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Surveyors seek homeless

Volunteers tally people in shelters, on the streets, in parks, along railroad tracks and under bridges.

By CURTIS KRUEGER, Times Staff Writer
Published January 29, 2008

Rhonda Abbott, center, a social services manager for St. Petersburg, interviews two homeless women Monday at Mirror Lake. The city attracts more homeless people in the winter from up north, she says.
	[James Borchuck | Times]

Hundreds of volunteers fanned out through Pinellas County on Monday in an annual effort to find and count homeless men, women and children.

Beside Mirror Lake in St. Petersburg they found Charles Taylor, 48, who has been homeless for most of three years and says what he needs most is "just a place where you can rest and get up the next day and clean up and look for a job."

They found Bruce Pearson, 52, who has battled alcohol and the streets for years, and says, "God is good. He kept me alive for some reason."

They found homeless people who can be seen every day on the streets of St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and they found others who mostly stay invisible.

The Pinellas County Coalition for the Homeless, which oversees the annual count, needs time to tally the numbers and will release the official results soon. But in spite of a new 240-person tent city called Pinellas Hope that opened last month near 49th Street N and Ulmerton Road, the one thing surveyors do not expect to find is that homelessness has in any way been solved in Pinellas.

"We're still seeing almost as many people on the street if not more," said Sarah K. Snyder, executive director of coalition.

Pinellas Hope provides a meal a day, Internet use, a tent and access to a case manager who will try to help homeless people find a job or whatever else they need to pull themselves off the streets.

Rhonda Abbott, St. Petersburg's manager of social services, said right after Pinellas Hope opened last December, her staff noticed a decrease in the number of homeless people who congregate downtown. But since then the numbers have crept slightly higher.

Many long-term homeless people are battling drugs, alcohol or mental illness and can't turn their lives around quickly.

But Snyder said she's also hearing of families who have never been homeless before, particularly ones who have lost an apartment or a house and are feeling the squeeze of what many believe is an economy on the brink of recession.

"We're getting people losing housing that certainly did not expect to lose housing," she said.

The coalition conducts the survey each year so that local governments and social service agencies know the extent of homelessness in Pinellas County.

The volunteers go to places where homeless people often gather - shelters, soup kitchens, food pantries, certain parks and, at the moment, the sidewalk beside City Hall in St. Petersburg. They also rely on social workers and health officials who know of hidden spots - bridges, stands of trees, the brush along railroad tracks - where people set up their makeshift shelters. In each case, the volunteers ask people to participate in a survey that provides data for the homeless count.

Pinellas County attracts additional homeless people this time of year, for the same reasons it has attracted thousands of other residents.

"You can't be in Chicago or Detroit or New York or Boston and be homeless," in this cold weather, Abbott said. "Because people are dying."

By the numbers

200 - Number of volunteers who participated in the 2008 survey

5,195 - Number of homeless people found in the 2007 survey

10.5 - Percent increase of homeless people from 2006 to 2007

17 - Number of years the Pinellas survey has been conducted

[Last modified January 29, 2008, 06:47:13]