A few weeks ago, a small band of workers fanned out across Springfield with flashlights and clipboards and spent two hours looking for the very folks most of us would cross the street to avoid–the homeless. It was the first time such an extensive search had been conducted in Springfield, says Rita Tarr, supervisor of Catholic Charities’ crisis assistance and advocacy office.
What they found: 226 homeless people living in shelters or on the streets. Of those, about half are children. “That’s one of the big things we’re seeing, is families with children,” Tarr says.
These workers, representing seven different agencies under the umbrella Heartland Continuum of Care, wanted to get each homeless person to answer a page-long list of questions. Once tabulated, the results will provide data for grant applications that might bring in money for more social services.
But for the workers, the street survey turned into something more significant than just data. Robert Steller, a 28-year-old volunteer, was moved to write an essay about his experience.
“In all my time here . . . I have never seen this,” he wrote. “I have always found myself one to look down at the cracks in the sidewalk to keep from seeing travesties all around me. . . .
“At one location, there was an empty lot where someone has fashioned a makeshift tent from bricks and sticks,” Steller wrote. At another, two men were living in a garage. One man, obviously ill, told the workers he had been working and the roof caught fire. He had developed a lung infection that made him too sick to work, yet he could not afford the $300 prescription that could cure it. “For the time being, his home is in a garage . . . coughing from the infection in his lungs, freezing as he sleeps in his overalls,” Steller wrote.
More workers will conduct a comprehensive survey June 21 for four hours.
Left uncounted will be the thousands of families who don’t meet HUD’s definition of homeless, yet are without a home of their own. Tarr calls them “people definitely at risk for becoming homeless.”
These families are living doubled up with relatives or friends–a step away from being on the streets.
Steller may help again, but as a changed man. “My heart has gained a pound or two,” he wrote.
This article appears in Apr 10-16, 2003.
