The homeless epidemic is back with a vengeance.

In the subway, commuters step around scruffy men making the concrete platform or a wooden bench their bed for the evening.

On Broadway, the jobless peddle used paperbacks to passersby and urge supermarket shoppers to drop a few coins into a water jug.

From the Bronx to the Bowery, the lines at soup kitchens have never been longer - and the faces of the newcomers have never been younger.

"It's beginning to get like the bad old days," said Geraldo Nieves, owner of Jerry Grocery, a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, bodega within five blocks of four shelters.

"This neighborhood has gotten worse, and the more homeless there are, the worse it gets," he said.

The city has no solid number for homeless on the streets, beyond a first-ever February survey that counted 1,780 in Manhattan alone - a figure that advocates say is laughably low. Officials plan to conduct another count, of Manhattan and two other boroughs, this fall.

Officials do keep track of who is staying in the shelters, and the numbers - especially for families - are up dramatically in the last year.

As of July, there were an average of 9,268 families in the system each night - a record, and up more than 1,100 from July 2002. The number of single adults also jumped, by 495, to 8,000 in July - and it has since climbed to 8,171, according to the city's Department of Homeless Services.

Economic hardships

"What we've seen under this administration is record increases," said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless. "It's now the highest in the city history. That's how bad the situation is."

Experts say the reasons behind the surge are mostly economic: loss of jobs, rising rents, cutbacks in social programs.

But city officials, while not disputing the unprecedented surge, argue that they are keeping pace with the demand for shelter.

They point out that not a single family slept this summer on the floor at the city's Emergency Assistance Unit, the bleak intake center for homeless families, and that more families were moved into permanent housing last fiscal year than ever before.

But for thousands of people, the efforts have obviously fallen short, as the city's sagging economy continues to devour jobs and livelihoods.

Lost home and BMW

Eddie Martinez, 42, a former waiter from the Bronx, lost his job and then spent $3,000 in savings on a futile search for work.

He lost his apartment and then his car. He moved in with his sister and her family, but with four people in two rooms, he couldn't stay long.

"I never thought I'd be homeless," he said. "I was a stable person. I was working for 15 or 16 years. I had a BMW, credit cards, everything."

Now Martinez sleeps at the Bedford-Atlantic Men's Assessment Center in Brooklyn, a 350-bed shelter in a forbidding, Gothic-style armory.

"The shelter was supposed to help me find a job and a place to live, but they've done nothing for us," Martinez said. "They throw us out in the morning and don't let us in until 7 at night."

He spends those hours wandering the streets - home to thousands who refuse to stay in the shelters or are forced out during the day.

George Rodriguez, chairman of Community Board 1 in the Bronx, said homeless men have started bedding down in a cluster near Lincoln Hospital's front steps. He was so perturbed, he spoke to the hospital director about coordinating with city outreach workers to assist the men.

"How do I know there's more homeless on the street? I've seen it with my own eyes," Rodriguez said.

The traffic at soup kitchens and drop-in centers also suggests the number of street people is growing.

The Citizens Advice Bureau's drop-in center at Hunts Point in the Bronx was at its 75-person capacity all summer for the first time, director Carolyn McLaughlin said.

At the Manhattan Church of Christ on E. 80th St., about 35 men and women showed up each Saturday last year for a shower, hot food and fresh clothes. Now, that number is up to 110.

Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen at Ninth Ave. and 28th St. in Chelsea, which serves 1,100 meals a day, has seen a 14% increase in clients in the past two years.

Longer food lines

The homeless themselves say their ranks are exploding.

Gary Dos Santos, 39, and Lisa Page, 40, have been on the streets since 2000, when they lost their apartment, car and jobs to a struggle with drugs and alcohol.

From their vantage point in Central Park's Strawberry Fields, where they sleep with their black Labrador, Mary Jane, the homeless population skyrocketed this summer.

"I'm seeing a lot more people on the food lines," said Page, a lanky blond in denim shorts and tank top who lugs a full wardrobe in a shopping cart. "Now, at some places, there's a cutoff. Like, they won't serve more than 95. Other places, you won't get seconds like you used to."

Outreach workers also have seen a demographic shift among the newly homeless.

"We're seeing larger families, and that's a scary thing," said Debra Carfora of the Salvation Army, which runs three shelters, including the 335-unit Carlton House near Kennedy Airport.

"Instead of a mom with one or two kids, we're seeing a mom with four children. That usually means they were living independently, and it's the first time they're in the shelter system," she said.

At Holy Apostles, program coordinator Clyde Kuemmerle is feeding more young adults, and it's the same at the Christian Help in Park Slope soup kitchen in Brooklyn.

"We've seen a lot of new faces," said director Sister Mary Maloney. "You can tell who are the people who have never been homeless before. ... They're very quiet, they're ashamed."

Alexander Lorient, 31, fits that bill.

Last summer, Lorient was renting a room in the Bronx and earning $6.50 an hour as a dishwasher at a fancy midtown steakhouse.

Then he got pushed onto the subway tracks and was laid up for two weeks. When he returned to work, they handed him $36 and his walking papers.

Unable to find a new job, he fell behind on his rent and was evicted. On Sept. 5, he joined the ranks of the city's homeless.

Now he spends his nights at Bedford-Atlantic.

"Before, I didn't understand how homeless people would sleep on the street instead of the shelter - but now I do," he said.

Asked to describe what it is like to become homeless, Lorient didn't have to search for words.

"It's hell on Earth," he said.

With Madeleine Baran, Melissa Grace and Fernanda Santos

Big effort, bigger bucks

City officials do not dispute that homelessness in New York has reached an all-time high.

But Bloomberg administration staffers argue they are doing more than ever to get people off the streets and back into their own homes, even as the city's economy drains jobs.

They point out:

• More homeless families - 5,539 - were moved into permanent housing last year than ever before. The moves came as Mayor Bloomberg increased by 110% the number of subsidies and public housing apartments available to homeless families.
• While still high, the number of homeless families has remained basically flat, around 9,200, since January, as more families are moved into permanent housing.
• Police transported 5,460 people to shelters last year, an increase of 140% over the year before. They also arrested 2,776 homeless people for lying in doorways and other, more serious crimes - three times more than in 2000.

"Everything we do is about moving people out of homelessness and into permanent housing," said Linda Gibbs, commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services.

But all this comes at a price. Last year, the city spent $391 million in city, state and federal dollars on sheltering an average of 9,230 homeless families every night - more than double the $190 million spent in 1998, when the average population was 4,516 families per night.

That doesn't include the millions of dollars to place the homeless in permanent housing - although much of that is reimbursed by the feds.

For more articles like this, visit the Homeless Voice at http://www.homelessvoice.org.

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