ON THE STREETS
New Orleans has more homeless people than ever before, advocates say, and fewer
services to help them out
Monday, August 06, 2007
By Katy Reckdahl
Staff writer
Each day, just after daybreak, the man in the red T-shirt leaves the piece of cardboard and
blanket he calls home. Before he walks to a nearby day-labor agency, Kenneth Thomas, 44,
sometimes takes one look back at City Hall, which rises into the sky across Perdido Street.
"I just need shelter over my head," he said.
He wishes that someone in power could help him with that.
Thomas now beds down on a concrete floor inside the gazebo in Duncan Plaza, across from City
Hall. He keeps his bedding and a bag of possessions there, in an encampment that started last
fall and now holds more than 50 people each night, many of them elderly or mentally ill.
Partially hidden from view by steep berms of grassy earth, the Duncan Plaza gazebo offers a
small measure of privacy. At night, the bedrolls and heaps of belongings spill out beyond the
gazebo toward the berms, sometimes covering the surrounding sidewalk.
The homeless in Duncan Plaza represent just a sliver of the growing number of homeless in
Orleans and Jefferson parishes, now estimated at about 12,000 people -- double the estimate
homeless advocates made before the flood, despite the drastic loss in city population as a whole.
At the same time, agencies that used to provide crucial services to the homeless have closed.
Local advocates have sought money from Congress for permanent housing vouchers and other
services, but still await action on such measures.
Like the vagrants laying on newspaper-lined benches in front of the Capitol building in
Washington, D.C., the homeless sleeping in the shadow of New Orleans City Hall, embody a
larger problem: New Orleans is failing to house -- and often even acknowledge -- its poorest and
most vulnerable citizens.
Nationally, at some point during each year, up to 10 percent of all poor people become homeless,
according to Urban Institute research. In New Orleans, homeless advocates are seeing "not just
the traditional homeless but a whole new population of people who never imagined they'd be
homeless," people who once owned homes and worked their whole lives, said Martha Kegel, who
heads up Unity for the Homeless, a collaborative of 70 nonprofit and government agencies in
Orleans and Jefferson parishes.
Each has a story
Every morning, Kenneth Thomas peels himself from the concrete floor in Duncan Plaza to trudge
a few blocks down Gravier Street to Temps Today. But during the summer months, he's been
finding himself in a line with four-dozen other men, all of them looking for work, he said.
Sometimes only four or five land jobs, usually at $6 an hour.
Seeking anything beyond a sweat-and-muscle labor job is nearly impossible, said Thomas,
because he can't make himself presentable without bathroom or shower. The Immaculate
Conception Day Center on Baronne Street used to offer homeless people showers and laundry,
but it closed after Hurricane Katrina.
He smoothed the wrinkled shirt that he slept in and rubbed his hand along his chin, which bristled
with a few days' stubble. "Nobody wants you on their job looking like this," said Thomas, a native
New Orleanian who grew up nearby in the 6th Ward and worked as a cook offshore before the
storm.
About a year ago, Thomas returned to New Orleans, got hooked on drugs and ended up in a
rehabilitation center. He said he's now clean and working whenever he can, but temp jobs that
pay $6 an hour won't pay for an apartment anymore in a city with skyrocketing rents and utility
bills.
"There's a reason all of us landed here," he said. "But we're trying to bring ourselves back up."
He blamed himself for his own missteps. He said some others in the makeshift camp merely fell
victim to sad circumstance, pointing at each bedroll: he had lost steady work; her relatives could
no longer house her; he was evicted when his longtime apartment was sold to a real-estate
speculator; he's an old-timer who had a mental breakdown 10 years ago but hasn't been able to
qualify for "a crazy check" Social Security benefits for the disabled.
One shelter left
Thomas has found that employers are wary of people without mailing addresses. He could use
843 Camp St., the address for the Ozanam Inn, but employers know that address and see it as a
red flag. Still, "the Oz," as it's called, is the only adult shelter that's currently up and running.
"It's really a mess," said Clarence Adams, an administrator at the Ozanam and an active member
of Unity for the Homeless. "Unity is probably moving more of the homeless into permanent
housing faster than before," he said. "But every time you house one, there are five more to take
his place."
Not far from the Ozanam, once-familiar private businesses also evaporated, including Mari-Clean,
a 24-hour temporary agency in the Central Business District that hired thousands of homeless
over the years to clean ships docked at the Port of New Orleans.
Thurston Wells, 36, was a regular at Mari-Clean. A native of Kansas City, Mo., Wells came
through to New Orleans in 2000 as a "ride jockey," running the rides for a traveling carnival. He's
lived here ever since, drifting in and out of homelessness. He likes the Duncan Plaza quarters, he
said, because he believes that Mayor Ray Nagin protects the homeless people who sleep there.
Wells continued, with several other unrealistic details about Nagin's protection. Not far away, an
older man ranted, spouting gibberish. Nationally, about 1 in 5 homeless people suffers from some
form of severe mental illness. The ratio at Duncan Plaza seems higher, said Shamus Rohn, a
Unity outreach worker.
"The people at Duncan Plaza tend to be often severely disabled or elderly," Rohn said.
People tell him they chose Duncan Plaza because the National Guard parks just across Loyola
Avenue, in the Holiday Inn's lot. "Some of these people wouldn't necessarily make it in the
squatters' camp under the overpass," he said, referring to a slightly crowded area under the
freeway, near Canal Street and Claiborne Avenue. "Older folks tell me, 'I can sleep here because
I know if I yell out, National Guard troops will come running.' "
Seeking federal initiatives
Before Hurricane Katrina, advocates seldom saw a homeless person older than 50 or 60. No
longer, said Kegel. "We're seeing far more elderly people than we saw before the storm," she
said. "We've found people as old as 88 living in abandoned buildings."
Since an estimated 10,000 of the area's homeless people live in abandoned buildings, out of
sight, the post-storm spike in homelessness has largely gone unnoticed, Kegel said.
Kegel would like to see two federal initiatives -- low-income housing tax credits earmarked for
hurricane-affected areas like New Orleans, along with rental subsidies -- to prevent
homelessness.
So far, the federal government has financed the rebuilding of only a small portion of the area's
devastated affordable-housing stock, she said, calling that response "a national embarrassment."
For months now, Kegel has lobbied Congress for something she places "at the top of the list" in
terms of importance: 3,000 permanent federal housing vouchers for "the most vulnerable." They
would go to Louisiana people with disabilities who are homeless, at risk of being homeless or
otherwise vulnerable.
Such a measure may pass soon, after the August recess, according to Scott Schneider,
spokesman for U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu's office. Schneider said those vouchers and affordablehousing initiatives are part of the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, which he called a "major
priority" for Landrieu, D-New Orleans, after Congress returns from its August recess. If the
Senate bill and a similar House bill pass in August, the money could come from a supplemental
appropriations bill later this fall, he said.
To fight homelessness, local officials are dependent on federal purse strings, said Michael
Stoops, who directs the National Coalition for the Homeless.
"But Mayor Ray Nagin and other city officials need to provide leadership even if they can't provide
money. (Democratic Presidential hopefuls) Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are
talking a lot about poverty as an issue. Officials in New Orleans could do the same -- they could
become spokespeople for people living in poverty."
Nagin already fills that role, said city spokesman James D. Ross. For example, he said, the
mayor has been supportive of the Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act, has urged Housing and
Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson to open more public-housing units and has
helped individual homeless people through caseworkers in the Mayor's Office of Public
Advocacy, Ross said. Nagin has also requested for New Orleans an additional $10 million from
the pot of federal homeless-assistance money.
"We are working every day to address this problem," he said, noting that "Mayor Nagin and his
staff are of course saddened that New Orleans, like virtually every urban community, faces issues
of homelessness."
Housing, not jail cells
Near places where increasing numbers of homeless congregate, some neighbors have
demanded that anyone sleeping in public be arrested. Historically, the New Orleans Police
Department cuffed all napping homeless people under a municipal charge barring "public
habitation," however, a federal judge ruled that unconstitutional in 1986.
For the past several years, NOPD's Homeless Assistance Collaborative has taken a different
approach, doing street outreach instead of arrests and working with Unity to move even
chronically homeless people into permanent housing.
Research has found that jailing the homeless can actually worsen the problem. Some are
separated from their bags, containing necessary prescription medication. Others lose hard-fought
Social Security disability benefits, which are suspended after a certain amount of time in jail.
"Arresting the homeless is extremely costly to taxpayers," Kegel said. "It does nothing to remove
people from their current situation and put them into the stable housing they need."
Behind the berms at Duncan Plaza, Thomas talked about solutions. He's deft at construction, he
said, as were several others who slept in Duncan Plaza.
"We could do the work and fix up housing for ourselves," he suggested. "I'm not asking for
anything for free -- I'm asking for another chance."
A man standing across the way nodded.
"Sheetrock, drywall, painting, I can do it all," said Emile Thomas Gaspard, 45, who grew up
watching the craftsmen in his 7th Ward neighborhood.
Thomas gestured around him, at the dozen or so other men he'd gotten to know while sleeping at
Duncan Plaza. He knew they were visible from Nagin's second-story City Hall window.
So he wanted the mayor to know one thing: the men in the plaza, at least most of them, were
neither lazy nor content with their situation.
"If we had housing," Thomas said. "We could be as productive as any citizen around here."
.......
Katy Reckdahl can be reached at kreckdahl@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3300