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A yellow school bus followed with teenage boys screaming, “Have you killed anyone yet?”
Hurtful and compassionless comments have always occurred in the more than 10 years I’ve worn old clothes — including an old army coat — on my annual sojourns into homelessness.
In the Main Street median were two persons I wanted to talk to. Danielle’s backpack rested near her on the snow-covered ground.
Bundled in an oversized coat, she faced northbound traffic near the turn lane “flying a sign.” It said “Homeless. Hungry. Need Help.”
In the other median appealing to southbound Main Street traffic was Bill, a homeless veteran. He had a salt-and-pepper beard, large coat, a huge duffel bag and a hand-made sign saying, “Homeless vet. Need Help. God Bless.”
A woman in a passing car handed Bill a dollar. A man gave Danielle some change. Each recipient was grateful.
In the last year, I have noticed more homeless people in midtown, Westport, the Plaza and south Kansas City. It’s as if the new Sprint Arena, the Power & Light District and upscale downtown housing have caused people living on the street to migrate south.
Some agencies offering services to the homeless weren’t so sure. Others have noticed a definite trend.
Brother Louis Rodemann with Holy Family House, 912 E. 31st St., said the number of people seeking meals and shelter had risen about 13 percent.
Mike Mathews, director of St. James Place, 3934 Troost Ave., has noted increases approaching 50 percent in the last year of people seeking hot meals and bags of food.
“We are getting more people who are coming in who are homeless who want some kind of grocery help.”
“We don’t ask any questions,” Mathews said. “People come, and they are hungry. We feed them.”
Added to the homeless are those Mathews says are “living on the edge of disaster, and one little thing pushes them over the edge” and onto the street.
Instead of the overnight shelters downtown, people who have migrated south sleep in the parks and under the bridges.
During the day, many read and stay warm in libraries.
But they don’t find life any more hospitable out south than downtown, where people yell, glare or just rush by as if the homeless were diseased.
“No one is saying please bring homeless street people to my neighborhood,” said Evelyn Craig, executive director of reStart Inc., which ministers to homeless people downtown.
Darrell Jackson, 54, said at the Ark of Friends Drop-In Center at Walnut and 43rd streets that homeless people like him are mobile.
They are drawn to nice places like others are and don’t feel restricted to one area.
But, he said, “it’s brutal living on the street.”
Snow fell one quiet night when I walked in old clothes to look for homeless people in Mill Creek Park.
Two sets of footprints told of people who had traveled the path before me.
An ambulance with its siren wailing sped to St. Luke’s Hospital. Traffic sloshing noisily through the snow gave the ambulance the right of way.
The cold, darkness and isolation — though deadly — offered a strange peace from the other world where better-off people spit obscenities.
A deeper freeze of heartlessness allows homelessness to grow.
On my old army coat is a Salvation Army pin with the word Hope — that Barack Obama word.
I pray that the better times he promises lie ahead to keep homelessness from spreading.
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