Is He Homeless Or Just Belgian?

More followup on the City’s annual homeless census:

A man with a white cart happens to be rolling it east along the south side of 45th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues at a little before 1 a.m. on the last day of February. Group G is on the same path at the same time, but moving slower, so he catches up to Suzanne Wagner and Moreen Sinclair, and they ask him the big question.

Meanwhile, a tourist with a goatee enters the block from the northwest, so Jo Anne Bennett stops him and asks the same thing. “Yes,” the tourist says, pointing down the street to his hotel. Bennett tells him why she’s asking. “Oh, sorry,” he says, “No, I do quite well.”

But the man with the white cart isn’t doing so well. So when asked, “Tonight, do you have some place that you consider to be your home or the place where you live?” he says, “No.” And voilà: New York City’s fourth annual census of the street homeless had found one.

. . .

The team turns right on 47th as it starts to flurry. Two Belgian tourists say they aren’t homeless but point to a sleeping guy who is. There’s no one at all on 48th Street, nor on 49th, where the search ends. It’s 1:32. In the 55 minutes it takes for Group G to walk its route, the women encounter 38 people.

And more background about the decoys we read about last week:

One of the “shadow count” bases is on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam, where the teams of $100-a-night decoys are still trickling in at around 2:30 a.m. Some really go all-out with the wardrobe: The prize for best effort goes to a girl with untied work boots and a yellow caution tape as a belt. There’s an element of cat and mouse to the decoy game: An e-mail from the Homeless Services “command center” says that census takers were able to pick out decoys by the plastic bags they all seemed to carry or wear.