With its storefront tributes to Southern California's surfing culture and L.A.'s hipster elite, the leafy dinosaur topiary and gleaming signs that promise multiple movies, Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade is a popular destination for tens of thousands each week.
In the middle of the night, it is a destination of another sort for a smattering of the city's chronically homeless. It is those inhabitants whom social workers hoped to encounter early Monday.
One man, wrapped in an orange scarf and dingy blankets, slept near the entrance to Barney's Beanery. A nearby walker was draped with his only personal belongings, protected from the almost constant drizzle.
"Am I in your way or something?" he asked after he was awakened at 3:15 a.m.
"No, you're fine," John Maceri said. "We're with the city of Santa Monica and we want to help you."
Maceri, the executive director of the Ocean Park Community Center, was one of 50 people helping conduct a survey of the chronically homeless in Santa Monica in the early morning.
It was the fourth of seven days during which teams of people from the city, nonprofit social service agencies, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the county's Department of Mental Health are attempting to count the number of homeless. The goal is to find those who are at the greatest risk of dying on the streets.
Although the man in the orange scarf didn't know it, he is part of a growing social experiment that some experts say is helping shrink the chronically homeless population in major urban centers.
Maceri and two colleagues interviewed him for about 30 minutes, asking about his vital statistics and health. He is in his late 40s, a veteran and hearing-impaired, he told the social workers. The Third Street Promenade, he said, is his home.
"I live on the Promenade!" the man in the orange scarf proclaimed as Maceri jotted down answers and Ed Parker, a street outreach coordinator for Step Up on Second, complimented him on his receptiveness to their questions.
After the interview, the social workers handed him a $5 gift certificate from a fast-food restaurant. Maceri and his teammates went through the same process with seven other people sleeping on the Promenade. Five of them agreed to take their survey.
"The people out here in the middle of the night sleeping are the most challenging to get to use social services," said Danielle Noble, the leader of Maceri's group and senior administrative analyst with Santa Monica's Homeless Services office.
