STREET PEOPLE

...Tax it for the poor, let the proceeds go to the poor...

...Willing to wait several hours for the Mission's dinner, she eases herself into a rocker, takes off her butterscotch-colored knitted cap-she is wearing earrings underneath—and idly studies a small tract...

...Abner Cunningham estimates that two-thirds of the people at Cooper's Place are willing and able to work...

...I see it as a sexist problem more than a race problem...

...All any local government has to do to erase poverty," says Ruth, "is to tax the kicks [recreation] industry...

...a brass planter that sits atop an antique sewing desk...

...You don't know what kind of people eat that kind of food, but you're hungry, you just don't care, you're just starving...

...I am an alcoholic," says Louis Wish-man, thirty-eight, who is trying for a second time to stay sober...

...Louis is divorced and has a six-year-old son, whom he watches anxiously for behavioral quirks...

...Joletta is trying to find a permanent place to live...

...She lost her apartment through roommate difficulties, then lost her money when somebody snatched her wallet...

...Though Bridgette is black and lives in the city and Judy Brown (not her real name) is white and lives in the suburbs, their situations are strikingly comparable...

...Hayes blames the housing crunch squarely on the Federal Government, arguing that a bipartisan effort begun after World War II to stimulate the construction of public housing in this country was ended by the Reagan Administration...

...In the summertime, he collects and sells golf balls driven into ponds by unlucky or unskilled golfers...

...If we're going to break the cycle of poverty, you can either write them a check for hope or you can write them one for despair, and right now we're writing them a big one for despair...

...He mentions being institutionalized as a child...

...Every day, twenty-four hours, sometimes two minutes, sometimes ten minutes—whatever it takes...

...A guy last night asked me what it feels like to be on the streets, and I said, 'It hurts,' " Louis says, " 'because you're not wanted anywhere.'" Jack, described by people at the Center as "a real street person," says, "If it wasn't for this Center, I'd be dead...

...Other women drift in to rock, sit, study the walls, and wait...

...But now the homeless are beginning to speak for themselves...

...Efforts for the homeless are also being pressed in the courts...

...Cooper's is dedicated to the late Reverend George Thomas Cooper, who operated a shelter and reading room for the last twenty-five years of his life...

...An auto has more natural right than a person, and is more protected," asserts Ruth (not her real name), a forty-seven-year-old homeless woman...

...Bridgette, a large women with a round face, has been on and off Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and currently receives $302 a month in AFDC assistance and $184 in food stamps...

...I went home and turned on the gas and tried to kill myself," he says, "after a two-week drunk...

...The most honest explanation of homelessness is an economic one: supply and demand...

...Both are single heads of household, too poor to make ends meet...

...Two women, one pregnant, loll on a sofa...

...Louis has to struggle to stay on the wagon...

...It's time that older street people, forty-five to sixty-five, who are not going to go back to work in this society, are used as volunteers...

...his chiseled, handsome face, headed toward gauntness, looks a bit vacant...

...Judy, with neat short brown hair, kelly green sweater over a black turtleneck, and gold earrings, looks like a young suburban mother...

...his father was an alcoholic, he says...

...I was sober for six months, and I was doing real good, and—slip of the tongue, instead of ordering a Seven-Up, I said a seven-and-seven...

...Two major foundations have also added private money...

...Estimates of the proportion of the homeless population who are disabled or disturbed vary too greatly to be meaningful, but the disabled are a visible homeless contingent with special needs...

...There are simply not enough houses or jobs to go around for the country's lowest class, those who long ago fell through the "social safety net...

...The Coalition has also sued over the failure to limit the number of people in a shelter to the maximum of 200 imposed by state law...

...I'm speaking on behalf of other mental patients, people with disabilities and stuff like that, because that's the way that I came—that's what caused me to be homeless...

...But there is also a new, secular kind of care: At Cooper's Place, a drop-in center the homeless can use during daytime hours, the bible of choice is Radical Social Work, which lies on the desk of Director Abner Cunningham...

...People would love to get that kind of stuff...

...From New York to Los Angeles, the story is much the same...

...Anything we've had, these guys just jump at it...

...Northwest Community Services, the social services agency which placed her there, received 504 requests for emergency housing in 1984 from people in a suburban area generally thought of as middle- to upper-middle class...

...Her situation has frayed her family ties—a twelveyear-old daughter remains in Baltimore with the girl's father—and impaired her motivation to keep working...

...raucous laughter...

...Judy sits at the dining table in her apartment, which has been dimmed so her granddaughter can nap...

...I want to work, but, see, you lose incentive," she says...

...She has also been a seamstress at Catholic Charities in Baltimore, but her real skill is in the graphic arts...

...Then he lost the job, finished school, got drunk again, ended up back on the streets, and finally back at the Center...

...The way I figure it is, you need help and they're going to help you," she says...

...In an adjoining dormitory room, the beds covered with patchwork quilts are barracks-neat...

...The highest-paying job she ever held was at a suburban newspaper, three or four years ago, which gave her take-home pay of $168 a week...

...After being denied Federal Supplemental Security Income (cash aid to the disabled) three times, she recently won approval of her application...

...Generally her clients arrive at the shelter after they have been evicted...

...Since 1980, housing construction subsidies have dropped by 78 per cent a year...

...The "Tent City 14" were protesting a penalty of sixty-day ineligibility for benefits, imposed whenever a recipient violates the rules governing the county's "workfare" program...

...Secondly, we need efficient drop-in centers staffed by sufficient numbers of people who have been on the street and can relate to street people and give them support and care and just say, 'I understand your isolation.' " "The only solution to the problem is that street people and homeless people themselves need to be part of their own solution," says Louis Wishman...

...When Jack has money, he buys wine, not food, because he can get food elsewhere...

...I go to McDonald's," he explains, "but I don't go inside...

...Joletta has difficulty holding a job because of what she describes as a biochemical disorder that requires her to take medication...

...Touches of homey elegance gussy up the lounge: an antique bookcase, the coveted sort, with glass doors that lift up...

...Sister Connie Driscoll, who opened St...

...This country has no policy, nothing, that really assures that human right: that people are entitled to adequate, affordable, accessible housing...

...Final conference recommendations included recognition of "the values and rights of all humans regardless of their circumstances," The New York Times reported...

...What we need are overnight shelters that are responsible to the community: based in the community, run by the community," says Sue Freeman...

...What's available is short-term day labor...

...In New York City, shortly before last year's Presidential election, 410 homeless persons, using such addresses as a sidewalk, a park bench, and post office steps, registered to vote...

...There is no reason for me not to drink," he says...

...In Philadelphia last year, the first convention of homeless people drew an attendance of 175...

...They are white, black, Native American, Hispanic, foreign-born...

...It smells like laundry in the overheated women's lounge at Pacific Garden Mission, a 108-year-old shelter run by evangelical Christians for some of Chicago's homeless people...

...I don't know what tomorrow's going to bring...

...She sounds tough and angry when describing the problems of her poor, mostly black, female clients...

...If I have a job—and I'm looking for a full-time job—I won't be homeless any more," says William Johnson, thirty-two, a former offender who is co-chair of the Homeless Caucus in Chicago...

...Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...He is perhaps somewhere in his thirties, but seems prematurely slowed down by drink...

...The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Pew Memorial Trust recently announced a four-year, $25 million program for homeless people in eighteen cities...

...She has scars on her chest and upper arms where she says he once threw hot grease on her...

...It's like a diabetic has to take his insulin every day—I have to stay away from a drink, one day at a time...

...But people who live on the streets may be the best source of creative solutions to their problems...

...His speech is slurred but coherent...

...Los Angeles litigation is attempting to assert the right of homeless individuals to be sent to heated shelters...

...I go in the dump-ster, rip open the bags, and eat other people's food, French fries, hamburgers...

...As a licensed practical nurse, Frances Lahori should not be poor, but she lived— until recently—in the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's largest low-income housing projects...

...Six months...

...When Louis came to the Center in 1980, he was hired to be a member of its staff, but he couldn't handle it, so he quit...

...Some Chicago neighborhoods have lost as much as 20 per cent of their housing units over a ten-year period, according to a 1982 report by the U.S...

...Sam Guardino, an organizer who works with the Caucus, terms the Council's final $ 1.2 million allocation for services for the homeless "essentially a $1 million victory," since the budget originally submitted requested only $200,000 for that purpose...

...New York City has begun a $43 million program to renovate city-owned apartments into permanent housing for the homeless...

...It's hard to find people who will accept a family that's struggling...

...Like the unhappy family of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, each homeless individual has a unique tale of misery...

...I'm gonna tell you the truth," he begins...

...As the day wears on, the decibel level rises steadily...

...A measure requesting $10 million for shelter and services for California's homeless was passed last year after it was shaved to $3 million...

...Right now he sleeps at an overnight shelter in Chicago's Uptown, an ethnically diverse neighborhood that has served as a dumping ground for deinstitutionalized mental patients...

...It is the sort of space that could have been a beachhead trendy restaurant in a neighborhood ripe for rehabilitation, but it serves the displaced residents, not the gentrifiers...

...Their stories make up a giant mural of homelessness in America and a portrait gallery of homeless individuals: single parents, abused wives, confirmed or recovering alcoholics, former offenders, hard-core unemployed, drug abusers, the physically or mentally disabled...

...My experience here is that if there's a job, Jack or Jill will go to it," he says...

...As she talks, articulately but slowly, a fixed stare reveals her state of mind...

...Its old-fashioned compassion comes with its principal concern: saving people's souls while sheltering their bodies...

...In New York City, for example, 108,000 of the city's single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel units have given way to the wrecker and the luxury housing re-habilitator...

...Bridgette has held several of the low-paying jobs to which women are consigned: child-care worker, cashier, waitress, nurse's aide...

...It's been a journey, actually, to try to function within mainstream society," says Joletta Wright, thirty-one, who has been staying at Pacific Garden Mission for six weeks since arriving in Chicago from Baltimore, where she had also been homeless...

...Behind Judy, two painted cupboards with glass doors are completely bare...

...Some have succumbed to just plain bad luck...

...She left her abusive alcoholic husband...

...The registration was permitted after a Federal judge ruled that the homeless had a constitutional right to vote if they met the age and citizenship qualifications...

...And I went to a bar that had some live music...

...We've got nothing that says that housing is a basic human right," says Harvey Saver, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless...

...Some officials estimate that those who lack permanent shelter for any significant length of time may suffer a decrease in life expectancy of twenty to thirty years...

...The strain is starting to show...

...A resident, her hair in pincurls, enters the lounge to do her nails...

...Thousands of homeless people eligible for Federal benefits but not currently receiving them may need special help in applying, according to the recent findings of Representative Ted Weiss, New York Democrat...

...I'm an alcoholic...

...It's time that the socialists get off their dead asses and stop worrying about socialism in this country and start dealing with the people who are gonna bring that about...

...At forty, Judy has three teen-aged children and a five-week-old granddaughter...

...Christmas cards are stuck to a mirror...

...Landlords are reluctant to rent to her, "just because the words 'public aid' are there...

...The lines of her face are tight, her hands are thin...

...The center's five staff members try to provide an atmosphere where homeless people can enjoy a respite from the body-numbing cold and psyche-numbing isolation of the streets, and from the intrusive, patronizing "change agents" frequently prescribed by the social service agencies and shelters through which the homeless pass...

...Judy and her family are staying in an emergency apartment in Arlington Heights, a northwestern suburb of Chicago...

...Once, when she came home from work, her younger daughter had a mysterious black eye, she says...

...Many of the people who use Cooper's Place experience some of the problems related to alcoholism, but they suffer even more from chronic unemployment and underemployment...

...Ten or more years ago, the homeless were mostly alcoholic men...

...But now the population of homeless women is growing as single women and their young children begin to dominate the ranks of the poor...

...Until recently, they have been silent, pacified with the token turkey of concern at Christmas, ignored by strangers on the street, disfranchised, and insulted by a President who thinks that the homeless members of Washington's "grate society" choose to make their homes on heating vents...

...Pacific Garden Mission is Christianity with the sleeves rolled up, a classic example of the traditional way of aiding the homeless...

...Pay the rent or eat...

...I had to go back to waitressing," she says...

...Alcoholics fit the traditional image of the homeless person...

...Inexpensive housing is disappearing, and the demise of that entire housing market is principally responsible for the explosion in the numbers of people on the streets...

...He is again on the staff, as a volunteer "participant," and again seeing a therapist...

...It's time that the church responds with its mission to care about every human being in this society, not just Ethiopia or Vietnam...

...So he picks up aluminum cans, which he can turn in for twenty-two cents a pound...

...She has just returned from apartment hunting—her three-year-old daughter sleeps on her lap—with fresh anger about the stigma attached to public aid...

...One large, bright room, filled with men still dressed for the outdoors, reverberates with the noise of their activities: the snap of playing cards hitting the tables, the incessant drone of television, conversation, Marcia Z. Nelson, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, is a journalist in suburban Chicago...

...Under the program, teams of doctors, nurses, and social workers based in clinics at soup kitchens and shelters will provide the homeless with desperately needed health and social services...

...When Governor Mario Cuomo released a New York state study of homelessness late last year, he said, "Homelessness today is overwhelmingly caused by poverty, not pathology...

...I feel like now, I'm not a citizen of the United States...

...in 1981, that city agreed, as a result of a similar suit, to shelter homeless individuals...

...The car has a right to sit on the curb, whereas a poor person can't sit on a park bench without a legal address...

...At any one time, says Matt Lyons, who works with the Homeless Organizing Team, 5,000 people are on the streets because of the penalty...

...I just have to take it one day at a time...

...He was trained as an accountant and is about to begin an accounting job...

...I'll be able to be self-sufficient, I'll be able to take care of my own bills, I'll be just like somebody in society—I'll be a citizen...

...I think the rents are out of line and there's nowhere to go where people will be understanding," she says...

...You can't even get a rathole for $250," she says indignantly...

...Even when day labor is available, though, it won't make ends meet...

...He draws a distinction between sober people—those who are comfortable with themselves when not drinking—and dry people, who are unhappy about not drinking...

...By the time I get through paying the babysitters, I can sit home and get more money from public aid...

...I went inside that bar...

...Right now I'm in kind of a daze," she says...

...I needed as much cash as I could get...

...It's time that professional organizations hire people from the streets to work with street people...

...Her family has been evicted three times in the past five years, after she divorced an alcoholic who only recently began paying child support...

...Another, neatly attired in a coat with a fur collar, ducks in from the vicious Chicago cold...

...The abuse has also sent her four times to a state-run mental health institution in Chicago's southern suburbs...

...They are troubled people, vulnerable people: victims of unscrupulous landlords, abusive families, rapacious employers, callous bureaucrats, or of their own addictions or personality disorders...

...Many of them might make it in better times, given enough jobs, enough affordable housing, enough social services...

...Bridgette and her family are staying in De-hon House, a transitional shelter in a quiet residential neighborhood on Chicago's North Side...

...Where's their imagination...

...The Center for Street People, a drop-in shelter for homeless people in the neighborhood, helped Louis...

...Governor Mario Cuomo recently proposed to borrow as much as $1 billion to build 15,000 apartments for the poor in that city...

...I had to work toward getting incentive...

...You take a match," he says, "and when you strike that match, it's gonna burn...

...For $50 a month, a car can get a heated space...

...The demand is fierce, and the supply is shrinking...

...The Center was opened in 1974 for recovering alcoholics...

...Martin de Porres shelter for women on the city's poor south side...

...The Government sets up a system for you when you can't help yourself and then terrifies you for being on it...

...Homeless people with histories of alcoholism or disability are the most extreme and poignant examples of the dispossessed, but the problems of the homeless stem from something much deeper than individual affliction: Homeless people are poor...

...In Los Angeles, homeless people helped run an encampment erected late last year by a team of organizers...

...My incentive is getting low, because I have gotten frustrated with the way the system is...

...Smoking slender brown cigarettes, Sister Connie, with her eyepatch and low, husky voice, looks as if she should be running a roulette table rather than a shelter...

...The experience has taught her that it doesn't pay to work because she can't afford quality child care...

...His Christian fundamentalist family relied on welfare when he was growing up...

...While some of the homeless have organized to speak collectively, many others are willing to speak individually about the way they live...

...Bridgette Hawkins, twenty-five, has two daughters and a third child on the way...

...Joletta is extraordinarily tall—six feet, four inches—and dressed in a striped pullover color-coordinated with her skirt...

...People become homeless for an immediate reason: simple inability to pay the rent...

...Louis, sandy-haired, portly, looks like an aging preppy in his argyle sweater vest and gray trousers...

...It's time that organizations, instead of hiring middle-class college kids as volunteers to run their programs, get street people to run them and provide them with some kind of dignity...

...What happens to me if public aid isn't there...

...Frances has been on a waiting list for another apartment at the project, since her previous home was broken into four times...

...I feel like I'm an alien...

...Within the past five years," says Sue Freeman, who has been homeless off and on since 1983, "like every other group, the homeless have come out of the closet...

...Judy can't afford suburban apartments, but has chosen to stay in the area where her children have grown up and still attend school...

...I drink everything, I even drink rubbing alcohol, I drink beer, I drink anything that's got alcohol...

...I'm dry, very dry," he says...

...Pacific Garden Mission and Cooper's are among the few places where Chicago's estimated 25,000 homeless can find shelter...

...she hopes to take her three children to a new place...

...I just did a lot of things that were best for my children," she says...

...She is considering getting police protection against her husband, and a divorce...

...I did stop for a long time...

...Her story is less typical of the suburbs...

...In mid-1983, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition told Congress that at least 750,000 new units a year were needed...

...I was a security aide for the housing authority in Baltimore, I worked with the blind and handicapped, I did cashier work...

...Like Pacific Garden Mission, Cooper's building is in the run-down periphery of the city's core...

...He has bad legs, he confides...

...I had been working," Frances says, "but because of all this abuse, I haven't been able to hold a job...

...I've had a lot of jobs," she says...

...The day Tent City, which accommodated 300, went down, fourteen homeless people, organizers, and concerned citizens were arrested for civil disobedience at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors...

...The National Coalition for the Homeless has filed suit to require New York City to shelter homeless families...

...Federal renovation of a shelter for the homeless in Washington, D.C., agreed to by the Government after a protest fast undertaken by members of the Community for Creative Nonviolence, will cost $5 million, according to Mitch Snyder, a spokesman for the group who made headlines during his fifty-one-day fast...

...I like to play the drums...

...He sniffs periodically as he tells of a recent period of sobriety...

...Where's their leadership...

...You can't get a job around here," Jack says...

...He was hospitalized for depression, then enrolled in an alcoholism program, got a part-time job at a major Chicago bank, went to school, and cut his ties to the Center...

...Chicago's Uptown is filled with day-labor agencies, where lines form at 5:30 a.m...

...Her husband used to call her regularly, and disruptively, at a nursing home where she was the nurse in charge...

...Judy has obtained a Section 8 certificate—a Federal rent subsidy—in the past, but few suburban landlords were willing to take it, she says...

...Other homeless people sell blood, food stamps, or prescription drugs they can obtain from unscrupulous doctors who will eventually share in the profits of the street sales...

...Martin de Porres in 1983 in a neighborhood filled with vacant lots, boarded-up houses, and corner stores hidden behind burglar gates, reports that a rash of wife-abuse over the holidays filled the shelter with battered homeless women...

...So do the mentally or physically disabled...

...She wears sturdy walking shoes, has large gold hoop earrings...

...Now Frances, thirty-one, is homeless, staying at St...

...Judy has had some training as an accountant...

...The check for hope will also have to be big...

...Our main conclusion is that homelessness is by its nature a crisis of housing...

...They have a choice to make," she says...

...Two million to three million people have no place to call home, so they sleep in doorways, dump-sters, lean-tos, cars, tents, emergency shelters...

...Freeman, thirty-nine, is co-chair of the Homeless Caucus in Chicago, which formed last November and testified at the City Council's 1985 budget hearings...

...I think folks are beginning to understand that the shame of the old lady on the street corner has something to do with housing in this country," says Robert Hayes, a lawyer for the National Coalition for the Homeless...

...Sixty days on the streets does not rehabilitate anybody," Lyons says...