For baseball games, Yankee
Stadium seats 50,287. If all the homeless people who now live in New
York City used the stadium for a gathering, several thousand of them
would have to stand. More people in the city lack homes than at any time
since . . . It’s hard to say exactly. The Coalition for the Homeless, a
leading advocate for homeless people in the city and the state, says
that these numbers have not been seen in New York since the Great
Depression. The Bloomberg administration replies that bringing the
Depression into it is wildly unfair, because those times were much
worse, and, besides, for complicated reasons, you’re comparing apples
and oranges. The C.F.H. routinely disagrees with Mayor Bloomberg, and
vice versa; of the many disputes the two sides have had, this is among
the milder. In any case, it’s inescapably true that there are far more
homeless people in the city today than there have been since “modern
homelessness” (as experts refer to it) began, back in the
nineteen-seventies.
Most New Yorkers I talk to do not know this.
They say they thought there were fewer homeless people than before,
because they see fewer of them. In fact, during the twelve years of the
Bloomberg administration, the number of homeless people has gone through
the roof they do not have. There are now two hundred and thirty-six
homeless shelters in the city. Imagine Yankee Stadium almost four-fifths
full of homeless families; about eighteen thousand adults in families
in New York City were homeless as of January, 2013, and more than
twenty-one thousand children. The C.F.H. says that during Bloomberg’s
twelve years the number of homeless families went up by seventy-three
per cent. One child out of every hundred children in the city is
homeless.
The number of homeless single adults is up, too, but
more of them are in programs than used to be, and some have taken to
living underground, in subway tunnels and other places out of sight.
Homeless individuals who do frequent the streets may have a
philosophical streak they share with passersby, and of course they
sometimes panhandle. Homeless families, by contrast, have fewer problems
of mental illness and substance abuse, and they mostly stay off the
street. If you are living on the street and you have children, they are
more likely to be taken away and put in foster care. When homeless
families are on the street or on public transportation, they are usually
trying to get somewhere. If you see a young woman with big, wheeled
suitcases and several children wearing backpacks on a train bound for
some far subway stop, they could be homeless. Homeless families usually
don’t engage with other passengers, and they seldom panhandle.
One
Saturday afternoon, I was standing at the corner of Manor and Watson
Avenues, in a southeastern part of the Bronx, waiting for a woman named
Christina Mateo. I had met her and her then partner on the street the
day before. She had said she would show me what a shelter was like—I had
never been in one. They were living in a nearby shelter for homeless
families. No shelters say “Shelter” on them in big letters. This one
looked like an ordinary shabby apartment building, with a narrow entry
yard behind a tall black iron grate whose heavy iron door did not lock.
People were going in and out. Two young men, one in a hoodie despite the
heat and the other in a clean, tight white T-shirt and a black do-rag
with the tie ends dangling, leaned into the open windows of cars that
pulled up. In between doing that, they looked at me. I am past the age
of being a prospect or a threat. I nodded back, genially.
Christina
came down the sidewalk pushing a stroller. With her were her
nineteen-year-old daughter, her seventeen-year-old son, her
fifteen-year-old daughter, and two grandchildren. They had just picked
up the younger grandchild from a shelter where she was living with her
other grandmother. We all went in, lifting the strollers, and crowded
into the small elevator. The security person at the desk asked Christina
if I was with her and she said I was. At the door to her fourth-floor
apartment, she took out a single key, unattached to any chain, key ring,
or other keys, and opened the door.
Uncheerful interior, and an
air of many people having recently passed through; the floors were like
the insides of old suitcases, with forgotten small things in the
corners. Bent window blinds; tragic, drooping, bright-green shower
curtain; dark hallway opening onto two bare bedrooms. Christina is
forty-one and has pained, empathic dark-brown eyes. She wore blue denim
cutoffs, a white blouse, sandals, ivory polish on her fingernails and
toenails, and her hair in a bun. Sitting on the only chair in the larger
bedroom while I perched on the bed, she told me how she came to be
here. She was a home health aide. After the deaths of patients whom she
had grown close to—one of them a four-year-old girl with
AIDS—she
had a breakdown and was given a diagnosis of P.T.S.D. In shelters, out
of shelters; for a while she enjoyed her own apartment, with a rent
subsidy from a program established by Mayor Bloomberg. The program was
cut. She lost the apartment, complicatedly, somehow without being
evicted right away, although if she had been, she said, she would have
qualified for other, preferable housing.
An accordion file of
documents leaned at her ankle. Everybody has documents, but the homeless
must keep theirs always close by. She showed me letters with
letterheads and foxings and pencil underlinings, and a sheaf of
certificates attesting to her success in various programs: Parenting
Skills, Anger Management, Women’s Group, Basic Relapse Prevention (“I
was smoking a lot of marijuana, and this course taught me how to
recognize my triggers. Boredom was one of my triggers”), Advanced
Relapse Prevention, and My Change Plan. “What I’m waiting for is the
paper saying that we have been declared eligible to stay in this
shelter. Right now my case is under review. This place is adequate, but
it’s not hygienic—but I don’t want to move. Stability is very important.
They will decide if we can stay or not, and then they’ll slide the
paper under the door.” She pointed to the end of the dim hallway as if
this paper might appear at any moment, sliding in silently like the
checkout bill in a hotel room.
As it happened, the news Christina
was expecting arrived late that same night, in the form of a shelter
employee who knocked on the door and presented the paper by hand. It
said that she had been declared ineligible for shelter and would have to
go to the
PATH center before eight-thirty the next morning to reapply.
Some of the things people have said to me outside the PATH center:
“I
came here first when I was eighteen, when foster care maxed me out. I
been in the system for fourteen years, and I don’t know how many times
I’ve had to come back here. When you go to
PATH, they always want to deny you. They don’t believe you really homeless.”
“You
know what is the best shelter? Covenant House. But it’s for homeless
kids, and only has about two hundred beds. There they max you out at
twenty-one.”
“This new place,
PATH, is better than what used to be here, the E.A.U.”—the Emergency Assistance Unit. “The E.A.U. was horrible.”
“Here they treat you more horrible than a drunk bum.”
“The food here is not too bad, the bag lunches they give you. The baby likes the animal crackers.”
“Hey, yo, you a writer—do you know Denis Hamill?”
“We left
PATH
at twelve-twenty-six last night and they bused us to a shelter in
Queens and we had about three hours of sleep and then they brought us
back here at seven this morning to be reassigned, and my kids was
falling asleep in the chairs, and a security guard hit the chairs with
his radio and made them jump out they sleep, and I told him not to do
that because they tired, and he yelled at me and wrote me up, and I
filed an incident report, and I’m sure it ended up in the wastebasket.”
“They spend
so much money on us. It costs three thousand dollars a month to put one family in a shelter! Why don’t they just
give us part of that money so we can afford our own place to live?”
To get to the PATH
center, you take the No. 4 train to Grand Concourse–149th Street, in
the Bronx, walk two blocks to 151st Street, make a left, and continue
for a block downhill, to 151 East 151st. Of all the places in the city’s
shelter system (aside from the Department of Homeless Services offices
on Beaver Street, in downtown Manhattan), the PATH center is probably the most important. PATH
stands for Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing. All families
seeking shelter start out here. When their numbers increase, PATH fills up. Night and day, year in and year out, weekdays and holidays, city shutdown or hurricane disaster, PATH never closes.
Often,
it is a parking lot of strollers, a basic part of life for homeless
families: these rolling mini-worlds are the single unchanging point of
reference that many homeless kids know. The strollers proceed awkwardly
through the security scanners, they queue up in a caravan going back and
forth in lines in front of the admission desk, they occupy the middle
of the floor of the building’s elevators while standees press themselves
against the walls. Plastic bags of possessions drape the stroller
handles, sippy cups of juice fill the cup-holders, Burger King paper
crowns ride in the carrying racks beneath. Kids sleep peacefully while
consultations and long waits go on around them. Some lean back and watch
with a numbed, listless patience that suggests how much of their
childhood has already been spent like this. Others hunch and squirm and
scream their heads off.
The old Emergency Assistance Unit, which
formerly stood on this site, is remembered fondly by nobody. Staffers,
city officials, advocates for the homeless, and clients who had to make
their way through it are all glad it’s gone. The E.A.U. was a windowless
brick building with small, bare, ill-smelling waiting rooms. Hundreds
of people, including the very old and infants, routinely spent the night
there. In 2002, a sixteen-year-old boy killed himself when he learned
that his family had to go back there. Linda Gibbs, now the deputy mayor
in charge of Health and Human Services, which includes the Department of
Homeless Services, was Mayor Bloomberg’s first D.H.S. commissioner. She
took the new mayor on a tour of the E.A.U. one Sunday morning in 2002.
“He was literally stepping over the sleeping kids all over the floor,”
she told me.
Bloomberg’s eventual response was to tear down the E.A.U. and build the
PATH center in its place. Where the E.A.U. was grim,
PATH
is gleaming and efficient—if not exactly welcoming. The land it sits on
is oddly shaped and comes to a wedge point. The building fits the
shape, so that its end makes an acute angle like the prow of a ship.
Points and angles and big windows that expedite the sunlight from one
side of the building through to the other define this place as a tool
and not a zone for relaxation. Even the low walls around the building
and next to the long, stroller-friendly entrance ramp are sloped, so
that they can’t be sat on. Inside it’s clean and well run, and the
social workers I talked to on a D.H.S.-led tour of the place seemed
serious and enthusiastic. The Bloomberg administration holds up the
PATH center as a rebuke to its critics and as a symbol of its humane yet businesslike approach to homelessness.
The “
PA” in
PATH’s
acronym—Preventive Assistance—comes across forcefully in the Bloomberg
policy, which tries hard to keep applicants out of the “
TH,” Temporary Housing.
PATH
will expend great energies in preventing you from being homeless, if
other options can be found. If you have no home in New York but own a
cabin in Alaska,
PATH may give you a plane ticket to Alaska. To save scarce and valuable resources for those who truly merit them,
PATH
searches out every possible alternative to city-funded shelter.
Usually, its efforts focus on finding relatives with whom the family
seeking shelter can stay. Patiently and firmly and with endlessly
bureaucratized persistence, it makes walking away and giving yourself up
to fate seem the easier solution.
The families lining up at PATH,
and the single adult men at their intake point, in the Bellevue Men’s
Shelter, on East Thirtieth Street, and the single adult women at the
women’s intake at the help women’s
shelter, on Williams Avenue, in Brooklyn: from a legal standpoint, these
people are not asking for charity. They are exercising a right. Since
1938, the right to shelter has been implicit among the rights guaranteed
by the constitution of the State of New York (though court action had
to confirm it). No other city or state in America offers this right as
solidly and unambiguously as does New York.
Advocates love the
right to shelter. Most mayors hate it. Referring to it on one of his
weekly radio shows last March, Mayor Bloomberg urged the city’s
taxpayers “to call their representatives in Albany and say, ‘We ain’t
gonna do this anymore.’ ” Had he elaborated, he could have put the blame
on literature. New York City has always been a place where reformers
have scouted around in poor neighborhoods and written books about what
they saw. In “American Notes” (1842), Charles Dickens affectingly
described the squalor of the Five Points slum in what became Chinatown.
Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, read Dickens, and later filled his own
exposé, “How the Other Half Lives,” with heart-wrenching, Dickensian
details, backed up by documentary flash photographs, among the first in
history. Teddy Roosevelt read Riis, practically hero-worshipped him,
and, as Police Commissioner, set about reforming the city’s housing.
Sometimes poetry does make things happen. If you declare, in a famous
poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor, “Send these,
the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,” you might consider that a certain
commitment has been made.
Another Riis admirer was Fiorello
LaGuardia, by general consensus the greatest mayor the city ever had. He
loved “How the Other Half Lives” so much that he put a copy of it in
the cornerstone of one of the nation’s original low-cost public-housing
projects, part of a series he built downtown and in Brooklyn. In 1938,
with the Great Depression ongoing and his mayoralty in its fifth year,
LaGuardia persuaded the state’s voters to pass a constitutional
amendment to help those in need. The amendment, Article XVII, reads, in
Section 1:
The aid, care
and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by
the state and by such of its subdivisions, and in such manner and by
such means, as the legislature may from time to time determine.
New York City’s system of housing homeless people and caring for them, as it has evolved, rests mainly on this passage.
The
upset-victory story of the Callahan v. Carey lawsuit, the right to
shelter’s first landmark case, gladdens advocates’ hearts to this day.
Demand for manpower in the Second World War absorbed most of the city’s
unemployed, largely solving the problems that Article XVII had
addressed. In the prosperous decades following the war, very few in the
city were without a place to live. Homelessness meant a small population
of older, mostly white men along a few blocks of the Bowery. In 1964, a
team of researchers looking for people spending the night in the city’s
parks found only one homeless man.
Then, all at once in the
mid-seventies, homeless people seemed to be everywhere. Even today,
nobody knows for sure why the problem became so bad so fast. Between
1965 and 1977, more than a hundred thousand patients were released from
state psychiatric hospitals, and perhaps forty-seven thousand of them
ended up in the city. At the same time, hundreds of
single-room-occupancy hotels, or S.R.O.s, were shutting down; the
S.R.O.s had provided low-income individuals with housing that was a step
up from nothing. In 1972, the Supreme Court decriminalized vagrancy.
Police became less aggressive about rousting those who were sleeping in
public. The number of middle-class people in the city went down, which
led to a decrease in the supply of livable and affordable apartments,
leaving even fewer available to the poor. Whatever the cause, by the
late seventies many thousands were “sleeping rough” (as the phrase had
it) in the city’s public spaces.
Robert Hayes was a
twenty-six-year-old lawyer who worked for the Wall Street firm of
Sullivan & Cromwell. Like others who became involved in advocacy for
the homeless, he had a Catholic-school background—Archbishop Molloy
High School, in Queens, and Georgetown University. After getting his law
degree from N.Y.U., he stayed in the neighborhood, and he began to
wonder about all the homeless people he saw around his Washington Square
apartment. From personal observation and from conversations with his
friends Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, students at Columbia University who
had spent hundreds of hours interviewing homeless people in the city,
he concluded that the city and the state were neglecting their legal
obligation.
Working pro bono, Hayes filed a class-action lawsuit
in state court in October of 1979 on behalf of three homeless men whom
he met at a Catholic mission. These men claimed that they had been given
nowhere to sleep but the so-called Big Room, a dangerous, unsanitary,
and crowded overflow area in what had formerly been a municipal shelter;
and that they had sometimes been denied shelter entirely. The lead
plaintiff’s name was Robert Callahan. He was a longtime fixture on the
Bowery. His opposite number—the Carey in Callahan v. Carey—was Hugh L.
Carey, then the governor. Hayes based his case on one word in Article
XVII: “shall.” When I talked to Hayes not long ago, he quoted, “ ‘The
aid, care and support of the needy etc.
SHALL be provided.’ ” Then he said, “In our presentation before the judge, we simply argued that ‘shall’ means ‘shall.’
“I
dug around in the N.Y.U. law-library basement and found speeches given
by the amendment’s supporters and drafters back in 1938 that showed the
intent,” he went on. “These proved that the amendment was supposed to
apply in hard times as well as in good. I kept the story simple because
I’d never tried a case before and didn’t really know what I was doing.
Sometimes the judge had to instruct me in the rules of evidence.”
Arguments ended in late October, and the plaintiffs asked for an
expedited verdict because winter was coming on. While awaiting the
decision, Hayes let Callahan stay at his apartment; with some companions
they made a big Thanksgiving dinner. Later, after Callahan moved out,
Hayes noticed that his Archbishop Molloy High School class ring was
missing.
On December 5, 1979, Justice Andrew Tyler, of the New
York State Supreme Court, issued a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs.
Finding that the state and the city were not in compliance with state
law, he ordered them to provide emergency shelter for homeless men
immediately in consideration of the weather. Attorneys for the state and
the city were stunned. Plaintiffs had requested seven hundred and fifty
beds; the city, caught short, asked that the number be left flexible.
Plaintiffs willingly agreed. Hayes knew that city officials had no idea
how many homeless men there actually were. Soon, more than a thousand
men were seeking shelter every night, and the city had to scramble to
keep up. The judge’s ruling was of small use to Robert Callahan,
however. He was found dead of alcoholism on a street near the Bowery not
long afterward.
The decision that bears his name created the
right to shelter, based on state law that had existed for forty-one
years. In practical terms, Callahan v. Carey also established the courts
as the de-facto overseers of the city’s shelter system. Dozens of court
proceedings having to do with city shelters and their management
followed, until details as small as the acceptable distance between beds
and the prescribed amount of toilet paper in the bathrooms became the
subjects of court orders. A consent decree in 1981 between the state and
the city and the plaintiffs agreed on guidelines to manage the
requirements of the Callahan decision, but other suits continued,
including those which eventually confirmed the right to shelter for
women, families, and people with
AIDS.
Another
result of Callahan was the beginning, in 1981, of the Coalition for the
Homeless, founded by Robert Hayes, Kim Hopper, and Ellen Baxter.
Relying mostly on private donors for financial support, the C.F.H.
disturbed and enraged the mayors of the nation’s richest city regularly
from then on.
On a recent Saturday, I set out to
see how people were doing at some homeless shelters I knew about, and
on the streets. First, I took the Lefferts Boulevard A train to the end
of the line and walked three or four miles to a shelter called the
Saratoga Family Inn. It is on Rockaway Boulevard by J.F.K. Airport,
across the highway from one of those long-term parking lots which
elevate cars two- and three-deep. The shelter used to be a Best Western
motel, and it houses about two hundred and fifty families. Fencing
topped with barbed wire surrounds the building on several sides, and
large banners advertising a slip-and-fall attorney and an auto-leasing
place hang from its windowless six-story front.
Two women were
talking by the main entryway. Shirley, the older one, sat on her walker,
while the younger, Diana, leaned against the wall. “We are living out
in the boom-docks here,” Diana said, when I told her I was a reporter.
Breakfast had just ended and a smell of syrup lingered in the air. “I
been in this shelter three years, and I don’t care if I never see
pancakes, French toast, or waffles again for the rest of my life,” she
remarked. “I don’t even eat the breakfasts here no more. My stomach is
too precious to me. And those artificial eggs—what do you call them—Egg
Beaters.”
“The food here ain’t even real no more,” said a woman
named Kiki, who was returning with breakfast from a nearby deli. “Hey,
y’all, this man is from the newspaper!” she called to some people coming
out the door. Kiki had many long braids and an antic manner. People
gathered around, and at each new complaint—playground is closed too
much, kids have nothing to do, out here the travel is so long you have
to get up at five in the morning to get your kids to school, kids see
too much when they live in a single room with their parents, kids get
sick more here, the eight-dollar-an-hour wage for in-house work will
never get you out of here—Kiki whooped in affirmation. “Bloomberg put us
in a corner and said fuck us!” she whooped. Pointing at the long-term
lot across the highway, she said, “Those are parked cars, and we are
parked people!” She let out a wild laugh.
“Every month, I get a
paper from Welfare saying how much they just paid for me and my two kids
to stay in our one room in this shelter, and I can tell you the exact
amount,” Diana said. “Three thousand four hundred and forty-four
dollars! Every month! Give me nine hundred dollars of that every month
and I’ll find me and my kids an apartment, I promise you.”
By
foot, bus, and subway, I backtracked to Brooklyn, changing at outlying
stops. Broadway Junction, near the Queens-Brooklyn border, was jumping
like Times Square. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, I got off a C train at
Nostrand Avenue and walked a few blocks to the vast old armory building
that is now the Bedford-Atlantic men’s shelter. People in soup-kitchen
lines have told me that this is one of the worst shelters in the city.
Sunlight glinted on its acres of gray slate roof, and its crenellated
tower stood out against the sky. The guy I met here is Marcus (Country)
Springs, originally from Lake City, Florida, who prefers to sleep on the
street near the shelter—“Under that pear tree,” he told me, pointing to
a Callery pear up the street.
“In this shelter they treat you
like an inmate,” Springs said. “I stay in it only in inclement weather.
It is not doing me no good, being in there. In a shelter you get what
they call situational depression, but if you remove the person from the
situation sometimes the depression goes away. These other guys you see
on the corner are like me, hoping to meet someone who can help us.
Sometimes contractors or movers come by with day jobs. Families visit
and bring food. But the D.H.S.—man, they have forgot us. The last person
from this corner that got housed was like two years ago.”
Next, I
made a stop at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter. For gloominess of aspect,
Bellevue is unique, with its high columns near the entryway surmounted
by the words “Psychiatric Hospital” (the building’s original function).
Bellevue has eight hundred and fifty beds and is also called one of the
worst shelters in the city; in general, the smaller shelters are said to
be much less bad, and some are even nice. Ellis, the dollar-apiece
Newport cigarette seller on the street out front, suggested I go to
Intake and register myself if I wanted to see what the place was like; I
took his word for it instead. Then I subwayed up to 103rd Street on the
Lexington line and walked across the footbridge to Wards Island, where a
three-hundred-bed men’s shelter occupies another former psychiatric
hospital. That shelter, called the Charles H. Gay Building, is a
lonesome place; constantly you hear the tires bumping on an approach
ramp to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge up above it. I asked a guy sitting
on the curb in front of the shelter what he thought of it. He considered
for a moment and said, “Jail’s worse.”
Nearby, a young man named
Angel was helping a woman from Access Wireless hand out cell phones that
were paid for by Medicaid. He called them “Obama phones,” because they
were free. A man in the background was being evicted from the shelter,
cursing out the D.H.S. police all the way. Angel told me that he had
lost his job in a towel and linen warehouse about six weeks ago and that
he wanted to get a job more than anything. He was wearing a pair of
trousers that appeared to be riding very low, as the style now has it,
but actually they were an optical illusion. The boxer shorts at the top
of the trousers were a part of the garment itself.
An M-35 bus
from Wards Island dropped me off at 125th Street in East Harlem along
with a lot of guys from the shelter. Almost none of them paid their
fare, but the driver looked the other way. Police had just concluded a
sweep of makeshift dwellings under the Metro-North bridge at 125th and
in front of a clothing store on Lexington between 125th and 124th.
Cardboard lay scattered here and there and some ring-billed gulls were
picking up French fries. A young policeman whose name tag said “Chan”
told me that some of the homeless who congregate here smoke a synthetic
marijuana known as K2, which is sold as incense and causes lots of
trouble. Just then a bearded guy ran up shouting, “Arrest that bitch!”
He pointed at a woman. The cop asked what he should arrest the woman for
and the guy said, “She just worked some voodoo on Maria’s cart!”
As
darkness fell, I took a bus downtown and looked for a man named Rick,
who has slept on or near the steps of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian
Church, at Fifty-fifth and Fifth, intermittently since the Giuliani
administration. Rick has told me that he prefers the streets to any
shelter. Throngs of people were passing in the rush of a midtown
Saturday evening, but Rick was not around. In the Village, I found a few
small homeless encampments under construction hoardings, but the only
person I recognized was a guy who used to attend a writers’ workshop I
taught a few years ago at a soup kitchen in Chelsea. The guy had been a
problem because he would come to class and then just stand there and
look at people. Tonight he was among all his stuff and reading a very
small book held close to his face in the dim light. I tried to get his
attention but failed.
In the warm Saturday-night air the city was
hivelike, humming, fabulously lit, and rocking with low, thrilling,
Daisy Buchanan-like laughter. A young couple slept under a blanket
beneath the hoardings at the Twenty-fifth Street Armory; the boy still
had his baseball cap on. Meanwhile, attendees at a gala going on inside
the armory took breaks on the sidewalk just around the corner and smoked
and made phone calls. I ducked into the subway and rode a crowded No. 4
train uptown and went back to the
PATH
center. I had never seen it after dark. Up here, the night was quieter,
and the building with its pointed end and five brightly illuminated
floors rose up like an ocean liner, or the yet unsunk front of one.
Two school buses and a black van waited by the building’s sidewalk-level door. A
PATH
employee in a blue T-shirt swept up under the street lights and by the
curb, and a guy wearing a fringed scarf wandered around muttering. The
vehicles started up and began to idle and a narrative of nighttime
journeys seemed to take hold. For a while nobody came from the
PATH
building’s door. Then a few families emerged with strollers and
suitcases. Sleepy kids held pillows and stuffed animals. A tall woman
with a shorter man and a teen-age girl came to the van, and the tall
woman asked me if I was the driver. The actual driver came up and opened
the van’s back doors and began to stow the family’s stuff, quietly and
taking care with it.
The van’s interior light shone on him. A
young mother with a baby in one arm had some trouble folding up her
stroller and the driver helped her fold it and then he put it in the
back. “We’ve been here at
PATH since
ten-thirty this morning,” the tall woman told me. “Twelve and a half
hours. Now we’ll go to a shelter for ten days while they decide if we’re
eligible. I don’t know how this all happened. We were staying with my
sister. Now we’re wondering what this shelter we’re going to will be
like. A year ago we had to stay in a shelter for a week and it was kind
of bad.”
More families came out, accompanied by a woman with a
clipboard. People got sorted out into the right vehicles. Kids slept on
people’s shoulders, except for a toddler named Jared, who was
stagger-walking to and fro. He bumped against the legs of the man who
was sweeping and a woman watching him picked him up and said to the
sweeper, “Sorry—my bad.” Soon all the passengers were aboard, the
vehicles’ doors closed, and the red tail-lights came on. Slowly the
buses drove off, followed by the van. Nighttime departures and arrivals
occupy the subbasement of childhood memory. The guy sweeping and the
muttering man and the woman with the clipboard and the reporter taking
notes existed in a strange, half-unreal state of being part of someone
else’s deepest memories a lifetime from now. An orange had fallen from a
bag lunch and lay beside the curb. The muttering man picked it up and
looked at it and rubbed it and put it in his pocket.
Deputy
Mayor Linda Gibbs, the Bloomberg administration official most
significantly involved in its policies for the homeless, is a trim,
gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties whose father was the mayor of
Menands, a village north of Albany. She grew up there and came to New
York City right after getting her degree at SUNY
Buffalo Law School. Intricate questions of public policy that would
confuse and baffle most people intrigue her. Her blue eyes often have an
expression that can only be described as a twinkle. I’ve seen this look
in other Bloomberg staffers’ eyes, and in photos of the Mayor himself.
It reminds me of the twinkle in the eyes of the Santa Claus in the
Coca-Cola ads from the nineteen-fifties (inappropriately, given the
Mayor’s feelings about soft drinks).
I think the contagious
Bloomberg twinkle comes partly from the Mayor’s role as a sort of Santa
figure. He works for the city for a dollar a year, he gives away his
money by the hundreds of millions, and he manifestly has the city’s
happiness and well-being at heart. Every rich person should be like him.
His deputies and staffers twinkle with the pleasure of participating in
his general beneficence, as well they should. “You can’t make a man mad
by giving him money”—this rule would seem to be absolute. And yet
sometimes people in the city he has done so much for still get mad at
Bloomberg and criticize him. At the wrong of this, the proper order of
things is undone, and the Bloomberg twinkle turns to ice.
Mary
Brosnahan, the president of the Coalition for the Homeless, has worked
for that organization for twenty-five years. She grew up in Dearborn,
Michigan, and got her undergraduate degree at Notre Dame. Dark-haired
and soft-spoken, she seems to enjoy the complications of public policy
as much as Gibbs does. Patrick Markee, the C.F.H.’s senior policy
analyst, is a graduate of St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, and of
Harvard. He has a high forehead, a short ginger-and-gray beard
(sometimes), and a voice that jumps into its upper registers when he is
outraged. That two such earnest, unassuming people can get our
multibillionaire mayor so upset seems a remarkable thing. Gibbs
generally refers to them and to others in advocacy groups as “the
litigants.” The term applies, because the C.F.H. and others have been
bringing suits against the city, with the help of the Legal Aid Society,
in an ongoing sequence ever since Callahan. She pronounces the word
“litigants” with an air of careful neutrality that is somehow
frightening.
One afternoon, I sat in the offices of the C.F.H. on
Fulton Street, downtown, while Markee and Brosnahan told me of the many
things the Bloomberg administration had done wrong. On another
afternoon, in a small conference room at City Hall, not far away, I met
with Gibbs and two of her colleagues while they told me of the things it
had done right.
“People have no idea what a mess the Department
of Homeless Services was when we came on board,” Gibbs said. “The
litigants probably never saw the confused mass of court orders and
directives that had piled up at D.H.S. in folders
this thick, not
even catalogued in any usable way, as a result of all their lawsuits.
And that mass of court orders was what the D.H.S. had to constantly
refer to in running the shelter system! Finally, in 2008, we were able
to bring some clarity and structure to that. This gave demoralized
D.H.S. staffers hope, and a new sense of empowerment.”
Markee:
“The agreement worked out with the D.H.S. in 2008 to resolve all the
preceding court orders with regard to shelter management was obviously a
good outcome for the homeless and for the city. But the C.F.H. and
other advocates accomplished it only in the face of constant opposition
from Linda Gibbs and the city’s lawyers.”
Gibbs: “The 2008
agreement we finally reached with the litigants vacating all preceding
court orders and replacing them with a coherent, mutually acceptable
framework for running the shelters is an achievement we’re very proud
of. But the litigants fought us on it every step of the way.”
Brosnahan:
“The most amazing mistake the Bloomberg people made was that they were
supposed to be this results-oriented, data-driven team, and they paid no
attention to their own data! From the beginning, they ignored decades’
worth of experience showing that homeless people who receive permanent
housing with rent subsidies almost never go back to being homeless.”
Markee:
“So, ignoring all that data, Bloomberg ended homeless people’s priority
for subsidized public housing, and for Section 8, a federal subsidy
that pays the difference between thirty per cent of a renter’s income
and the market rent of his apartment. Section 8 is permanent once you’ve
been approved for it, and studies show that nearly ninety per cent of
the people who get it are still in their own apartments five years
later. A certain number of homeless people annually had been given
priority over other applicants to receive Section 8. The policy had
worked forever, and they ended it.”
Gibbs: “We discontinued
Section 8 priority because of its dwindling availability, and because we
discovered that the chance of getting Section 8 was operating as a
perverse incentive, drawing people to seek shelter who otherwise would
not have done so.”
Markee: “The theory of the ‘perverse incentive’
has been disproved over and over again. Most people who become homeless
do not get themselves in that predicament in order to receive a rent
subsidy. If a small number actually do take that unlikely route, the net
effect on the shelter system is greatly outweighed by all those who
leave homelessness permanently after getting a subsidy.”
Gibbs:
“We did not end Section 8 priority with nothing to replace it. In fact,
we came up with a far superior subsidy plan, called Advantage, to be
funded by the city and state, which was particularly targeted to
homeless families and individuals. The litigants say they want rent
subsidies, but they were opposed to Advantage from the beginning.”
Brosnahan:
“Actually, we were glad when we heard that the Bloomberg administration
wanted to start a new rent-subsidy program. But when they announced,
almost immediately, that the subsidies would have a short time limit we
flipped out. Short-term subsidies obviously were not going to be enough
to keep people from again becoming homeless.”
The
Advantage program went into effect in the spring of 2007. It was
incremental, paying all but fifty dollars of the rent to start; then,
like Section 8, it paid the difference between an apartment’s market
rent and thirty per cent of the renter’s income. When asked about the
program by the News, Markee predicted that it would be “a
revolving door back into shelter.” Within the next year and a half, some
nineteen thousand people, including individuals and those in families,
signed up for Advantage. Soon, they had moved from shelters into their
own apartments and were paying rent.
In 2008, Rob Hess, the D.H.S.
commissioner, announced that no Advantage recipients had gone back to
being homeless, and he quoted Markee’s earlier prediction derisively,
without mentioning him by name. But in 2011 the state, facing a budget
shortfall, withdrew its funding for Advantage; and the city, unable to
afford it without the state, ended the program. As the loss of the
subsidy took hold, thousands of newly installed renters couldn’t pay
their rent, and many of them eventually returned to the shelter system.
The
collapse of Advantage contributed greatly to the rise in homeless
numbers during Bloomberg’s third term. Most of the heads of households
in shelters whom I’ve met, like Christina Mateo, say that they became
homeless because they lost Advantage subsidies. Some say that getting
their own apartments only to lose them again was worse than not getting
them in the first place.
Bloomberg and his administration had set
out to do something about homelessness. At the time he took office, he
feared that New Yorkers had come to accept homelessness as a condition
of city life, and the possibility alarmed him. He said, “We are too
strong, and too smart, and too compassionate a city to surrender to the
scourge of homelessness. We won’t do it. We won’t allow it.” He
assembled advisory groups by the score, called meetings, took
recommendations. A blueprint emerged, entitled “Uniting for Solutions
Beyond Shelter: The Action Plan for New York City.” The administration’s
businesslike, can-do ethic infused the effort, providing goals and
charts and tables, and deadlines by which this or that would be
accomplished. The Mayor said that in five years he planned to reduce
homelessness by two-thirds.
In this instance, he probably would
have been better off if he had left office after his second term. His
new homeless policy seemed to work for a while; by the middle years of
his mayoralty, homeless numbers had levelled off. But by his third term
the homeless population was climbing every year, exacerbated by the ’08
market crash, and continuing upward even after the crash’s effects on
the city had begun to abate.
Faced with questions about these
numbers—evidence of what was shaping up as the worst failure of his
administration—the Mayor grew peevish. He blamed “the advocates” for
Advantage’s failure, saying that they had lobbied to end the Advantage
program (they supported ending it only because they wanted to replace it
with something better, they countered). He reported that the New York
City shelter system was being inundated by people from out of town, and,
on one of his radio shows, he gave a skewed example of the city’s
long-standing legal obligation, claiming, “You can arrive in your
private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight
to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you
shelter.” He didn’t mention that the D.H.S.’s stated determination to
keep applicants out of city shelters whenever possible would have sent
this hypothetical traveller back to her airplane forthwith, perhaps with
a one-time subsidy for jet fuel.
Criticisms passed on to the
Mayor from the C.F.H. seemed to make him especially touchy. On one
occasion, he referred to the C.F.H. as “not a reputable organization.”
The
difference in philosophy is fundamental, and it goes way back. In the
years after the Civil War, a Massachusetts woman named Josephine Shaw
Lowell wanted to improve the living situation of the thousands of
postwar “vagabonds” then at large in New York City. Her husband, Charles
Russell Lowell, had died in the war, as had her brother, Robert Gould
Shaw, the famous commander of an all-black regiment. In her good works
among the vagabonds, the young, high-minded New England widow considered
charity to be corrupting. Soup kitchens enraged her. Rather than give
handouts, she preferred to teach the indigent “the joy of working.”
Despite or because of her ardor, she proved a bad fit for the charitable
organization where she served as the director, and she resigned.
That
is one philosophy. To some degree, though perhaps not as much as Mrs.
Lowell, the Bloomberg administration has subscribed to it. The Mayor’s
plan to reduce homelessness has always stressed “client responsibility.”
In an interview in 2003, Linda Gibbs talked about the new outlook at
the D.H.S. She said that a lack of standards had helped to create
“passivity” among shelter users, and that the new goal was to “manage
this in a way that people change their behavior.” For the services
homeless people were being given, conscientiousness and diligence were
asked of them in return. To begin with, they had to look for jobs and
apartments, attend regular meetings with social workers, and obey all
shelter rules. Their homelessness was mostly their fault, and so their
behavior had to change.
Then, there’s the other philosophy, which
says that it’s not their fault. What the homeless need, this other
philosophy says, is a stable place to live, not a system telling them
what to do. Once stable housing is achieved, changes in behavior, if
necessary, can follow. The problem is not the poor’s lack of character
but a lack of places in the city where they can afford to live and of
jobs that pay a decent wage. The problem is not inside but outside. No
change in personal behavior is going to make rents cheaper. According to
this philosophy, the
PATH center’s
relentless search for relatives with whom applicants for shelter can
double up or triple up just crams more bodies into the too short supply
of moderate- and low-income housing in the city, and sends people into
unhealthy or even dangerous situations.
Manhattan is now America’s
most expensive urban area to live in, and Brooklyn is the second most
expensive. Meanwhile, more than one in five New York City residents live
below the poverty line. Nearly one in five experiences times of “food
insecurity” in the course of a year—i.e., sometimes does not have enough
safe and nutritious food to eat. One-fifth of 8.3 million New Yorkers
equals 1.66 million New Yorkers. For people at the lower-middle and at
the bottom, incomes have gone down. The median household income in the
Bronx is about thirty-three thousand dollars a year; Brooklyn’s is about
forty-four thousand. Meanwhile, rents go steadily up. A person working
at a minimum-wage job would need 3.1 such jobs to pay the median rent
for an apartment in the city without spending more than thirty per cent
of her income. If you multiply 3.1 by eight hours a day by five days a
week, you get a hundred and twenty-four hours; a week only has a hundred
and sixty-eight hours.
The number of market-rate rental
apartments available to those of low income is extremely small. A
metaphor one often hears about the homeless is that of the musical
chairs: with such a small number of low-income-affordable apartments,
the players who are less able to compete, for whatever reason, don’t get
the chairs when the music stops. Every year, more and more chairs are
taken away. The existence of so many people who are homeless indicates
that a very large number of renters are close to that condition. Housing
advocates in the Bronx report that some of the people they try to help
are paying seventy per cent of their income in rent and that others are
living doubled up and tripled up and in unimproved basements and in
furnace rooms—conditions that recall the days of Jacob Riis.
Patrick
Markee has said that any real attempt to take on these problems will
involve the restoration of Section 8 and public-housing priority,
creating a new rent-subsidy program, passing living-wage laws, and
building more low-income and rent-supported housing. Given the
un-success of Bloomberg’s homelessness policies, and the comparative
authority the C.F.H. has gained thereby, its suggestions are likely to
be more listened to. Joe Lhota, the Republican mayoral candidate, wants
to amend Article XVII so that it limits the right to shelter to New York
residents only; according to D.H.S. statistics, twenty-three per cent
of shelter residents listed their previous dwelling as an out-of-state
address.
Bill de Blasio, the probable next mayor, wants to ease
the D.H.S. restrictions determining who qualifies for shelter, set aside
public-housing vacancies for the homeless, come up with a new
rent-subsidy plan involving a voucher system by which rent-challenged
tenants can afford their own apartments, and build a hundred thousand
new units of low-income housing. Campaign contributions he has received
from slum landlords who profit from running crummy shelters worry some
observers, and should; the condition of the homeless can always get
worse, while the financial reward for housing them can be enormous. De
Blasio and his defenders say that he has always stood up to slumlords
and wants to get rid of the expensive shelter housing they provide. In
any event, the near future will likely bring a major revision of
Bloomberg policies, and another shakeup of the world of the homeless
will occur.
Over time, I lost touch with almost
all the homeless people I talked to. There was Richard, a quiet,
humorous man with disabilities I met at a soup kitchen. He had been in
the care of friends until they took him to a subway station one day and
left him there. He spoke of the friends without resentment, as if by
accepting homelessness he had finally been able to do them a favor in
return. Richard has not been seen at the soup kitchen for a while.
A young man named Jay was carrying a rabbit outside the
PATH
center when I met him one day last spring. He made a call on my cell
phone because he thought I might take the rabbit off his hands (most
shelters don’t allow pets). The rabbit’s name was Queen. A family member
of Jay’s was about to show up with Queen’s cage and food when I finally
declined. Jay and I talked on the phone a few times after that—the
family member’s cell phone had my number. He and his mother and brothers
were in a shelter in Brooklyn and the rabbit was with a cousin. Later,
Jay’s or his relative’s cell-phone number stopped working.
Michael,
who was sitting by the road to the Charles H. Gay Building, told me he
had lost his job when the dock where he worked was destroyed by Sandy.
He said, “Bloomberg thinks we low-down, but we ain’t—we just poor.” In
twenty-eight per cent of the families in shelters, at least one person
has a job. Erica, who lived in a shelter despite working for an energy
company in Connecticut, listed her rage-filled complaints in a burst
like a ratchet gun, with swift, dramatic gestures. Her shelter
apartment, which she showed me, was spotless. Paul, an older West Indian
man, waited in line at a C.F.H. food-distribution van by Battery Park
while we talked. He said he had been laid off from his job as a
furniture handler and shipper in Staten Island and was sleeping on the
couches of friends. Shenon, a home health aide who lived in a family
shelter on Junius Street, in Brooklyn, said that “grown-ass men” walked
its hallways nearly naked in front of her kids. She offered to show me
the shelter, and told me a cell-phone number, but, like most of the
others I was given, it turned out not to work.
Soon after
Christina Mateo received notice of her ineligibility for shelter, she
called me in a frantic state. She was on her way to
PATH
to reapply. When I called her two days later, she sounded calm. It had
all been a mixup; she was back in the same shelter. Two days after that,
we spoke again. A new problem with her eligibility had come up, and she
was going back to
PATH. I tried to find out what happened but wasn’t able to reach her again.
Homelessness
is a kind of internal exile that distributes people among the two
hundred and thirty-six shelters around the city and keeps them moving.
In this restlessness, the homeless remind me of the ghostly streaks on
photos of the city from long ago, where the camera’s slow shutter speed
could capture only a person’s blurry passing. Of all the homeless people
who gave me their cell-phone numbers, only two—Marcus (Country) Springs
and a woman I talked to briefly named Rebeca Gonzzales—could still be
reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued
to work made them also photographable, and Springs’s portrait
accompanies this article.
Robert Hayes, the
young attorney who brought and won Callahan v. Carey and co-founded the
Coalition for the Homeless, remained involved in homeless advocacy. He
won other important class-action suits, kept up with the city’s
management of the shelter system, and continued to clash with the powers
in city government. At times, the work overwhelmed him with its
pressures and strident controversies. He thought the future of the city
depended on him, he felt the weight of the suffering poor on his
shoulders. When it became too much, he would get in his car and drive to
Maine and not stop until he was in some uncrowded, remote place, and
then after a short while he would drive back.
During the
administration of Mayor Edward Koch, the city found itself more than
usually strapped for places to house the homeless. Koch was among the
mayors who hated the right to shelter and the onus it imposed on the
city, and he and Hayes had many exchanges that ranged from bitter to
nasty. Low-income and middle-income housing also was in short supply
under Koch, and as these problems intensified his administration adopted
a plan of setting aside buildings that had been seized in tax default
and rehabilitating them for housing. These buildings are called
in rem buildings, from the name of the legal action that transfers ownership to the city. By fixing up
in rem
buildings, Koch began a process that eventually provided a hundred and
fifty thousand new units of affordable housing, much of it subsidized
for low-income tenants. Of those units, ten per cent, or fifteen
thousand units, were set aside for the homeless.
Colorful and witty as Koch was, the success of his
in rem housing added gravitas to his reputation. When he died, last February, the fact that his
in rem program had provided housing for many tens of thousands of poor and middle-income people ran at the top of his obituaries.
As
for Robert Hayes, after ten years with the C.F.H. his trips to Maine
became longer, and his weariness at his job greater, until finally he
decided to quit. He did a stint with the prestigious Manhattan firm of
O’Melveny & Myers, and then moved with his wife to just north of
Portland and set himself up in private practice. They had three
daughters. In Maine, he represented Exxon as well as local people
fighting paper mills, and he became less “us versus them” in outlook,
partly because the legal community was so small that the people he went
up against in court were the same ones he ran into at the supermarket.
After nine years, he moved back, to Hartsdale, New York, where he is now
a senior vice-president at a company that provides health benefits for
people covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
In 2003, he happened to
cross paths briefly with former Mayor Koch in a TV studio. Afterward,
Hayes decided to give his old adversary a call. His experience in Maine
had led him to think about his battles of the past, and he wanted to
make peace with Koch if peace needed to be made. Koch accepted the
invitation and the two went out to lunch.
Hayes, a self-possessed,
slim, sandy-haired man of sixty, looks like what he is—someone who has
seen a lot, won some big games, and now levelly watches the world. “We
met in the Bryant Park Grill, behind the library,” Hayes told me
recently, at his White Plains office. “The place was full, and everybody
recognized Koch, and he was pleased by the attention. We talked—or he
did, ninety-five per cent about himself, of course, although I was happy
to listen. After a while, the subject moved to our old disputes over
homeless issues and the right to shelter. Koch said that if it hadn’t
been for the pressure from us advocates to do something about housing
for the homeless he might not have been forced to undertake his
in rem program. Now he was an old man, and he knew that the
in rem housing was going to be his legacy.
“He told me he knew that, and then he did a very un-Kochlike thing,” Hayes said. “He thanked me.”
♦
