Daniel Rubin | An expert's view of the homeless

With the homeless being in the news again - their numbers are rising in the city - I went looking for a local expert.

And I mean really local. A block from the newspaper, a grove of trees rises above 15th Street, offering high ground to those who prefer to stay on the outside.

Urb'N Anthony calls his home "the grassy knoll," because it reminds him of Dallas.

I met him one afternoon last week. He was watching the cars peel off the Vine Street Expressway as he rolled a cigarette.

His long hair was twisted into dreads. Some gray sprouted from his beard. His shorts and T-shirt were the color of raspberries.

When he saw I had a pen, he wondered if he could borrow it. "I'll give you a quarter," he offered.

That's when I noticed the several black spiral notebooks next to him. I took a seat.

Anthony told me he needed the pen to write a rebuttal to an editorial in the Daily News about homelessness.

"I'm the expert," the 42-year-old said. "I've been writing my dissertation on the subject since 2003. You could solve the problem if it weren't for the politics."

Anthony is not what you picture when you think of the homeless. He has a membership at the Y, because he knows he needs to stay in shape to survive.

He has a master's degree in education from the University of New Haven (I checked; awarded in 2005 under his real name, which I agreed not to print).

And he has written four books.

One, called The Family, The Reunion and self-published in 2003, begins intriguingly:

"I was on the bed with my back to the door and the baseball game was watching me."

Since January 2005, he's lived on the streets of this city, from Stenton Avenue to South Philadelphia, but mostly at this rugged encampment.

And he has a job. Five days a week Anthony can be found at 15th and Spring Garden, selling books from a folding card table.

He keeps his supply in storage at night, where he stows his camping equipment. He's got a vending license, but no address. He takes deliveries at a local photocopy store, and has convinced UPS to add his card table to its route.

Anthony says he's living what he's studying. He's gotten to know the streets of Los Angeles, Portland, Dallas, Raleigh, Milwaukee, Chicago and places in between.

"Philly was the only city I thought I could make it in."

He arrived with $11.83 in his pocket. His first day, in January 2005, he bought a $10 bag of pot and a $1 cigar. Pot, he says, is his weakness.

So why is a guy like this homeless? How did it start?

"I'm here by choice," he says. "Most of us like the independence, and don't like the shelters."

He says he'd give up street life in a second for an apartment. Affording one is the problem.

His fall to the streets began back home in Connecticut, where he was a corrections officer. For six years after a prison melee, he says, he battled the state for benefits. It cost him his job, his wife, his house and his car.

He kept writing his free-flowing novels, which Larry Robins, the Center City bookstore proprietor, calls urban fiction. Anthony survived by collecting cans and bottles in New Haven.

Then, in an RV rented with money lent by his ex-wife, he drove west to promote his books and explore the American streets. He burned through the money and then some, advanced by those he met along the way.

He's been here ever since, living slightly apart from people he says have no talent for money and no sense of time. But the people on the knoll look out for each other, he says.

All sorts of people are homeless, he says. Those who have homes they visit only on the first and 15th of the month, when the checks come in. The mentally ill, the addicted, the scammers.

"It's not like they all need a hug," he says. "Sometimes they need a kick in the butt, too. The city people just keep on giving and giving. They don't know when they're being conned."

Earlier in the week while he was on the knoll after work, some volunteers drove by, hoping to provide some dinner.

"They had bologna and cheese sandwiches with a cookie and apple juice."

Anthony was already eating a tuna hoagie with his friend B.

"The women asked if we wanted to eat. I said, 'No, but do you have an apartment?'

"No one had an answer."

Before I left, I asked Anthony what he thought of the mayor, whose program for the homeless has drawn national praise.

"The day he sat outside to buy an iPhone, I couldn't get into the store to pay my bill," Anthony groused. "He wants to be one of the people, buy an iPhone.

"If he wants to be one of the people, then he should try sleeping out here one night with us."