How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked

They dressed in several layers of clothing or donned old hats. They carried blankets and cardboard boxes. It was approaching midnight in New York one night in March 2005, and recruits who had been paid $100 each to pretend to be homeless were fanning out across the city.

There were 58 sites dotted throughout the metropolis. Pseudo-homeless people arrived at subway stations in Manhattan, back alleys in Staten Island and Queens, the front steps of a church in the Bronx.

The actors were taking part in a peculiar experiment led by Kim Hopper, a researcher then at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. The purpose: to analyze the effectiveness of the city’s count of homeless people.

Hopper and his colleagues found that actors at almost one in three of the sites reported being missed by counters. And these were people who wanted to be counted. They did not include the swaths of genuinely homeless ensconced in corners of the city. “Invisibility serves the purpose of security and uninterrupted sleep,” the researchers noted.

Just over a decade later, questions remain about the reliability of America’s biennial street count of homeless people, an extraordinary undertaking in which thousands of volunteers head out into the darkness in cities, forests and deserts around the country.

It still takes place mostly at night, relying on volunteers who are often equipped with nothing more sophisticated than clipboards, pencils and flashlights.

But supporters of the count, which is run by local communities in return for federal dollars and may be the largest tally of homeless people in the world, argue that it is a crucial mechanism to keep track of people who often exist outside of government bureaucracy.

Even if the figures are open to question, they provide a window into the landscape of America’s homelessness problem – and a sense of how it is changing over time.

“The bottom line is that it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that we could do a better job,” said Dennis Culhane, a University of Pennsylvania researcher and a principal investigator on the homelessness reports that are presented to Congress annually.

The most recent report found that on one night there were 549,928 homeless people in America.

Read the rest of the story, including scenes from Alaska’s most recent homeless count, here.

The post For The Guardian: Homeless in America appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how the story starts:

As soon as she glimpsed at the body on the icy street, Marie Nickolai knew it was Jackie Amaktoolik. He’d been drinking outside. People said he had collapsed.

She wept as friends coaxed her from the scene. “That’s my brother,” she said.

When homeless people die in Alaska, it is often like this: outside, facilitated by a lethal combination of alcohol and cold.

Nickolai’s stepbrother, known on the streets as Isaac, died on 13 December. The temperature was 6F (-14C).

Nickolai, 42, and her stepbrother grew up among eight siblings in the remote Yupik village of New Stuyahok along the Nushagak river in western Alaska. She said it was a childhood of picking berries, hunting moose, fishing and attending the Russian Orthodox church.

However, for years in their adulthood, Nickolai and Amaktoolik lived on the streets of Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city. Both lived with chronic alcoholism.

Alaska has some of the highest per capita rates of homelessness and alcoholism in America. From October to April, when temperatures can fall below freezing in this city of 300,000, bodies turn up outside with grim predictability; they are found in cars, hunched for warmth near transformer boxes, or in makeshift camps in the city’s many wooded parks.

Read the rest here.

Here are some of Ash’s gorgeous and heartbreaking unpublished images from our reporting:

The post For The Guardian: In Alaska, homeless on the frozen streets (with Ash Adams photos) appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Here’s how the story starts:

I texted Maya Wilson to tell her that I was bringing a dozen extra-ripe nectarines from Anchorage, and by the time I arrived at her little log house in Kenai she had a recipe in mind. It was a rainy summer afternoon. Her three kids – Brady, 13, Connor, 11, and Kelty, 8 – lounged in front of the television. Wilson put a cast iron pan on the heat. Soon I smelled bacon.

Wilson, who is 36, started the food blog Alaska from Scratch five years ago. At the time, she’d just moved from Bakersfield, California, to Nikiski with her husband, where they both became pastors at an evangelical Christian church. The grocery store was 40 minutes away. Food prices were much higher than she was used to. It seemed practical to make things from scratch. She began with a post about sourdough starter and continued posting recipes three times a week. Within months, blog traffic exploded. Strangers began recognizing her at Fred Meyer.

“I was surprised at how fast it took off,” she said. “I was just putting something out there that was true and real and, for whatever reason, people gravitated to it.”

Today Wilson is one of the most recognizable voices in Alaska’s food world, with readers all over the globe. Her blog averages more than 2 million views a year, she said. Her Instagram account has almost 57,000 followers. She has a regular recipe column in the Alaska Dispatch News, she’s shopping a cookbook proposal, and has been approached about a television show.

I watched her cut the nectarines and set them cut-side down in the hot pan, bacon grease sizzling. The blog began as a hobby, she told me, but it has become a life.

Read the rest here.

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Here’s their coop, which we were lucky to inherit from some neighbors who had it in their backyard but didn’t have chickens (thanks!). It’s all decorated for Christmas:

They were babies just this spring at being raised by Sara’s cousin Emily at Twitter Creek Gardens in Homer. And now, they’ve finally started laying:

They have been way more fun than I expected.  And the fresh eggs are great. I love giving them to friends and family almost as much as I love eating them.

Anyway, thanks Ash, for these great photos:

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You think your Starbucks cold-brew coffee is trendy? People in Anchorage were buying bottled cold brew five years ago. As for your pour-over black cup made with single-origin beans from a small farm in Africa? Yawn. Fairbanks has been doing that since the 1990s.

Little-known fact: Alaska is among the most coffee-obsessed states in the nation. Some years, the coffee-shop-to-human ratio in Anchorage has been higher than Seattle, making it the most caffeinated place in the America (at last count, in 2011, it dropped to number two, with about one coffee shop for every 2,000 souls.)

You cannot escape the coffee carts here, common as roadside moose, each with its unique brand: The Sugar Shack, Java the Hut, Fred’s Bail Bonding and Coffee Cabana. …

Read more here.

The post For The Guardian: America’s biggest coffee snobs are not in Seattle, but wide-eyed and alert in Alaska appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

How did he end up in a town where snow covers the ground half the year? His parents took him, he says as he rings up fresh basil and rice noodles. They heard Anchorage had better jobs than in Merced, California, where they used to live.

“It’s easier to get a living for your family,” says Lee’s wife, Chue Her. “Less competition.”

Talk to the business owners up and down thriving Mountain View Drive and the answers are the same. At the Dominican restaurant and the Polynesian salon. At the shawarma cart and the pho shop and the Korean laundromat. In Anchorage and in this neighborhood, people see opportunity.

Mountain View is a grid of modest houses and apartment buildings, churches and small shops, bordered on one side by a state highway and on the other by an Air Force and Army joint base. The population is a little over 9,000. People don’t drive as much as they do elsewhere, instead choosing to walk and ride the bus. The neighborhood parks are full of children this time of year, their bikes lying in the grass. Asian greens crowd the community garden. On a weekend morning you can hear the sound of Lao Buddhist monks chanting on one block and African-American spirituals pouring out a church door on another.

Welcome to the future of America. Welcome, according to some sociologists, to the most diverse neighborhood in the country.

Read more here.

With photos by the talented Ash Adams, and an awesome, nation-wide interactive map by the dynamo Lam Thuy Vo.

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