On arctic winter mornings, there's little more to do than pull your warmer clothes tight around your body and hit the sidewalks, doing what you can to bear the wind and wetness. During your day's trek, you might find respite from the elements by dipping into a local library. But instead of going home to a cozy dorm room or apartment after the sun sets and the libraries close, you search out a stretch of floor or pavement with something of a roof. Make due-it's cold and you're homeless.

Homelessness is an ubiquitous presence on the fringes of the University experience. Freshmen don't make it past November without seeing a figure cloaked in a large, old coat that has lodged itself in a building entrance to combat the effects of the day's chill. On any given day, several reports are recorded in the Department of Public Safety's incident log regarding sleeping "unknown unaffiliates" being removed from University buildings after hours. And no students have escaped patting down their pockets near the Diag after being asked if they could "spare a little change, my good friend?"

But what most students don't realize is that what they see and hear concerning Washtenaw County's homeless population is the tip of the iceberg, and a largely unrepresentative tip at that.

Spare a little change for the. housed?

What may seem like the most visible example of homelessness near campus - panhandling on student-heavy thoroughfares - is more often done by people who have homes.

"Panhandlers aren't typically homeless," said Jared Collins, development director of the Shelter Association of Washtenaw County. "They say they are but they're not. Because of the University, it's a very lucrative place to panhandle."

The Michigan Daily reported previously that campus's most renowned panhandler, a man named Ronnie who greets passersby as his "good friends," has a home and panhandles around campus between taking care of his ill mother to raise money for a fashionable faux fur coat. Shakey Jake Woods, a campus-renowned street musician who died in September, lived in subsidized housing.

A man named Sam, who refused to give his last name to avoid embarrassing his family, regularly panhandles outside Borders to contribute to the money needed to fund of his daughter's home in which he lives.

When asked, Sam said he was homeless, but when invited to an interview over sandwiches, he told the truth about his housing situation and said he'd rather continue collecting money.

"I just ate," he said. "I'm trying to make me a few dollars. I'm using that to subsidize because I ain't got no income."

Sam said the 30 dollars or so a day he makes goes toward feeding his granddaughter.

Many times, money given to downtown panhandlers keeps a person housed or a family fed, but the majority of the county's homeless population doesn't ask for donations to make a living. They are usually people who were recently housed and maintained jobs, and are trying to get out of the rut of homelessness, whether long or short, that unexpectedly befell them.

Counting A2's homeless

Around the University, the real signifier of homelessness is the frequency of calls reporting trespassers in closed University buildings late at night. DPS recorded 325 calls reporting trespassing last year.

DPS spokeswoman Diane Brown said the majority of these calls are about homeless people who try to escape the weather by sleeping in University buildings. But, she said, these trespassers are more likely to be found in parking structures rather than academic buildings and are often repeat offenders.

"If 20 people are encountered after midnight, I don't think it's 20 individuals," Brown said. "It's a smaller group of people encountered several times."

Besides the faces and incidents that students most often associate with homeless people, the general homeless population of Ann Arbor doesn't involve itself on campus.

"The homeless population is almost invisible," Collins said. "The ones that you see are the smallest percentage of that population."