We drove east down Hollywood Boulevard, north on Grammercy Place, west on Franklin Avenue, peering out the windows of the van, looking for people on the street.

Volunteer Rudy Salinas checks on a person living in a tent near the Hollywood Freeway during an effort to gather information about the area’s homeless population. (photo by Ian Lovett)

Finally, Stephanie spotted someone on the far side of the road.

“I don’t think he’s homeless,” Rudy said. “It sounds really corny, but I look at the shoes. He’s got a brand new pair of shoes on.”

“He’s also not carrying any belongings,” Sarah said.

We were driving around in circles at 4:00am on Tuesday morning as part of Hollywood Homeless Registry Week. On each of the first three mornings of this week, 60 volunteers trolled the streets of Hollywood from 3:30 to 6:00am in hopes of finding and interviewing Hollywood’s homeless residents.

Despite Hollywood’s glamorous image — or, perhaps, in part because of it — the area boasts one of the largest homeless populations in Los Angeles County, which in turn has the most homeless residents in the country. Two years ago, Hollywood 4WRD, one of the groups that sponsored this week’s program, conducted a count of the neighborhood’s homeless, and found more than 500 people living on the street in the area bounded by Western Avenue to the east, Franklin Avenue to the north, La Brea Avenue to the west, and Romaine Street to the south.

Kerry Morrison, the executive director of the Hollywood Business Improvement District (BID), which founded Hollywood 4WRD, said the good weather, an easily accessible Greyhoud station, and thousands of pedestrians in the area every day make Hollywood an appealing destination for the homeless.

“Hollywood also has an allure for young people,” Morrison said. “If you’re going to run away from home in Iowa, you’re not going to go to Torrance. You’re going to go to Hollywood. About a quarter of Hollywood’s homeless are under the age of 25.”

This week, however, the goal was not only to count the area’s homeless residents, but also to gather specific information about them, in hopes of connecting the most vulnerable with services and shelter.

I joined Sarah MacPherson; Stephanie Hicks; Mike Miller; and Rudy Salinas, the community outreach director for People Assisting the Homeless, in canvassing the area’s northeast corner. For the first half-hour of the morning, we drove around in circles in the dark, looking around in the parking lot behind a 7-11, and in nearby alleyways. But we found no one.

Then, Sarah spotted a pair of men lying on a strip of grass at the edge of the curb, behind a tree. Rudy got out of the van first, and approached. The rest of us stood back, quiet.

“Hello,” he said. “Good morning. Sorry to wake you.”

Heads nodded. Rudy introduced us, and we slowly stepped closer. Normally, two volunteers would interview one person, and two would interview the other, but because both men speak only Spanish, Rudy had to interview them both himself.

Rudy asked the first man, a series of 40 questions about his medical history, his social security number, his family, and why he was living on the street. Pedro hardly moved as he answered, his eyes remaining mostly closed, flicking open occasionally as he mumbled a response before sliding shut again. He said he was 60 years old, a legal immigrant with family in the area. But he had been living on the street for the past three months as a result of his drinking. He had a blanket half-wrapped around him, half beneath him, and he wore no jacket, just a shirt, a pair of jeans with metal rhinestones running down the seam on the outside of the leg, and black leather shoes with thick rubber soles. He shivered slightly as he spoke, and I wondered why he didn’t wrap the rest of the blanket around himself.

When he’d finished with Pedro, Rudy repeated the same set of questions to the second man, Cupertino, a 55-year-old who had been homeless for eight years, also due to alcoholism. He too answered every question and allowed Rudy to take a picture.

I was surprised they were both so willing to answer such personal questions.

“I was amazed last night how open people were,” Stephanie said. “A lot of them really want to talk. You might be the only person they get to talk to all day.”

When he’d finished, Rudy gave each man a $5 gift card to Subway restaurants, packed up the questionnaires, and headed back towards the car.

“I think the second guy might be tri-morbid,” he said. “He admitted that he was drinking every day, he had a chronic back injury, and he said he was hearing voices.”

The questionnaires we used were designed by Common Ground, a non-profit group devoted to ending homelessness that has run registration programs like this one in Hollywood around the country.

Becky Kanis, Common Ground’s director of innovations, said the data collected on the surveys helps place people on the “vulnerability index”, a tool that helps outreach workers focus on helping those people who are sickest, and have been homeless longest.

“We look for health conditions that research shows are associated with higher mortality rates for homeless people,” Kanis said. “The idea is that the people with the highest scores on the vulnerability index will get the first available housing.”

Of the eight conditions associated with higher mortality among the homeless, which included liver disease, a history of injury related to cold or wet weather, Kanis said tri-morbidity — any mental health diagnosis, coupled with substance addition and a chronic physical impairment — is the most common. People like Cupertino are exactly who the registration program is designed to find and help.

Not everyone, however, wants to be found. At Franklin Avenue and Canyon Drive, we spotted a man pushing a shopping cart overflowing with trash bags full of bottles and cans. Rudy asked him if he would take a survey in exchange for a Subway card. The man shook his head and kept walking.

“At least he acknowledged me,” Rudy said. “A lot of times, people who are recycling don’t want to be bothered. This is when they work.”

Though most of the volunteers worked in the middle of the night, trying to identify people on the street, work for the registry program continued almost around the clock. During the day, a different team of volunteers entered data from the early morning interviews; from 7:00pm to midnight, a team of staff members went out specifically looking for people living in vehicles; and after the morning session, Rudy and some other staffers went up into the hills behind the Hollywood Bowl.

In the first two mornings of going up into the hills, staffers had interviewed 30 people. Rudy said he was surprised to find so many, and even more surprised to find that some of them simply didn’t want to find housing.

“A few folks said they just weren’t interested in housing,” he said. “I found that part really, truly hard. I can’t see how during rainy days or in the summer heat that person would want to live there. You don’t really find that with people living on the street. You get a wide variety of answers about where people would prefer to live. Some have painful memories of living with family, others talk about it and seem to recall some moment of peace, but in ten years of doing this, I don’t recall coming across people who said they didn’t want to find housing.”

Towards the end of the night, we ventured to a hill on the south side of Hollywood Boulevard that overhung the Hollywood Freeway. Slabs of cardboard and plastic bags lay behind dry, dusty bushes. Rudy said many people would often move in and out of these areas, with new residents taking over the places previous inhabitants had vacated. He’d also heard that people sometimes tied plastic bags around branches to show the space was occupied.

The noise was deafening, and I asked how anyone could sleep amid the sound of so many cars going by.

“For some, it helps them sleep,” Rudy said. “If you have voices going in your head all the time, the highway helps drown them out, almost like a white noise machine.”

A young man approached us from out of the darkness farther from the road, where the hill is steeper. He was young, tall and slightly heavy, with dark skin and bright blue eyes whose pupils remained dilated. At first, he wanted to know what we were doing there, but after a few minutes of coaxing, he agreed to be interviewed.

Sarah began asking him questions, the basic ones first — name, date of birth, where he usually stayed. At first, he looked at her suspiciously, refusing to tell her his age, or if he’d ever spent time in a foster home. Slowly, though, he began to open up. He told her he was 24 years old, and pulled his school ID from his pocket, with his real name on it, not the name he’d given. Still, he stood uncomfortably close to Sarah, leaning over the survey to see what she was writing and joking that he was a former Russian army assassin. We all remained wary in a way no one had seemed in previous interviews.

As Chuck stood with his hands in his pockets, talking about the time he’s spent in Twin Towers (Los Angeles County Jail) when he was arrested for assault, and his $800 a month Social Security Insurance check which he couldn’t get because it was mailed to an ex-girlfriend, I began to feel distinctly sick to my stomach. I suddenly understood why Sarah had said the 25-year-old girl they’d met sleeping above the highway the previous night had affected her so much. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the belly full of coffee, or the fear that he might turn and hit me, or the idea of sleeping on this hill above the highway, as he had for almost two years. Whatever the reason, I knew I was ready for the night to be over, so I could go home and throw up, or cry, or just curl up in my bed and get some sleep.

Soon, the interview was over. It was light enough to write without a flashlight, time to head back to meet up with the other groups. Chuck followed us out to the intersection, asking us where we were going. Eventually, we crossed Hollywood Boulevard, leaving him on the overpass above the highway.

Back in the van, I asked Sarah if she’d been afraid during the interview.

“He was getting into my personal space, which was making me uncomfortable,” Sarah said. “Especially since I didn’t know what he was bringing out of his pocket each time. I fear for my personal safety, but I also feel empathy. I’m learning so much about this person and all I can offer right now is a $5 gift card.”

“It’s draining,” Rudy said. “We’re going to go back to this room where there’s coffee and lights and people we know. We’re all going to carry on with the day. But this is his life. This is where he goes at the end of the day. Processing this is necessary. It’s necessary sometimes to talk about it among your colleagues. I think it’s draining for many reasons, not just the concern for your safety, but also emotionally.”

“If you don’t feel affected by what you see here, I think that’s the problem,” Stephanie said.

Still, Rudy found reason to be encouraged by the interview. Even though Chuck had been living on the street for almost two years, he knew a service provider by name, and his SSI meant he had received some type of diagnosis in the past.

Morrison said there is a growing consensus that housing options and services for the homeless have to be available in Hollywood.

“I’ve been here for 13 years,” Morrison said. “In the early days, the instruction to security was to move people out of the BID. People thought that if we cleaned up Hollywood, homelessness would magically disappear. I know I’ve had a lot of personal epiphanies over the past five or six years, and I think it’s become clear to everyone that we have to secure housing for these people. We have two permanent supportive housing facilities in the pipeline, but that’s just a drop in the bucket. We need a couple dozen more to house everybody.”