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Report: 4,000 homeless on Long Island

BY MICHAEL AMON | michael.amon@newsday.com

March 1, 2007

There were nearly 4,000 homeless people on Long Island and more than 48,000 in New York City in 2005 -- the vast majority of them families with children, according to a federal government report released Wednesday.

The numbers were the result of a Department of Housing and Urban Development project that crunched numbers from shelters and thousands of volunteers who fanned out across the country to count the homeless, one by one.

Overall, the department found that there were 754,000 homeless in the United States on one night in January 2005, a "snapshot" of the population that officials said would prevent people from being counted twice over time. About 338,000 of the homeless were living outside.

In Suffolk, there were 2,728 homeless people, the vast majority in shelters. Dozens of volunteers walked through woods, over train tracks and into abandoned buildings to find 196 of them living on the streets. In Nassau there were 1,215 homeless, 91 of them outside.

In New York City, there were 43,759 people in municipal shelters and 4,395 on the streets, the report said.

However, even those who helped compile the numbers said they missed many homeless people, especially those living outside in scattered forest encampments on Long Island.

"The numbers give us a piece of the story but not the whole story," said Joan Noguera, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless, which compiled Long Island statistics for the report.

The report was billed as the most comprehensive look on homelessness in a decade. For that reason, it is difficult to know whether homelessness is increasing or decreasing because past efforts to track the issue were less ambitious and used different criteria.

Locally, the city's homeless population has increased by 48 percent from 2000 to 2007, though there have been steep drops since since 2003, according to the city Department of Homeless Services.

In 2004, Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless found there were more than 5,000 homeless on Long Island. The decline between 2004 and 2005 was because of different reporting methods, not a decrease in the homeless population, the group said.

The report made clear that homeless families are a much bigger problem in New York and Long Island than the rest of the country.

Nationally, 34 percent of the homeless were families with children, while most of the rest were single men. On Long Island, 61 percent of the homeless are families, and in the city, nearly 59 percent.

"Most homeless people here don't fit any of the stereotypes," said Marge Rogatz, president of Community Advocates, a Long Island group advocating more housing resources.

The high cost of housing has driven thousands of families into shelters and onto the streets in the last seven years, homeless experts said.

"We're in one of the tightest rental markets in the country and the world," said Robert Hess, commissioner of the city Department of Homeless Services. "You're likely to see more people squeezed at the bottom of the rung. Once folks are squeezed hard enough, they tend to end up at our front door."