish the whole house with donations of beds, blankets– the basics.

Gloria had never had her own home. She is SO HAPPY. The little she has now is more than she’s ever had in her life. She really wants to work. She loves to clean houses.

 What drives me to be compassionate to others is my faith. When I was a little girl, I would bathe and clothe the dirty kids in the neighborhood. My mother would come home and ask, “Where are your clothes?” She got so angry because I gave them my clothes. I am a giver. It is so rooted within me.

UNITY has the same purpose and goal. UNITY wants to end human suffering. I get them. We go far beyond the call of duty to help people who have given up.

I am glad that Senator Landrieu’s office always takes time to hear people with no voice. They are also committed to ending homelessness. Some people think that the homeless have no voice – but her office shows compassion for all people. I am so glad we could help Gloria and her family. 

-Laniker

amills

I’m no optimist, that’s clear.

My coworkers and friends will tell you I’ve got a great sense of humor (along with a not-too-small touch of arrogance).  However, they’ll also tell you that it is one of those slightly-twisted, mildly-morbid types of humor that even if light-hearted is very much about expressing my distaste for the misery I see in this world daily… we all understand I should be seated at the back of the room in meetings.  My coworkers are often more afraid of what I might say in front of strangers than of what those strangers might say (my parents and sisters have had the distinct pleasure of this same concern for the last 28 years).   The humor lets me address that misery while keeping a smile on my face.  Usually, I’m the one in the room who figures out how to describe the size and shape of the elephant standing in front of us while managing to get a smile from everyone else so desperately trying to look away from it.  Despite common concern to the contrary, there’s actually a lot I don’t say.  I just filter myself differently than most.

I offer this, simply as an acknowledgement of the psychological basis against which my jokes, my writing and my preaching emerge (yes, I realize I have habit of climbing the soap box).  This doesn’t make what I do or say any more ok than it would be otherwise.  I don’t even joke about acting like it is going to change, I’ll simply say that I wish people weren’t as upset by what I identify and put words to whether it is when I am joking or angrily ranting (preaching)… That is not the same thing as saying I wish I didn’t say these things.

We’ve expressed in previous posts what this work is like.  You can sort through many of them and see that our number one problem is that we find poor, badly disabled, sickly people living on the streets and too often don’t have the resources to do a damn thing for them.  At that particular time and in that moment, they don’t fit the criteria for our housing resources.  It never gets easy telling a man that despite being on the streets for a year and scraping out an existence by scrapping cans, we don’t have anything we can offer him right now because he is not sick enough to be the most likely to die out on the street, and because programs requiring a client to have income don’t recognize his form of income as such.

So anyway, after all of that, I write this post to say we had a great day yesterday.  Some unusual housing resources shook down due to some other agency not being able to use them, and we had the opportunity to recommend some clients for a quick placement.  Two or three of our squatters made it to the top of the PSH Registry and – due to the severity of their illnesses – will be housed within a week.  So we spent the day flying around town in a five-year old Dodge Caravan, updating client files, making sure every signature space was signed and every place requiring initials had at least two if not three letters in it.  We caught up with a few different clients to see if we can do a lightning-fast job of assembling documentation and identification for this surprise resource (we were told we have two days to do it). 

We moved at least five clients much closer to being housed.  Many of these are folks we’ve known for a year or more whom we’ve never been able to find a spot for. 

It was a good day.  I don’t remember the last time that Mike and I saw five of our clients housed in a week… we’re usually happy for one or two.  But five in a day or two?  Suddenly we could see the various systems on which we rely working again and at a fast pace.

I promise not to get too optimistic.  I promise to expect these systems to start throwing bureaucratic hurdles in our way again next week (“Mike, Shamus, no doubt the guy is homeless and very ill, but because his application was completed before the NEW and IMPROVED Version 5 Release Form came out, we can’t accept his application for housing until you re-do it with a new one.”)  And I promise to have a thoroughly dry comment about the hurdle when it does trip us and our clients.  But today we, and our new outreach worker Katy, are going to complete those five client’s packets, and maybe we’ll even manage to turn up a sixth and seventh.

Days like yesterday and today are what outreach workers live for.  They remind us of why we are where we are in this time and place. 

I’ll speak only for myself here, but seeing the sparkle in a man or woman’s eye when you tell her that she’ll be housed next week is the perfect counter to my sarcastic and slightly irreverent verbal jabs at the system in which I work and the world in which I live.  That sparkle is a glimmer of hope.  It is like magic.  It is something that a lot of us have less and less these days.  It is in seeing their hope and thankfulness at times like this that my waning faith and hope in this world are bolstered and justified even if only by a bit. 

-Shamus

srohn

There are clearly five major events in the history of New Orleans:   the founding of New Orleans in 1718 by the French colonizer Bienville, the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 in which we decided to let America taste real food, Andrew Jackson defeating the British in the War of 1812 at English Turn, Hurricane Katrina of 2005, and the Saints victory in Super Bowl XLIV.  Some New Orleanians might also consider the creation of the original Mardi Gras founders the Mystic Krewe of Comus in 1857 and the creation of Pat O’Brien’s Hurricane cocktail in the 1940’s as equally important, but I digress.

The problem with having two of New Orleans most important historical achievements in such close proximity –  Hurricane Katrina and the equally devastating Saint’s offense — is that now we’re again in the peculiar predicament of explaining ourselves to the rest of America.  Historically, this dilemma causes both confusion and wonderment.  Those New Orleanians who have been able to articulate the idiosyncrasies of our collective idiocy, like Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and Truman Capote,  have been able to achieve remarkable fame and fortune.   I’m no author.  I work with the homeless.  So here goes. 

Almost four and a half years ago, Hurricane Katrina seared images of unimaginable suffering into the American psyche.  Tens of thousands of Americans flooded into the Superdome as the flooded streets of New Orleans saturated the city with both death and destruction.  We lost over 1,900 neighbors, family and friends in that water, and tens of thousands are still missing.  They’re missing because they’re not home.  There are still, four and a half years later, over 60,000 blighted abandoned properties hiding thousands of homeless disabled individuals.  The “suburbs” of New Orleans now stretch across the United States as New Orleanians have resettled in cities and towns in which they were evacuated to when the flood festered in our historic streets.   While a newly renovated Superdome can hold 90,000 screaming Saints fans adored in Black and Gold and is an adept metaphor for the spirit of the Orleans Parish (we do parishes, not counties) citizenry, there is an equal number of New Orleanians cheering not about football, but for a home they are unable to live in.  Through the crushing realities of abject poverty, disability and government inaction, the New Orleans they know drowned in the floodwaters on August 29, 2005. 

Almost five years ago, many of our fellow Americans questioned whether New Orleans should be rebuilt.  They wondered whether rebuilding New Orleans was worth the trouble, worth the money.  Those of us who still live here know why New Orleans is important.  Those who are still struggling to come back know why New Orleans is important.  That’s what we’re really cheering for.  It’s so much more than just a football game.  It’s a collective recognition that our spirit, though all our trials and tribulations, through fumbles and interceptions, lives in each and every one of us.  We’re not done rebuilding our city until every New Orleanian has a chance to celebrate Saints football where they should: only in New Orleans.      

-Mike

mmiller

I hope Mitch Landrieu does something for this city, or else God’s gonna wash it away.

Welcome to office Mr. Landrieu, these are the words of a man squatting right downtown in the Central Business District (CBD) last week.  Despite battling bipolar disorder and the general alcohol abuse that grips many of us  during Mardi Gras, he apparently keeps up on his politics (the election was only five days before this statement).  He also apparently believes in a retributive God not above using floods to clear out a city failing to pay heed to His word.

We habitually change our client’s names for this blog in accordance with professional standards regarding client confidentiality.  So, let’s call this client Noah (not his real name, I promise).

I know a lot of people reading this are already upset by the man’s statement about God washing the city away.  At face value this isn’t significantly different than the claims made by fundamentalist Christian groups such as Repent America that attributed Hurricane Katrina’s death and destruction in New Orleans as God’s plan to end the annual Southern Decadence and Mardi Gras celebrations that happen here due to the alleged debauchery, drunkenness, nudity, sodomy and other carnal sins that are supposedly celebrated during them.  (For anyone who hasn’t been here for Mardi Gras it is actually family and community oriented despite the Girls Gone Wild footage most people think of.  And despite my being a straight-male, I love decadence and the social openness and inclusion that it represents even if it is gay-oriented.  Count me in for participation in both).

No, our modern Noah, threatening another divine flood, was not speaking from a position of judgmental religious fundamentalism… at least not from the typical right-leaning evangelical damnation we’re so used to when attributing natural disaster to divine justice.  Instead, he was speaking more from a sense of the Gospel of the Poor (Gospel of Luke, see chapters 4 and 13 among others).  Our Noah was talking about needing a new leader (Landrieu) to finally do something for the poor in this town (it is, by the way, usually the poor who can’t get out when the storms come, and the poor are not necessarily those like myself who charge a bit of debauchery to their Visa or MasterCard from time to time in this fair city).

Noah threatened this flood twenty minutes after I met him, which itself was a first for Mike and I.  We were checking on an old five story building in the CBD.  Nestled among some of the most expensive real estate in New Oreleans – the proposed site for the Trump Tower  is not more than half a mile away – you would not think homeless people slept there, unless you also have the habit of walking back alleys and testing every boarded-up door way for a loose piece of plywood.  I made it to the second floor where sits a nice apartment that looks like it may have been a demonstration model for proposed condominium redevelopment.  On my way there, expecting to see evidence of squatting, I heard voices.  I paused, preferring for people to walk toward me in the open rather than wanting to step through a door way without being able to see whomever it was speaking.  Surprise, surprise, two uniformed police officers and a squatter wearing a strand of Mardi Gras beads emerged.  The lead officer was clearly surprised by my presence as much as I was by his, and hesitated; I thought this might be the day Mike finally got his wish and I’d be headed to jail.  Not having a business card on me, I unzipped my jacket showing my uniform (just a goldenrod, screen-printed t-shirt) and said “Hi, Officer.  Homeless outreach here.  Looks like a lot of people are staying here now, huh?”

The officer indicated that, yes indeed, a lot of people are known to use this buildings, and that we could help the gentleman they were taking out as soon as they finished writing up a court summons for a criminal trespass charge.

15 or 20 minutes later, and Mike and I were in the van with Noah, who was just happy he didn’t get arrested again.  Yes, I said again.  He reported that the previous Friday night (six days earlier) he and six others were arrested in the same building or one nearby (it was not clear which building given the rapidity of his speech) and spent a few nights in jail before pleading guilty at arraignment.  This time, instead of arrest, he only got a ticket (a good sign in terms of our desire to see homelessness and crimes related to homeless existence decriminalized). 

I don’t believe in prophets.  But I do think people can say things that may well be prophetic.  I’m not referring to Noah’s threat that the city could be washed away if Mayor Landrieu doesn’t help the poor here.  No, it was what Noah said right before that as he manically reflected on his experiences living homeless in this town since last November:

This place is so hard on us homeless.  They run you out from under the bridge, then they run you out of abandoned buildings.  The shelter is always full.  Where can I just go and be?

This is the side I don’t think most people understand about homelessness, and even those of us who work with it every day often forget it.  We don’t like seeing a dirty, disheveled man sleeping on the corner – why can’t he go somewhere else?  We don’t like seeing encampments of thirty to a hundred people on an empty lot – isn’t there a shelter for them to sleep in?  We don’t like the idea that someone might be using the vacant building next door for shelter from the elements rather than allowing it to go untouched and without use or social purpose – why don’t the owners board that up better?

But if people can’t live out in the open, if the shelters are full to capacity, and if we choose to allow thousands of buildings to go un-used while thousands go homeless, where do we expect them to go, where do we expect them to exist?  Some people think of jail as the answer, forgetting the horrors that were debt peonage and debtors prisons a few centuries ago – right or wrong, birth is the one thing in this life you don’t pay for, and as I see it no one ought have to pay merely to justify their existence in public spaces. 

Here’s hoping on this Ash Wednesday that, in accordance with my Noah’s ill-phrased request, the new government does something for the poor in this town other than expanding the capacity of Orleans Parish Prison.

-Shamus

srohn

Recently we’ve been working on our annual attempt to count the homeless. This year we were lucky as we were able to recruit almost 70 volunteers to assist the 9 members of the outreach team and a bunch of staff from UNITY’s other programs. After dark teams scoured the streets of New Orleans searching for New Orleanians who don’t have their own little slice of New Orleans, outside of a ragged piece of cardboard or a hard piece of concrete tucked in a darkened doorway. It’s not the easiest work, especially for people more accustomed to letting their fingers walk through paperwork than actually walking darkened streets. Their efforts were extraordinary, their bravery commendable.

How do you count hidden populations? The answer: leg work, or more appropriately, street work. Before Hurricane Katrina, I had the pleasure of working for the Centers for Disease Control on a research project on HIV high-risk behavior. We piloted a sampling method for the rest of the country on how to find and assess a specific high-risk HIV- susceptible population: injection-drug users (IDU’s). For those unaware of IDU’s, they’re not really a population that sticks out. It’s not like people who shoot heroin advertise their addiction, wearing bright yellow hats that scream “Junkie”. They’re highly paranoid, often dope-sick and hidden better than a plastic baby in a king cake. If you want to find someone who shares syringes, trades sex for drugs or carries a rusty needle in their shoe for a quick fix, you better be prepared to spend considerable time walking lonely blocks in some of the worst neighborhoods of New Orleans. You better be prepared for what you can’t prepare for, anticipate what you can’t anticipate and watch your back while always walking forward. You also have to do it with a smile, a comforting presentation and a street-smart wit. It was great training for homeless outreach.

Sending teams of volunteers, people from all walks of life, like accountants, waiters, EMT’s, consultants, lawyers, homemakers, etc. to count the homeless can be very eye-opening. To spend just four hours counting the mentally ill, the physically disabled and the addicted who make the street their home can be very humbling. While counting the homeless, you’re forced to count your blessings. It’s important work for us and in raising awareness in the community.

That, in a nut-shell, is the street count. You have to count as many homeless people sleeping in the streets as possible in a 24-hour period. However, as this particular blog mostly focuses on, we have another problem in post-Katrina New Orleans: abandoned building dwellers. These are the real needles in the haystack: “the hidden homeless.” We’ve been trying to hone our methods for achieving a comprehensive extrapolated count of abandoned building dwellers, where they’re at and how many there are in 61,000 abandoned buildings in New Orleans. We’ve sat down with sociologists, Ph.D.s, the census folks, consulted with academic journals on hidden population research, attempted multiple sampling procedures using the best information available to us.

What did we learn? First, if Shamus was still in school they’d probably give him a doctorate in sociological extrapolation for hidden population research. Secondly, it doesn’t matter how many sexy equations and statistical formulas you have, it will never replace actual boots on the ground. In my mind, determining the total number of homeless abandoned building dwellers will never be as important as saving just one. While the cold drips through the tattered walls of a formerly flooded shot-gun and a flickering candle is the only light to displace the darkness, our clients aren’t worried about Point In-Time counts. They’re worried about survival.

-Mike

mmiller

The new 2010 census is coming up.  For those who don’t know this is the decennial process by which the U.S. government determines (1) how many people live in the U.S., and (2) how to properly apportion Congressional representatives to across the country.  The census in New Orleans this year, 4 years and 8 months after Katrina, will be an interesting exercise.  Let me offer one example.

Census blocks – the geographic subunits of physical space within which individuals are counted – cover all the landmass of New Orleans.  While you would expect them to include residential blocks (they do), you might not expect them to count medians and neutral grounds (they do), parks (they do), commercial office spaces (they do), or school buildings (they do).  Hmmmmm, school buildings… well we’ve got a lot of those that are abandoned, and they tend to be some of our favorite stops.

We happened to pass back by a few school buildings in the last week, just on a hunch.  We usually do our work by scouting a building before dark, finding the places people sleep (bedrolls) and then showing back up after dark (11pm is usually a good time) and introducing ourselves.  This is because squatters generally don’t stay in the buildings during the day, and we don’t feel comfortable walking in for the first time when we can’t see – flashlights work a lot better when you can compare the shapes the beam is illuminating with your memory from the earlier daylight trip.

Back to our school buildings.  During daylight hours (when we almost never meet people in buildings) we met two different squatters in two different buildings.  At a third school building, three clients whom we’re actively working on the cases of were not in as we passed through.  Call that a minimum of 5 squatters we have direct knowledge of in 3 school buildings we’ve been through in the last three working days.  That doesn’t count the six squatters we met in an abandoned hospital or the one we met in an abandoned office building.

The guy in the office building asked Mike and I if he was “going to die here” in this abandoned office building.  Mike thought the comment was a bit melodramatic.  I’m so used to questions like that I hardly heard it. “Hopefully not” is the only response I’ve got for questions like that.

Back to the census.  I’ve heard the current U.S. population is estimated at 300,000,000 or a little more.  There are 435 representatives in the House.  That means that to get one representative a region must count as roughly 689,655 people (300,000,000/435=689,655.1…).  Wait, let’s not forget that the 599,657 people listed as living in the District of Colombia don’t count (hence the “Taxation Without Representation” license plates… personally my  favorite license plates) meaning we divide not 300,000,000 but 299,400,343 by 435 to arrive at a necessary headcount of 688,277 in order to get one congressional representative.

Looking at those staggering numbers, does it matter whether the five squatters I met in the school buildings, the six in the hospital or the one who asked me if he is going to die here… Well, do they count?  Let’s be blunt, I’m kind of sick of the P.C., all-inclusive statements social workers (which I’m not) and politicians (which I’m not) generally hand me when I ask this question… Don’t tell me it matters if you can’t help and/or house the person I’m bringing you.  Just say “no” and be honest about it.

So again, do they count?  Do the thousands of homeless people in New Orleans (and the rest of the country) often hidden from our eyes matter when it comes to the census and the apportionment of representatives?  Against a number like 688,277 it might seem like they don’t – what are 11,500 homeless people against a number like 688,277? A few drops in the bucket? 

Tell you what: 11,500 is a lot more than 1.  And 1 is all you are as you read this.  If you think you count in this representative democratic experiment we call the U.S. you’d better hope that 11,500 people count (and that they get counted).  So here’s to the good men and women of the Census Bureau and my hope that they manage to find not just you in your home on April 1^st, but also that they wander the abandoned schools, hospitals, homes, and commercial/industrial spaces after dark to find the thousands who squat there.  The value of your (and their) vote - its relative strength within the U.S. Congress - may just count on it.

-Shamus

srohn

I’m tired. We’re all tired. As a cold jet stream continues to dip into the Deep South for over a week now, New Orleans homeless providers have been operating under our freeze plan. The plan is simple: pull as many people off the streets as you can and pack the shelters. The plan is to save lives by any means necessary. The work is time consuming, drawing staff into the wee hours of the morning. Fueled by stale coffee and cigarettes, teams of outreach workers are combing the darkened alleyways, frozen underpasses and urine stained doorways of New Orleans and Jefferson Parish. The odds are stacked against us: an estimated 7,400 unsheltered homeless individuals scattered in over 61,000 abandoned buildings and on streets, alleyways and parks stretching across the vast geographic terrain of the city and parish. In contrast: Manhattan has many fewer unsheltered homeless people (777) but more than three times as many street outreach workers as we do. We’re so short staffed our Director of Facilities, Calvin Lee, has been riding shotgun with me for the graveyard shift. It doesn’t matter whether he has experience working the streets or not. We need the bodies and we need dedication. More importantly, I need someone who is willing to sacrifice precious hours of sleep to prevent human popsicles scattering on the streets of The Big Easy.

We meet at the office about nine, fill up our coffee cups and start the roll. Walking out to the van the humid frigid wind hits your face and you begin to wonder if you dressed appropriately. 25 degrees with 80% humidity cuts right through your jacket, stings your face and freezes your core. It’s a cold that is hardly comparable…..and I grew up in Chicago! However, we’re both insulated. Calvin is wearing a full body coverall, thick gloves and I’m layered like an onion. Still, as I rev up the van we laughingly cuss to each other about the freeze, both knowing that in 6 or 7 hours we’ll be tucked nicely in our beds satisfied that we saved lives.

We’re eagle eyeing shadows, straining our faculties to distinguish between piles of garbage left to rot against buildings or bodies struggling against the cold. Doorways, alleys, porches, benches and bridges merit special attention, as does the lone stranger aimlessly wandering the streets to ward off the freeze. When we encounter a client our conversations are brief. We explain to people that there is a city shelter open and we’ll take them there.

Most people we find on the street, answering through chattering teeth, are grateful for the ride and the opportunity to trade a stiff piece of cardboard for a soft mattress and a military surplus blanket. However, there are exceptions. There are individuals, and they are almost always individuals, who refuse to come in out of the cold. These clients are so mentally ill that their physical health is in jeopardy. One of the ravages of untreated schizophrenia is that not only is social isolation and paranoia the norm, it is embraced. Many of the hard-core chronic homeless, those with years and even decades on the street, have become so isolated in their mental illness that they don’t trust anyone. It can take months, even years, for outreach workers to break through the mental barriers these clients have in order to help them accept services including housing. For people who are uneducated about mental illness and homelessness — who believe that there are actually people who just don’t want help — I ask this question: Does anyone decide they want to be mentally ill, to be schizophrenic? All outreach workers understand that patience, persistence and consistency create the foundation to get these individuals off the street. These virtues are quickly forgotten when the mercury dips below freezing and your client refuses to move inside. What are your options?

You could have the client hospitalized – too gravely disabled to care for himself — knowing full well that New Orleans’ broken hospital system might discharge him back on the street in a matter of hours. This would dislocate him further from his neighborhood supports—and his nest of blankets. I guess you could have the client arrested for some trumped-up homeless charge like obstructing a public passage so that he would spend the night in a warm jail cell. However, I’ve never heard of a social worker advocating for a client’s rights to be violated. In fact, I think they’d take my license for that.

When it gets that cold and your client refuses shelter, your options are limited. I’m not a religious person, but when you know there is a distinct possibility that you’ll find him expired tomorrow morning, you’ve got to do something. So you give him what you can: a blanket and a prayer.

- Mike

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Today’s blog entry is by Vicki Judice, G.S.W., a social worker and dedicated social justice activist who is Deputy Director of UNITY and one of the founders of the organization.

It was 7:30 p.m. Saturday night.  The outreach team needed extra help due to the hard freeze so good friend Katy and I volunteered to help out.  As we pulled out of the UNITY Welcome Home outreach team’s parking lot, I thought, “Surely no one in their right mind would still be out on the streets looking for shelter now. We probably won’t even find anyone to help.”  It took about one minute to find someone “not in their right mind” who was still out on the streets with no shelter.  (Makes me wonder what does that term “right mind” really mean anyway?  Can someone actually have a “wrong mind”?)

There she was, Miss C. — waiting with her two bags in front of the Burger King.  She wasn’t exactly “looking for shelter.” It was more like she was waiting for something – perhaps for someone to pick her up and take her to the city overflow shelter where she had stayed the previous night.  She eagerly jumped into the van and cheerily talked about how nice it had been there and how she didn’t mind staying there as long as she could leave during the day to get some sunlight.

It wasn’t hard to find others who were shelter-less that evening and who seemed to be waiting for their  predicament to change. They were just standing in front of fast food restaurants or in doorways or under bridges.  About half-way through our shift, I thought “How on earth are we going to find everyone who needs help?”  I prayed silently, “God, please guide us to the people who need our help.”   I don’t know if my prayer was answered, but I do know that about 100 people found shelter that night who may not have found it otherwise.  (Katy and I were a small part of the outreach efforts that night — others from UNITY took part in the initiative: Angela, Pam, Cynthia, Mike, Calvin and NOPD colleague, Sam.) 

The last person Katy and I helped was Mr. M, an elderly gentlemen who was sitting outside of the locked (at 10 p.m.) door of the bus station.  He was rocking back and forth to the piped music (perhaps the bus station owners thought that at least they could offer the solace of music since they weren’t offering shelter inside?)  He was blind in one eye and nearly deaf.  When we offered to take him to the city overflow shelter, his one good eye lit up and he eagerly accepted.  On the way to the shelter, we could hear him murmuring over and over:  “Safe and warm…..safe and warm….safe and warm.”

Vicki Judice, Deputy Director

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I don’t understand this at all!! Why isn’t someone doing something to help???? Can you ask the Arc to help you? What can we as citizens do about this? I used to work with special needs kids and this is totally unacceptable to me.

Above is a comment that one blog reader posted on Mike’s December 22^nd post regarding an intellectually disabled (retarded) man living on the streets down town.  I think the statements and questions in the comment illuminate some of the misunderstandings about our work, and I’ll attempt to answer them in turn.

As to the reader’s lack of understanding: we don’t get it either.  In a comparative politics class on the welfare state in college, the United States was identified as one relying on means testing aimed at identifying the deserving poor in order to make sure that they received assistance while the other half of the poor – if not deserving, I guess they’d be the undeserving poor – go without public assistance.  Without even addressing the issue of whether the concept of deserving vs. undeserving poor people corresponds to reality or is just an exercise in semantics, I instead have to wonder who the deserving poor are if it is not those with serious cognitive impairments.  Means testing is not working if people we meet like this mentally retarded man are not being helped.

Could we ask the Arc to help?   We could ask, though we’ve never worked with them that I know of.  We’ll have to look them up.  One of the things people don’t understand is that most non-profits and social service agencies are underfunded and incapable of helping all of those who qualify for their programs.  In the case of organizations like the Arc that exist to help individuals with serious cognitive disabilities, those who are able to access their services tend to be the more-able members of the target population, or those tied into a good social network and supports.  For example, a man with an I.Q. of 70 is more likely to be able to navigate the Arc’s programs than a man with an I.Q. of 60.  As this man is chronically homeless, he does not have a strong social network of friends and advocates who will help him to navigate the Arc and advocate for him within the Arc’s programs.  The existence of a social service agency focused on helping a particular group of people does not mean that everyone of that target group can actually get help.

What could citizens do about this?  Vote.  Attend City Council meetings and testify about your concerns.  Call your representatives at all levels of government (local through federal) to express outrage that people such as this man are left on the streets, and request an increase in funding for permanent supportive housing programs that provide housing and supportive services for people like this.  Another option might be to volunteer at a local non-profit that helps the target population you care about in order to help expand that cash-strapped agency’s capacity to offer services to the target population.  The worst thing you can do is turn a blind eye, as do most people who walk past this man while he sleeps on the cold, hard ground.

Yes, I used to work with special needs kids too, and now I work with special needs adults.  I agree that this is unacceptable.  But without communication of what’s going on and who many of these people on our streets actually are (i.e. the mentally retarded man, the schizophrenic woman, the fifteen-year old runaway victim of abuse, etc.) their stories will remain hidden.  They will continue to live an unobserved and invisible existence on our streets while the majority of us worry about whether we’re being taxed too much when maybe the real question ought to be whether we’re being taxed for the right reasons.  Seems to me that every day this man sleeps on a cobblestone sidewalk blocks from one of America’s favorite adult playgrounds – the French Quarter – is another day we have to ask the question about what we prioritize as a community and a society. 

-Shamus

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