Pretending to be Homeless Difficult When You're Still Wearing Your $300 North Face
If you were out and about on Monday night, perhaps the guy asking for money on the corner looked a little ... different than he usually did. But what was it, exactly? The face that was scrubbed a little too clean? The pristine white Converse?
Oh, right. It's just those Columbia kids, pretending to be homeless again. Never you mind.
Cheery faces of youthful volunteers, dressed in their best faux-homeless garb, often with telltale glimpses of bright North Face under-layers poking through, filled the lobby of the Columbia University School of Social Work to prepare to help in the ShadowCount, the second prong of the effort to estimate the number of homeless people in the city.
These 191 people, most of them students, were paid $75 to sit at assigned locations in all five boroughs from 12 a.m. until 4 a.m., looking homeless. If a counter from HOPE asked them if they were homeless or not, the decoys gave the counter official slips and returned to the staging area to either go home or be reassigned to another area.
Just seems as though Columbia students might not be the obvious choice to impersonate someone homeless, is all.
