{"id":166,"date":"2005-03-08T10:14:41","date_gmt":"2005-03-08T18:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/03\/playing_homeless.html"},"modified":"2005-03-08T10:14:41","modified_gmt":"2005-03-08T18:14:41","slug":"playing_homeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/playing_homeles.html","title":{"rendered":"Playing Homeless"},"content":{"rendered":"

The city’s homeless census took place last night<\/a>. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath looks at the control decoys in the city’s homeless census<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Dr. Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the Nathan Kline Institute and the former president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, is the architect of what the city is calling the Shadow Count, and the man in charge of implementing its \u00e2\u20ac\u0153plant-capture\u00e2\u20ac\u009d method: you plant a known quantity of itinerant decoys among the street population at large, and see how many of them you can spot in a night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth of searching for actual homeless people; the percentage of decoys missed ought to resemble the percentage of the true population unaccounted for in your surveyors\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 ledgers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The guidelines for playing a homeless person:<\/p>\n

Prospective decoys\u00e2\u20ac\u201dHopper wants a hundred and fifty\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwill be handed an instruction card shortly before heading out to assigned locations, at midnight, for three hours of role-playing. The card begins, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Your job is to pass for a homeless person on the street tonight. But you will be unusually stable, well-behaved, dressed for the weather, and approachable.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d As props, Hopper recommends bringing along only a blanket and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a crummy hat.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Booze? \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Several people have asked if that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s O.K.,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Hopper said last week, in the midst of final preparations. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We had to develop some artful answer: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcYou\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re employees of the research foundation for mental health; these are work hours for you and the usual rules apply.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 But if people feel like misbehaving in a civil fashion on their own, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t police them.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Reading material? Hopper\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inclination was to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yeah, whatever helps pass the time.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But one of his students asked if he could bring his homelessness textbook along. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably not the thing that ordinary homeless folks would be doing,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Hopper cautioned.<\/p>\n

Then again, Hopper isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t calling for total hobo impersonation. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We would like very much if the students saw this as a research study rather than an audition,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want people begging or accosting passersby, or whatever they think homeless people do when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re out during the middle of the night.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The city’s homeless census took place last night. In this week’s New Yorker, Ben McGrath looks at the control decoys in the city’s homeless census: Dr. Kim Hopper, a medical anthropologist at the Nathan Kline Institute and the former president of the National Coalition for the Homeless, is the architect of what the city is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culturalanthropological"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}