Sunday, February 06, 2011
By Leslie Linthicum
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
You probably didn’t notice the warm wave of good works and synchronicity that washed through the streets of Albuquerque last week as Ice Age 2011 settled in for a stay.
Most of us spent the week watching the weather map, scraping ice off our windshields, worrying about our furnaces and going a little stir-crazy.
So it was easy to miss a hundreds-strong volunteer effort, especially because it took place in the very coldest wee hours and in out-of-the-way alleys, under highway bridges and along the railroad tracks.
Albuquerque Heading Home, a city/business/nonprofit partnership, started a weeklong survey of the homeless among us to identify the 75 most vulnerable and get them into permanent housing. More than 200 volunteers were sent out to scour the streets at night, meet the homeless and ask them a series of questions about their health and backgrounds.
Surveying started Monday. Do you have diabetes? Where do you sleep most often — in a shelter, in a car, on the street or at the river? How long have you lived on the streets? Have you been the victim of a violent attack? How many times have you been in a hospital in the past year?
About 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, 18-year-old University of New Mexico freshman Sara Tuzel was out along the railroad tracks Downtown, layered with clothing and equipped with surveys and a pen good to below zero. The temperature was 4 degrees, wind chill much lower, and it was snowing.
“These two guys were under blankets, literally sleeping under blankets covered with snow,” Tuzel said.
Tuzel wasn’t the only one who recognized that a record-breaking deep freeze could be fatal to the population being surveyed. The same teams that had been interviewing the homeless and handing them a McDonald’s coupon for their trouble, began encouraging people to move to shelters.
The weather worsened, and in a command center that had been set up in the lobby of luxury lofts Downtown, volunteers marked the locations of people on the streets who still hadn’t budged, and shelter vans and rescue units were sent out to get them to safety.
The census mission became a rescue mission.
Albuquerque’s mayor, who had been part of a survey team, didn’t go home. He got back in his car and made his own sweep, trying to make sure no one was missed and left outside.
Becky Kanis, a firecracker of a woman with a peroxide blond crew cut, runs 100,000 Homes, a nonprofit that seeks to get permanent housing for homeless people across the country. She was directing Albuquerque’s efforts and said nothing like this had happened in the group’s experience organizing in 66 other communities.
“You pretty much had everybody who’s experiencing homelessness in Albuquerque inside on Wednesday in the coldest weather in history,” Kanis said. “It’s just amazing this happened. The coldest February day in New Mexico history, and not a single person died of exposure.”
On Wednesday morning, the low temperature had dropped to 2. I went out to the West Side shelter, where beds are set up to accommodate 42 women and more than 300 men.
Everyone was safe and warm, but they aren’t always. Ed Boucher, who’s been living on the streets for 2 1/2 years, told me he’d slept in a garage Sunday night. Abdul Birnson, homeless for more than a year, said he’d spent that night awake outside at a truck stop.
Carol McCord, on the streets for 16 years, has been camping out where the police can’t find her. Fred Lewis, homeless for two years, told me he has a place Downtown in a little encampment on private property where he likes to sleep when he can’t get into a shelter.
Early Thursday, it was 7 below.
Shelters that normally open only at night stayed open during the day all last week. Volunteers brought in food. The call went out for cash donations, and they came pouring in. From PNM Foundation, $5,000. From a high school student, $30. In 48 hours, $67,000 had been raised.
It felt like one of those rare but important moments in a community when, faced with a challenge, people fall into place and all pull on the rope at the same time.
Mayor Richard Berry, reflecting on a week that could have been tragic but instead turned uplifting, said: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like I did this week. It’s humbling.”
On Friday morning, volunteers and donors gathered to get the preliminary results of their effort. Surveyors engaged with about 700 homeless people, and 475 of them agreed to take the survey. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed (252) had one or more of the risk factors that make them more vulnerable to dying if they stay homeless.
The 75 most in need will be identified and set up in free housing for a year.
This first phase, cold and inconvenient, was really the easy part.
Homelessness is a complicated social problem, and it won’t be solved by handing over the keys to an apartment to 75 people, or even 7,500, and walking away.
It’s going to take intervention from medical and social service agencies already working at capacity. It’s going to take landlords with patience and understanding. And it will require volunteers to come by for a talk, or provide a lift to a job interview or notice when food’s running low.
It’s going to take friends and neighbors.
“This is not just solving a problem,” Dennis Plummer, executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Project, said Friday. “This is about welcoming back into our community people who have really been on the fringes and neglected for a long, long time.”
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or [email protected]. Go towww.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.