Word: airport
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...familiar scene: 3 a.m. at Heathrow Airport, and a gathering of people are sprawled across plastic benches in various poses of contortion. To be in transit is to be disconnected, but for some of those sleeping here, rootlessness is not temporary. Each night, scores of London's homeless men and women take advantage of modern travel delays by posing as stranded passengers in order to sleep in a warm and safe place. They play a cat-and-mouse game with police, often donning floral shirts, fanny packs and other travel accessories to blend in. And their increasing creativity - and ability...
...Last month, Heathrow commissioned a local homeless outreach organization, Broadway, to visit the airport once a week and survey its homeless population, while also trying try to coax them into temporary accommodation. They were not prepared for the scale of the problem they discovered: In the first four weeks alone, they conducted 100 interviews with homeless "passengers" - although some of those were repeat interviews, the number was far higher than anyone had expected...
...These men and women may seem to embody the English tradition of the plucky Dickensian Dodger, but it would be wrong to mistake their ingenuity for anything other than desperation, social workers say. Like those to whom the travel ads all around the airport appeal, Heathrow's homeless are also in search of escape: from debts, legal problems, family responsibilities. They often have mental health or substance abuse problems, and they often refuse help. During the day, some travel by public transport into London to beg, busk or take drugs, while others remain in the airport, sometimes scrounging food...
...Ingenuity is a necessity for Heathrow's homeless to avoid detection by police. "I thought about disguising myself as a passenger, but I have a bit of what you might call 'a luggage issue,' 65-year-old Joseph explains from a bench in the airport's remote bus terminal, pointing at a shopping trolley of bulging plastic bags. "They are hardly Louis Vuitton...
...Rough sleepers," as homeless people are known in Britain, disguise themselves at all major airports, says Sandie Cox of Heathrow Travel Care, the social care organization overseeing the one-year pilot scheme. Indeed, Chicago's O'Hare airport instituted a homeless outreach in the 1990s. But while the problem may not be unique to Heathrow, several factors make it easier for rough sleepers to blend in. It is the busiest airport in Europe, has more delays than other major hubs, and while it doesn't serve Europe's low-cost carriers, it has still seen the effects of the democratization...