Down and Out and Dispossessed

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A wino with rheumy eyes and a scraggly beard slumping against a skid row doorway. A muttering mental patient, his hair caked with dirt, searching for the warmth of a steam grate on a bitingly cold day. These are stereotypes of the homeless: desolate men who are still with us in abundance, causing Americans to look the other way, half wishing such unfortunates did not exist at all.

But the haggard face of homelessness is changing. It is growing younger, more feminine. A new class of homeless men, women and children is showing up in the shelters, people whose reasons for homelessness are less obvious but no less disturbing. The new destitute often confute the stereotype; they do not sleep on park benches or push around shopping carts bulging with their worldly goods. On the street they may appear neat and purposeful, with a place to go and work to be done.

The new homeless are the economically dispossessed: young men who have fallen on hard times, families who are not making ends meet, single mothers who cannot afford to pay the rent and support their children at the same time. They include blue-collar families who have been forced out of apartments when their low-income housing is converted to condominiums; some hold jobs but cannot find or afford a new place to live. Many are homeless for the first time, and deeply shamed by the experience. "These are people you would never expect to see in a shelter," says Martha Whelan, director of an emergency facility on Chicago's North Side. "They certainly never expected it."

Temperatures last week plunged to record lows in much of the country, bringing the plight of the homeless, both old and new, to an early crisis as shelters everywhere brimmed over with people escaping the cold. Some could not escape: in Kansas City two homeless men were found frozen to death, one in a portable toilet at a downtown parking lot, the other in a construction-site trailer.

At shelters across the country, the new homeless are attempting to come to terms with their daunting circumstances. Kerry Alston, 24, looks like thousands of other city students as he saunters through Manhattan's crowds on his way to a computer class, a bookbag slung jauntily over one shoulder. But when he leaves the refuge of the classroom, Alston returns to the buzzing confusion of the Fort Washington Armory in New York City, an enormous room that sleeps as many as 900 men. Alston's luck went bad after he lost his job as a security guard last July and then had to leave his apartment after a dispute with his roommate. "When I first got to the shelter," he said, "I wondered what I had gotten into. I had never been in anything like this -- the odor, the dirt, people all over the floor. Then I realized I had no choice." Pride prevents him from telling his mother in South Carolina about his situation. "I'm going to get back on my feet first." Rachel Hanson, 43, was a housewife in Anaheim, Calif., when her marriage of 19 years ended in divorce in 1985. With no skills and little savings, Hanson lost her four-bedroom house to foreclosure. Shelter workers discovered her last January in a campground, where she had been living in a car with her three children for eight months. "My life simply fell apart," Hanson said. "I lost everything. Why, I even had a microwave oven."