Annual tally gives insight into problem
Volunteers fan out to see how many sleep on streets on certain night, what services needed
It’s hours after most Center City Allentown businesses have closed, and the streets around PPL Center are dark and desolate on this frigid Wednesday night. Tim Joyce and his crew spot a thin, gray-haired man leaning against the door of a Linden Street parking garage, clutching a tattered grocery bag.
“Sir,” Joyce says, approaching the man with clipboard in hand, “do you know where you’re sleeping tonight?”
During the night and into the next day, dozens of volunteers like Joyce crisscrossed the Lehigh Valley, asking this question of people they found at bus stations, all-night laundromats, makeshift camps and homeless shelters. The effort was part of the annual Point-in-Time Count, a federally mandated attempt to estimate the number of homeless in each community.
Joyce, who oversees The
Synergy Project, a youth street outreach program at Valley Youth House, has participated in four Point-in-time Counts. He’s coordinating the 2020 count, leading teams of volunteers in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, as well as surrounding communities.
Getting homeless people to open up, then stay focused long enough to answer a three-page questionnaire, can be a challenge.
“There’s a lot of mistrust. A lot of these folks have been treated like outcasts,” Joyce said.
The questions span subjects like a person’s education, family connections and health. Most of the homeless people on Allentown’s streets have been diagnosed with at least one mental health condition and are frequently suffering from physical ailments, said Zenayda Alicea, coordinated entry regional manager at Third Street Alliance for Women and Children.
“You find that a lot of them had health problems before they were living outside that got worse. We see a lot of asthma, a lot of depression,” Alicea said.
Alicea and her husband, Jose, were part of Joyce’s crew, which focused its search in downtown Allentown. Joyce’s mother, Ruth
Joyce, a volunteer at Family Promise of Lehigh County, rounded out the team.
A retired emergency room nurse, Ruth Joyce said she’d witnessed firsthand the toll living outside in extreme temperatures can take on the human body.
“I’ve seen some terrible cases of frostbite. It’s heartbreaking,” she said.
At the LANTA bus station on Sixth Street, the group approached several people who were sitting on sheltered benches, trying to stay out of the wind. Garry, a 41-year-old man carrying a trash bag full of belongings, answered Joyce’s questions and accepted a bottle of water and bus pass. Like many of the people at the bus stop, Garry said he was waiting for a bus to the warming station at the YMCA on 15th Street.
After about an hour of walking around Center City, checking for homeless people at the Arts Park and between buildings on Hamilton Street, the team headed to the warming station to talk to people spending the night. The 64-bed facility was nearing capacity, with nearly every chair in the dining area claimed by people eating chicken noodle soup, crackers and apples.
While people milled around the brightly lit shelter waiting to take a shower or use a washing machine, Joyce and the other volunteers worked the room, gathering as many surveys as they could. The Morning Call was not permitted to take photographs in the warming station.
When people refused to participate in the survey, the team jotted down an observation, noting the person’s age, gender and appearance. All the information is helpful, team members noted, because it shows legislators what kinds of services are needed in the Lehigh Valley.
The count, overseen by the Lehigh Valley Regional Homeless Advisory Board, will take several weeks to tally. Last year’s count, held Jan. 23, determined that 574 individuals were experiencing homelessness in the Lehigh Valley.
While the count captures the number of people on a single night, it doesn’t capture the magnitude of the problem over the course of the year, the Advisory Board said in a statement. Organizers noted that in 2019 alone, 2,885 people who were homeless or at risk of being homeless sought information through the eastern Pennsylvania 211 social services helpline.
As he walked down a nearly deserted Hamilton Street, Joyce said the Lehigh Valley’s homeless problem differs from that in larger cities such as Philadelphia and New York, where homeless people are often seen sleeping on heating grates in front of businesses, or in sidewalk tent communities.
“Around here, homeless people are more hidden, so the problem’s less obvious. But it’s there.”