ATLANTA — Life has taken Roger Gleen up and down the East Coast, and on this night the weary traveler settles into a chair in the corner of the world’s busiest airport.
His bags propped neatly beside him, Gleen is among a dozen or so ticketless passengers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, folks with no destination in mind.
They’re Hartsfield’s homeless, and like their counterparts in other major terminals, they have successfully resisted most efforts to clear them out.
“We have to go sooner or later,” Gleen said. “But you have people (who have) been coming to the airport for years.”
Clusters of the homeless have long settled in terminals from Philadelphia to Chicago. The airports are ideal round-the-clock shelters for men and women displaced by cities trying to clean up their downtowns.
Hartsfield and other airports consider the homeless more nuisance than danger, just as they’re seen in entertainment, shopping and transit districts everywhere.
Nonetheless, Hartsfield officials decided last year to join a program that trains police to identify homeless and coax them into shelters. Airport-based officers have since taken about 400 homeless to shelters, aided by monthly visits from United Way of Atlanta outreach workers, said airport spokesman John Kennedy.
As quickly as they can cart them off, more are back, said Protip Biswas, head of United Way Atlanta’s Regional Commission on Homelessness.
Throughout the night, they often blend in with stranded fliers, a shoeless foot or tattered clothes some of the only signs they’re not ordinary travelers. Some roam the terminal. Others find a comfy resting spot among business types and families sitting in the atrium.
All of them frequent the eating areas and bathrooms.
More privacy than a public shelter
“Food court is so they can beg, and the bathroom is so they can hide out,” said Grace Bryant, who works nights cleaning the airport.
For men like Gleen, the airport is ideal: A 24-hour public setting with food and water, where nobody looks twice if you snooze for hours.
“I don’t bother nobody. I just get me a place, and I just stay,” said Gleen, who preferred coming to the airport over the past few months to bunking with relatives or staying in a noisy downtown shelter.
Indeed, most airport homeless are independent types, less likely than others to find cover under bridges or on street corners, explained Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
They also include the working poor or the newly unemployed, who tend to seek more privacy than a large public shelter can afford, Stoops said. “An airport is one place where most Americans have been. It’s a place where they can hide their homelessness,” he said.
They can’t all hide, however. At the front end of another all-night shift at the airport, Bryant spots a woman pushing a cart piled with papers. Minutes later, hassled by United Way volunteers, the woman wanders off to catch a train.
By the start of her next shift, Bryant says, the same woman will be back. She sees her every night.
“(Police) sweep and take them to the train station, or either take them on the other side to wait for the train to come,” she said. “The next morning, they come right back.”
House them or roust them?
Some of the nation’s biggest airports have considered different approaches to clearing out vagrants.
• In the early ’90s, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport thought about building a shelter on site. The same decade, Hawaii legislators weighed whether to set up mental health and alternative housing programs for the 70 homeless bedding down at Honolulu International Airport. Neither effort was realized.
• At Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the city and homeless advocates sent outreach teams into the airport almost every night for two months in 2006. The effort cleared all but the most stubborn, and most of them have stayed away. It took city funds and five outreach teams available for near-nightly sweeps to make it happen, though.
