THE city didn’t look in the nooks and crannies.
It didn’t search in the rat-infested, garbage-strewn, closed-off, “do not trespass” underbelly of the city.
The city conducted a “scientific” head count of New York’s homeless population early yesterday morning – but didn’t want to get its hands dirty.
My homeless buddy, Mark Luehrs, 48, was skeptical of the survey from the start because he was rousted by Mayor Bloomberg’s cops during a well-publicized holiday crackdown.
Searching for a nook, we found a soggy, light-beige sofa bed in a garbage heap behind the swanky high-rise apartment building at 300 E. 59th St.
We replaced the missing cushions with a large, folded-up cardboard box and parked the couch on the sidewalk under a Queensboro Bridge overpass on East 59th Street between First and Second avenues.
“If we stay here, all we’re going to do is attract the cops,” said Luehrs, who doubted any of the city’s 1,000 volunteer head-counters would bother with us.
“If they’re really looking for homeless people, they’ll still find us across the street,” he said, referring to an area blocked off by concrete highway barricades where we dragged the sofa.
The temperature dipped below 32 degrees and patrolling cops had a right to haul us to a shelter. Luehrs dipped his legs into a black plastic garbage bag to keep warm, and I clung to a fleece blanket for dear life until 4 a.m., when the city’s homeless survey ended.
We weren’t counted.
Jim Anderson, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Homeless Services, said the foot of the Queensboro Bridge was not an area visited by the volunteers because it wasn’t identified as a high-density homeless area. A team of volunteers actually was a block to the north.
He explained that the methodology of the count is designed to get a sampling of Manhattan’s homeless people in “public places” and that the search excluded – for safety reasons – subway tunnels, abandoned buildings and other secluded areas where they hide to avoid Bloomberg’s cops.
“They weren’t going into areas that are considered dangerous,” said Beverly Cheuvront, a spokeswoman for the Partnership for the Homeless.
“It certainly skews the numbers, because that’s where a lot of the people stay.”
And, she added, “It’s ironic that the count comes right after a police crackdown where police were ordered to move the homeless out of highly visible areas.”