While the snow in front of student houses in Burleith and West Georgetown has built up into slick sheets of ice and nearly every street is glazed in a brownish mix of slush and dirt, the alleyway behind Riggs Bank on Wisconsin Ave. has remained pristine, as if snow had never fallen. At the end of that alleyway sits an overloaded shopping cart covered in plastic tarps. If you look closer, though many don’t, you can see the outline of a bundled-up old man leaning against it. His name is Nathanial Ust, and he prides himself on keeping his home clear of snow.
Gunther Stern, Director of Georgetown Ministry Center, which helps the homeless in Georgetown, estimates that there are between 60 and 80 homeless people in Georgetown at any time. On clear days you can find them on the sunny side of M St. or Wisconsin Ave.; on inclement days most find a warm grate outside of a metro stop or, on the coldest nights, they can go to one of the shelters in D.C. Most of those interviewed for this story have been on the street for many years. Some have accepted their fate and some remain frustrated with it, but almost none have plans for the future.
“Most of them are just resolved to be on the street,” Stern said.
Sitting outside of Ben & Jerry’s, John Butler appears fat thanks to the layers he wears to protect against the winter cold. His mittens are so thick that you can’t feel his fingers when you shake his hand, but he seems cheerful enough, despite suffering hard times. After growing up in an orphanage in Trinidad, Butler joined the army but left after an attempted coup in 1970 and moved to Montreal, where he made plastic toys in a factory. He then went to Brooklyn to work as a tailor, and later did alterations at a dry cleaner in Washington until it was taken over by a Chinese family who refused to rehire him. Though Butler doesn’t remember the exact chronology, Stern says that Butler has been sitting at the corner of M and Wisconsin at least since the GMC first opened 16 years ago.
“You end up on the shitty end of the stick,” Butler said. “That’s how I became homeless.”
He estimates that people drop between $10 and $15 in change a day into his paper Starbucks cup, more around Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is enough to get by if he gets a meal at a shelter. He also lands odd deliveries or cleaning jobs every three days or so that supplement his income. Butler spends most days sitting on the sidewalk on a small box, listening to his Walkman and holding out his cup. He stressed, however, that there’s more to his life than “working.”
“If I’m not working, I’m at the [National] Mall or the movies,” he said, smiling. His favorite actor is Sean Connery, and he enjoys going to events and parades.
Ust, who lives in the alley behind Riggs, also enjoys wheeling his shopping cart down to the National Mall for major events like the anti-surge march a few weeks ago. He said that he would have gone to the New Year’s parade in Chinatown last week, but he didn’t want to push his “wagon” through all the snow, and he couldn’t leave it in Georgetown.
“If I leave this wagon up here I won’t have it,” he said.
Though it was originally used for carrying groceries to people’s cars, Ust’s overloaded shopping cart now functions more like a mobile home. The whole contraption is covered in a complicated patchwork of plastic tarps, with weights tied to the ends to keep it safe from rain and snow, and arranged so that that a portion of it can be folded over the side to create a pup tent that Ust crawls under in bad weather. Aside from his personal clothing and blankets, his wagon contains his economic livelihood: every item that he finds on the street he keeps until a buyer comes along. Clothes, blankets, knick-knacks—pretty much everything is in it.
In addition to the items in his wagon, Ust sells newspapers when he can get ahold of them and was holding out a cup on Monday, though he disparaged beggars when we spoke. He said that he doesn’t trust them, and won’t let them near his cart.
“Some of them are up on something,” he said.
Butler, on the other hand, thinks that having a cart is foolish because it just gets stolen anyway.
“I lose a lot of stuff like that,” he said.
He also said that he enjoys a greater degree of freedom by not having a wagon to care for. While Ust must always stay within sight of his wagon, Butler roams the city with just a small bag with some clothes and blankets.
“I can walk to Virginia and back,” he boasted.
Peter Harshaw, who was begging at DuPont Circle on Monday, has a stash of belongings near where he sleeps at the L’Enfant Plaza metro stop, but he does not carry them with him. He seemed unconcerned with the prospect that they could be stolen.
“If it ain’t my life, I don’t value it,” he said. “Material things come and go.”
Harshaw’s immaterialist philosophy is somewhat surprising given his history: he was imprisoned from when he was 20 until he was 47 years old for robbery and murder.
“I needed the money,” he said of the crime.
Outside of the CVS in Dupont Circle on Monday, Harshaw seemed resentful of passing people who did not give him money. He said that he was in his second winter on the streets and was becoming more frustrated with it every day.
“I opt to … ask for something rather than take it,” he said somewhat bitterly. “It’s getting harder on me to accept the position I’m in.”
On the other hand, he said that he was not taking any steps to change his situation. He has never applied to CVS or other chain stores that might hire him.
“I just don’t work for anybody,” he said. “I don’t like working for people that look down on me.”
Though Stern had not met Harshaw, the GMC director said that he sounded like the second of the two general personality types among homeless people that he has observed. Most are generally amicable and accepting, Stern said, but a sizable number fault others for their situation.
“Every time there’s a problem they turn around and blame somebody,” Stern said. “People on the street are definitely not successful at whatever they did.”
Butler, for example, said that he cannot find work at a dry cleaner because they are all run by Chinese, Jews or Italians that discriminate against him.
“They won’t hire you, regardless of how good you are,” he said.
From his experience, Stern believes that other people are not generally to blame for their plight. He has seen little correlation between homelessness in the area and the strength of the economy, and that the highest rate of homelessness occurred between 1986 and 1991, “when the crack epidemic was at its worst.”
“It’s mostly related to substance abuse and mental illness,” Stern said. Roy Witherspoon, the Program Coordinator at GMC, agreed.
“That’s like the biggest issue: mental illness,” he said. “We encounter people who were professional people in an earlier lifetime.”
Some of the people in GMC’s winter shelter were nearly unintelligible, while others were like Joel, who asked that his last name not be used. Joel insisted that he was a professional journalist who broke every major news story in the past year, like the Dubai Port Deal. On the other hand, he was perfectly articulate and could put a Georgetown student to shame with his knowledge of current news.
It’s easy to understand how providing assistance for people who often don’t understand they have a problem can be difficult, but GMC offers them a number of services, and Stern claims that nearly all of the homeless between Rock Creek and Foxhall Rd. know about the center and visit it.
This is supported by the personal attention that staff and volunteers pay to the homeless community. Chatting with each other, they often asked whether they saw a specific homeless person singing on M St. or if another was sleeping in his regular spot. They know each person by name, including every person interviewed in Georgetown for this story.
The center provides Georgetown’s homeless with comforts most people take for granted: a phone to call family and loved ones, a shower, a washer and dryer and friendly faces to talk to. There are also two psychiatrists who visit weekly for counseling. Most services, even laundry, must be scheduled in advance, which provides some structure in the lives of the homeless who use the center. However, the center also offers two life-saving services: night outreach and a winter-long shelter.
Night outreach is essentially a checkup on the homeless in Georgetown. Staff and volunteers bundle up before checking known sleeping spots, and go looking when someone is missing.
“It’s very territorial. They have their spots and that’s where they sleep,” Dana Mascali, a staff member said.
That is not to say that everyone is always in their place. Witherspoon said that there has already been a death from hypothermia when a man wandered through Rock Creek Park on a snowy night and was found frozen up near Maryland. In addition to the cold, the homeless community itself also offers its own dangers, and sometimes homeless people steal or attack each other.
“A lot of the guys look out for each other. Some of the guys prey on each other,” Stern said.
More proactively, GMC also has a winter-long shelter for 10 to 12 people every night from November to mid-April. Although the center is not religiously affiliated, several churches host the shelter for a week or two each in rotation, and provide cots and a warm dinner. Unlike most shelters in D.C., such as hypothermia shelters that open up to all comers when the temperature drops below freezing, tenants at the GMC shelter are chosen in advance and stay for the entire winter. This system is intended to promote a stable platform for a few months that its beneficiaries can use to stabilize their lives.
Bobby Ali, who was chosen to stay at the center this year, was an alcoholic and a frequent cocaine user. Now he sleeps at the shelter at night and attends an anti-drug program in the mornings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the afternoon.
The shelter’s no-drug policy helps keep addicts clean for a few months out of the year and a strict curfew keeps them out of trouble at night. Sometimes the regular schedule helps them see that there is an alternative to living on the street, and allows them to start to confront the root causes of their condition.
“That’s our job—to get people to address the real issue,” Stern said.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of homelessness in Georgetown is that, despite centers like GMC, there doesn’t seem to be much impetus among the homeless to change their lifestyle. None of the men interviewed were searching for jobs. A jolly homeless man in Dupont who calls himself Butcher doesn’t consider himself unemployed as much as retired.
“I’m retired. I do what retired people are supposed to do: get drunk and feed the birds!” he said, indicating a bottle of malt liquor in his bag.
Butler claimed to go to the movies frequently, Ust was snacking on cookies and enjoying a Coca-Cola during our interview and Harshaw sometimes gets $40 per day from begging in a city where eight hours at minimum wage is only $56. When the temperature falls below freezing they will not be turned away at a shelter, and even the meals served by GMC, which does not consider itself a meal program, are large and appetizing.
“They’re better than you and I eat,” Mascali said.
Despite this, the homeless are ostracized, ignored and alone. Sitting outside Ben & Jerry’s, Butler might as well not exist to most of the people who pass by.
“These days there’s more bad,” he says of the people in the world, and he sees little evidence to the contrary on the cold street. But the next night, in the church at the dining table among his peers, he wears a light, unzipped sweatshirt in place of his several coats, and has an easy-going manner while chatting with the woman next to him. Most of th–e others, however, maintain their distance, suspicious that they will be judged even in the warmth and safety of the shelter.
