YOUNG AND HOMELESS
LURED BY ATLANTIC CITY'S RICHES, THEY END UP IN THE UNDERBELLY
Sunday, February 7, 1999
THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW JERSEY
ATLANTIC CITY
BY ANDREA KANNAPELL

It was after midnight on a frigid Friday night. Slot machines pinged and binged inside Caesar's, Bally's, the Showboat, the Tropicana and a dozen more casinos. Thousands of patrons were sending their quarters and dollars with few exceptions - into the deep, deep pockets of the rich.

Near the northern end of the casino strip, under a pier where the boardwalk meets the Taj Mahal, another kind of gamble was playing out.

A 23-year-old man and a slip of an 18-year-old girl slept between carpet scraps and blankets, with three pillows and a flattened box blocking the cold ocean wind and a Rottweiler guarding their small encampment. Their stakes: survival. So when they awoke to voices, fear squeezed their hearts. Flashlight beams stabbed toward them. He reached for his knife.

"It's the cops," she whispered. The focus of their fear shifted, from assault to another devastating possibility: discovery.

Then the voices became clear, shaking under the vast cement ceiling: "Covenant House! We're not the cops!" The outreach workers retreated, with the dog slavering just a few feet away.

For one more night, the couple's gamble paid off.

Homeless people are not easy to count, and homeless young people the most elusive of all, and thus the hardest to help, according to the people who work with them - or try to.

"Frankly, when I talk to people about homeless teen-agers, most people look at me like I have two heads," said Lisa Eisenbud, the executive director of the Garden State Coalition for Youth and Family Concerns, an associate of shelter providers. "People just don't really see this issue, because it's about substance abuse and physical and sexual abuse. They just didn't know we had 14-year-old girls working truck stops. And a lot of these kids are high-functioning, and they can hide the fact that no adult is really taking care of them any more."

The young couple in Atlantic City, a appearance-conscious as most people their age, stole fresh clothes when they needed them and kept clean in casino bathrooms. They blended in easily in food courts and mall lobbies and were identified on the boardwalk the next day only because a photographer was with the outreach teen and recognized their dog.

Nationally, estimates of homeless people under the age of 21 range from 500,000 to 1.3 million people. Most states guess at their young homeless population by taking 80 percent of the number of missing juveniles -those under the age of 18 - reported to the police in a given year. In 1993, New Jersey's answer was 13,000, and the number has risen since then, advocates say. More recent estimates have not been made because of a software glitch in the state's computer records, according to Lieut. Joseph Lake of the New Jersey State Police's Missing Person's Unit.

Ms. Eisenbud, and other experts in the field say that these numbers, often the concern only of shelter operators and social workers are receiving a level of attention they have not had in more than two decades, with legislative, administrative and budgetary initiatives at the state and Federal level.

Senator William L. Gormley, a Republican from Atlantic City, said that he intended to introduce legislation created by Covenant House and the Garden State Coalition next month, after a review by the Attorney General a preliminary discussion with Governor Whitman. The legislation, the New Jersey Homeless Youth Act, would allow people under the age of 18 access to shelters without requiring them to get a court order or parental consent. It would also budget $4 million for street outreach, emergency shelters and transitional living centers. New York has had such legislation since 1978.

New Jersey is now beginning to certify foster families, which advocates hope will stabilize the lives of foster children, some of whom bounce from home to home and never get close to their foster parents or learn basic life skills from them

"We had a child who was 16 when she came to us," said Dolores G. Martell, the executive director of Crossroads Programs Inc., a shelter for pregnant girls and teenage mothers in Burlington County. "She had had 37 foster-care placements."

And, under the guidance of Dennis A. Derryck, who works with the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Develop - in a new program called Community Builders, an unusual gathering of state officials has been meeting since September. They include representatives from the Department of Community Services, the Juvenile Justice Commission, the Division of Youth and Family Services and the Department of Labor, who say they are trying to integrate their resources to address the needs for housing, life skills and jobs of young people who are now homeless or who are at risk of becoming homeless soon because they are "aging out" of foster care or the juvenile justice system.

'That phenomenon is also starting to get attention at the Federal level. Last month, Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the President's next budget would include $280 million over five years in new support for young people leaving foster care.

Taken together, these initiatives have heartened even those who have worked in the field for decades and are accustomed to frustration.

"I seem to see that people are really committed to doing something," said Nancy Kaplan, who oversees an independent living program at the Division of Youth and Family Services, part of New Jersey's Department of Health and Human Services. "It's gone beyond the planning stage."

The state's largest clusters of homeless young people, the advocates say, seem to be in Newark, Trenton, Camden and a handful of other cities. But even rural areas have started outreach projects aimed at homeless teen-agers. Many young people run to New York City, where they seek out the company of others like themselves and amenities like needle exchanges, which are not allowed in New Jersey.

Atlantic City is a special case. "The Manhattan of New Jersey," as some call it, Atlantic City not only has a significant population of local homeless youth, it also attracts runaways from around the country, partly because of the glitter and the lights of the casinos and the aura of easy money.

Most end up trading sex for a few dollars or a place to live, or dealing drugs, or committing more serious crimes. They often band together, squatting in abandoned buildings. Sometimes, one or two will rent a hotel room and let friends sneak in. One youth remembered a room jammed with 26 other people.

The couple under the pier, who arrived in Atlantic City in July on a train from western New Jersey, told a story that experts say is common: part Romeo and Juliet, part youthful rebellion, part family trouble and substance abuse.

The man - a native of Camden who asked to be identified only as E. B. - was a skinhead in high school, until he decided he "didn't want to hang out at the mall and beat up black kids," he said. His former skinhead friends then turned on him, beating him mercilessly, he said. The number 666 stands out on the fingers of his left hand, a homemade tattoo in wavering blue ink.

He began smoking crack, even robbing his own grandmother to get money for his habit, before putting himself into rehab for a year. His mother gave up on him. She moved to Las Vegas without leaving a forwarding address.

He and his companion both remember the day they met: July 16, 1997. The girl, T. P., who was a cheerleader in her Cherry Hill high school, dropped into a pizza shop. They noticed each other, but said nothing. The next day, she saw him at the mall. Their bond was immediate and powerful. They've been together ever since.

She grew up around Cherry Hill, where her parents held normal jobs. Her mother ran an office, her father removed asbestos. One adult in the family dealt cocaine to friends, she said, and another relative died of a heroin overdose.

Her parents let E.B. move in to the house but then worried that he and their daughter were inseparable. When E.B. rang up nearly $400 on their phone card, they pressed charges. Last June, when he got out of the Camden County Jail, T.P. picked him up and took him to a friend's house on the Black Horse Pike in Belmawr. And she stayed with him missing school and work.

She lost "a really good job" at an insurance company, infuriating her family.

In July, they decided to flee. He knew somebody in Wildwood who knew somebody, and they could work and have fun at the beach. They took the train to Atlantic City, a few pieces of luggage and two pints of vodka in tow. "We were drunk and we had $11," E.B. remembered, laughing. "Then I played three quarters and won 90 bucks! And we just looked at each other and said, 'We ain't going to Wild wood!' "

That first night, drunk and carefree, they slept on the beach. "We were right out there in the sand, right in the middle of everything," T.P. said, amused at their innocence - and perhaps still not grasping what had become of her life.

The summer was easy: money, drugs, friends and alcohol were everywhere and the worst part of sleeping outdoors was the sand fleas. "We started having fun," T.P. said. "I've gotten my belly button pierced, since we've been here, and he's gotten his nipples pierced."

They made friends with street people who watched over them and casino workers who tossed them free passes and helped them "win" prizes of money or goods.

E.B. learned a new skill: credit hustling. He wandered through the slots, looking for machines that still had credits on them. Sometimes he picked up $40 or $50 a day.

"People get like zombies on those machines," he said. "They just walk away sometimes." They could occasionally rent a cheap hotel room, but mostly they slept on the beach and bathed in the ocean.

The winter is another story. E.B. still stalks the casino floors, but he's been caught a few times and there are several casinos he can't go into anymore. And even if he "works" from 10 in the morning to 8 or 9 or 10 at night, he might only collect $20. Their summer friends are gone, or changed.

"They're all in bad moods," T.P. said. "They just sit outside of liquor stores in the cold and beg for money and then buy beer. And they're all sick."

They talk about going somewhere warm, but they can't seem to find their way out of Atlantic City. They go to a shelter for a shower now and then, because they can rarely afford a hotel. They avoid Covenant House, the privately financed shelter, because E.B. is too old for its services - it has a cut - off age of 21.

"I wouldn't be able to sleep without him next to me," she said.

The phenomenon of homeless young people is not new, but the perception of it has changed from "Huckleberry Finn" adventure to a Haight-Ashbury lovefest to a grim tale of abuse and terror in the 70's, as the nation focused on a new breed of murderer, the serial killer.

One of the earliest cases surfaced in 1973, when a Texas man named Dean Corll was shot to death by one of his two young accomplices, who led the police to the remains of the 28 young men who had been tortured and strangled. Newspapers carefully defined the term "serial killer" for their readers, contrasting it with the more familiar concept of the "mass murderer."

Experts on homicide began to note that serial killers' victims were often runaways. Some were even "throwaways," young people no one had bothered to report missing.

"Volunteers all across America got together and said we've got to do something," said Ms. Martell, of the Burlington County shelter. "Just look at the shelter names: Crossroads, Harbor House, Anchor House. They all sort of talk about young people being in crisis."

In 1974, the Federal Government solidified that volunteer shelter system with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, which provided alternatives to incarceration, and the Runaway Youth Act which allocated money for crisis and counseling centers. The act was later amended to include homeless youth. Currently, the act provides about $44 million for emergency services and about $15 million for longer term housing annually.

In New Jersey, the court system was reconfigured in 1985 to create a Family Crisis Intervention Unit, which simplified the process of coping with legal problems with juveniles and tried to keep families together. Children who need to be placed in foster care are handled by the Division of Youth and Family Services.

This Tuesday, Congress will be reminded that the problem of homeless young people has not gone away. In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Homeless and Runaway Youth Act, the National Network for Youth, a Washington-based advocacy group, will send about 200 formerly homeless and run away young people to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress for reauthorization of the act, as well as for a Presidential plan to add $5 million to its housing budget.

Longtime advocates seem taken aback their own apparent success. Jeffrey Fetzko, the president of the Garden State Coalition and the executive director of a shelter in Somerset, caught himself short in the middle of an unenthusiastic recitation of positive changes.

"Hearing myself talk, it sounds like we're doing a whole lot," he said, suddenly animated. "When you're in the middle of it, you feel like you're shoveling sand into the ocean. But hearing myself talk, it sounds really good!"