By Garry Mitchell, Associated Press
Mobile, AL – A team counting the homeless Thursday didn't take long to spot 25-year-old Sharmika Lashell Doyle on the porch of an abandoned apartment amid neglected and burned-out housing.
Doyle said she has lived for seven months in the Alabama Village apartment, with no utilities, sleeping on a decaying sofa and cooking on a front-porch grill.
"I'm trying to find something to cover the windows," she said, pulling an arm inside her T-shirt for warmth on a sunny, but chilly afternoon in the port city.
Like others counted across Alabama this week, she said she has been unable to find a job. The count in Mobile and statewide, part of a biannual, federally mandated national survey of people living on the streets, is the first since a deepening recession has left thousands without work.
The stalled economy and increasing home foreclosures are new factors that could drive up this year's total, according to agencies serving the homeless.
Leading Birmingham's count Thursday, Michelle Farley said service agencies have reported growing numbers of "street homeless" and families needing assistance.
In Montgomery, homeless coalition director Henry Stough said the capital's 211-phone center has experienced an increase in calls from families seeking all kinds of help with housing, utilities, rent and mortgage payments to avoid becoming homeless.
JoAnn Johnson, the 211 coordinator in Montgomery, said people call when they have run out of options after losing jobs and health care. They are referred to help agencies through 13 call centers operating statewide.
Huntsville count leader Larry Sisterman, director of First Stop day shelter, said he doesn't expect the north Alabama homeless total to be much higher than 780, the latest estimate available. But he said in counting earlier this week, he found more tents in use by the homeless.
Birmingham had the largest homeless population in the 2007 count, the most recent available. The statewide total was 5,391, almost half of them in Birmingham.
Results of this week's statewide count may take a month to calculate, but the numbers were expected to include people who have only recently become homeless because of the bad economy.
They include Shawn Mazur, 27, who said he's homeless for the first time. He said he recently lost his heating and air conditioning job in Kansas City, Mo., and, because of family problems, drifted to Mobile searching for a job.
Patricia Cook, 47, at a shelter in Mobile, said she has been homeless since September after being evicted in St. Cloud, Minn. She said she became stranded in Mobile in December when her car broke down.
Interviewed in a hallway at 15 Place, a day shelter, Cook said she's embarrassed to be homeless, but glad to be included in the homeless count.
"We're not throwaway people," she said.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development requires the nationwide "point-in-time" count of the homeless to support requests for taxpayer money to fund services for the homeless.