Rachel and Her Children (13 page)

The owner of a motel housing thirty homeless children sees an opportunity for profit. He recently bought four buses and obtained a contract with Westchester County to transport the kids to school. He gets a dollar a mile for each child. “I would anticipate we will be picking up from more motels …,” he says. “I don’t think homelessness is going to disappear.”

Finding shelter for homeless families with children in New York becomes more difficult on weekends because, on Fridays and Saturdays, prostitutes have more business and the homeless must compete with them for space. In Washington, D.C., in 1986, the problem is more easily resolved. Children and prostitutes are housed in the same building.

“The number of homeless families seeking emergency shelter” in the District, writes the
Washington Post
, “increased more than 500 percent during the last year,” pushing the city to house thirty-nine homeless children with their parents in a rooming house for prostitutes known as the Annex.

In the Annex, mothers put milk on windowsills to keep it cold. Families are confronted with drug paraphernalia in shared rest rooms. Children mingle with the prostitutes and clients. The owner of the rooming house describes it as unfit for children. “This is a pigpen,” he tells a reporter. But the city keeps the children in the “pigpen” for almost a year.

A member of the city’s Commission on Homelessness visits the “pigpen” and sees homeless children playing in
corridors while, twenty feet away, prostitutes and clients take turns waiting to make use of the same room. Exit signs for the fire escape are in front of a locked door. Smoke detectors don’t work. The ropes from the window sashes have been confiscated by drug users to tie up their arms. “This is one of the worst things anybody could do to any family,” says a woman who has lost her home after losing her job. But she says she doesn’t dare complain. “If I lose this I have nothing.”

The city’s excuse, the
Washington Post
writes in January 1987, “is, as usual, that it had no choice.” But, says the
Post
, there have been sufficient warning signs. When the city attempts to justify this as a temporary answer to an unexpected need, the
Post
observes that city officials have been putting families in the Annex “since last March.” The
Post
editorializes that responsible officials ought to be removed. Embarrassed by the sudden press attention, a city official moves the families to another building. “This,” she says, “is just to get the situation out of controversy.”

The situation in Washington seems neither worse nor better than that in New York. Homeless families, according to the rules in Washington, must go every day to a decrepit place known as “the Pitts Hotel,” where they receive their meals and room assignments for the night. If the Pitts is full, they’re given bus fare and sent to one of two other dismal shelters. The next day they return to the Pitts and must begin the process once again.

“We have a more efficient system in the U.S. to deal with stray pets,” says New York Congressman Ted Weiss, “than we have for homeless human beings.”

Do we know what we are doing to these children?

Knowingly or not, we are creating a diseased, distorted, undereducated, and malnourished generation of small children who, without dramatic intervention on a scale for which the nation seems entirely unprepared, will
grow into the certainty of unemployable adulthood. The drop-out rate for the poorest children of New York is 70 percent. For homeless kids the rate will be much higher. None of these kids will qualify for jobs available in 1989 or 1995. But every one who is a female over twelve is qualified already to become a mother. Many only thirteen years of age in hotels like the Martinique are pregnant now. Hundreds more will have delivered children, brain-damaged or not, before their sixteenth year of life. They will not be reading books about prenatal care. They will not be reading or observing warnings about damage done to infants by the alcohol or drugs they may consume. When their hour of labor comes, many will not even understand the medical permission forms they sign before they are sent into anesthesia. What, then, will happen to
their
children?

Those who are tough-minded may berate the mothers of these children. They may lacerate their fathers for not finding the employment that does not exist, or for which those educated in the schools provided to poor people cannot qualify. No matter how harsh, however, how will they condemn the children? Will they accuse these children, too, of lacking the resilience to stand tall? Some of these children are so poorly nourished, their confidence so damaged, or their muscle tissue so deteriorated, that they have a hard time standing up at all.

Visitors remark that places like the Martinique Hotel remind them of a penal institution. Prisons are for those who have committed crimes. What crime did the children in the “pigpen” or the Martinique commit? These children haven’t yet lived long enough to hurt us. They have not grown big enough to scare us. They have not yet learned enough to hate us. They are as yet unsoiled by their future indignation or our future fear. The truth is, they offend us only in one manner: by existing. Only by being born do they do injury to some of us. They take some of our taxes
for their food and concentrated formula, their clothing, and their hurried clinic visits and their miserable shelter. When they sicken as a consequence of the unwholesome housing we provide, they cost a little more; and, if they fail utterly to thrive, they take some money from the public treasury for burial.

So they offend us not by doing but by being. We pity them enough to put them in a warehouse, but we do not mark these buildings in a way that will attract attention. You could walk from Broadway to Fifth Avenue on Thirty-second Street a dozen times and never notice that there is a building on the left side of the street in which 400 families are concealed.

The Martinique Hotel is an enormous building and should not be easy to disguise; but the sign has no illumination and it’s hard to see the name of the hotel unless one studies it from across the street. For this reason, and because of the bleak lighting in the lobby and the filthiness of the glass doors, it is difficult to recognize this as a residence. It resembles less a dwelling place than a dilapidated movie house or a bus station. One would not imagine from the sidewalk that this building might be home to 1,800 human beings.

Concealment is apparently important.

T
he use of the unrestrictive term, “the homeless,” is in certain ways misleading. It suggests a uniform set of problems and a single category of poor people. The miseries that many of these people undergo are somewhat uniform. The squalor is uniform. The density of living space is uniform. The fear of guards, of drugs, and of irrational bureaucracy is uniform. The uniformity is in their mode of suffering, not in themselves.

No two people in the Martinique are quite alike; but no two people could be less alike than Rachel and a woman I call Kim. Kim stands out from almost every other person I have met here. Her energy may be a helpful and instructive counterpoint to much of the hopelessness and panic we have seen.

She’s in her twenties, has some education, and lives with her children in a room on the eleventh floor. She tells me that, before becoming homeless, she was living in a
building she was trying to restore. She was a preschool teacher and was working to support her children when her enterprising spirit met its match in the cold weather of New York.

The plumbing and heating in the house weren’t operating well. She had managed some repairs and was planning to replace the heater and install new pipes once she had saved the necessary funds. The heater ceased to function in December. She had no affluent relatives or friends to help her out.

Living in substandard housing on a tight and careful budget in the 1980s leaves no room for breakdown of the heating system in midwinter. In a matter of weeks she was reduced from working woman and householder to a client of the welfare system. Like many others, she was forced to sit and wait for hours with her children at the EAU. Like others, she was finally assigned to the Clemente shelter in the Bronx, one of the largest barracks used for housing homeless families at the time. Better informed than many mothers, she rejected placement at Clemente.

“There were people with tuberculosis in those barracks. I refused.”

In 1984, Kim and her children were assigned a placement at the Martinique, where they now dwell.

Kim, because she’s educated and articulate, is often interviewed by visiting researchers. When she is asked why she is here she says that it’s because her heating system doesn’t work. This answer is frustrating to researchers. Looking for more complicated data, they regard her answer as facetious—or a screen for something she is trying to conceal.

“‘What would it take to get you out of here?’ they ask. Like, what would it take to get my family values reconstructed? I tell them: Maybe ten or fifteen thousand dollars. ‘What would it take to get you back to work?’ I tell
them: ‘Help me get a loan to fix up one of those abandoned buildings.’”

The city, state, and federal government pay to the Martinique year after year the money that she might have used to have restored her home. Kim was doing, and would like to do again, exactly what the government ought to have been doing for the past ten years. She wasn’t waiting for the government. She wasn’t looking for a federal grant. She wasn’t asking anything for free. She gave her sweat. She could have used a loan.

The New York City Council calculates (1986) that it would cost between $4,500 and $30,000 for the rehabilitation of each of 100,000 vacant units that the city owns in buildings seized for nonpayment of taxes. Others estimate that total (“gut”) rehabilitation of some of these units may run higher—up to $65,000 each. An average rehabilitation cost in 1987 may be $50,000. Even this—a one-time cost—is less than what the city spends to house a family of five for two years in the Martinique.

“I know Mr. Tuccelli.” She speaks of him more comfortably than many tenants do. “‘I’ll put you out of my hotel,’ he says. ‘You talk too much and give me too much trouble.’ I tell him: ‘Look, do you think that I like it here in your hotel? I am here because I have a broken furnace.’”

Mr. Tuccelli carries a pistol. Many women speak of this with fear but Kim does not. “It doesn’t bother me,” she says. “Listen! Mr. Tuccelli’s pistol didn’t put these people here. Mr. Tuccelli’s not my enemy. The guards and social workers aren’t my enemies. The system that puts all of these poor people in this building is what makes me scared. In a way, I kind of
like
Mr. Tuccelli. I see him sometimes looking worried—or unsure … I believe this whole thing makes him
very sad
. Does anybody like to run a prison?”

Like others, she reminds me that the Martinique is not
the worst of the hotels. She speaks of another hotel, the Brooklyn Arms: “There are families there who say they have
no
heat and
no
hot water. There are people who have been there for two years. After they’ve been there that long they begin to tell themselves that it’s forever. They stop getting dressed. They feel afraid to go outside. Once you’re out, no matter where, you don’t want to go back.”

She says this about the Brooklyn Arms: “The building is so dangerous that welfare workers won’t come to your room. You have to go down to the desk and beg for little things like toilet paper. The guards sell drugs. The place is run by somebody important. He’s married to an opera star. He gives a lot of money to the politicians. When things go wrong, when something terrible occurs, who do they blame? They blame the residents. They’re not going to blame someone with connections!”

Kim’s words are later confirmed and amplified by stories in the press and by the New York City Council. The hotel draws attention when a fire breaks out and incinerates four children. At that point, the press cites residents’ complaints that there was no fire-alarm system in the seventeen-story building and reports that rotting garbage is strewn about in roach-infested halls, that the owner is indeed the husband of an opera star, that his attorney is a former New York mayor named Robert Wagner. The press also confirms her point about political contributions by the operators of the Brooklyn Arms. A police investigation in July finds fifteen walkie-talkies allegedly used by hotel guards and others working for narcotics dealers. A report by members of the city council in November notes that, in order to call an elevator, “one must kick the door to the elevator shaft and yell….” Residents, the city council adds, “must negotiate … for toilet paper at the desk.”

In a final confirmation of Kim’s words, the death of the four children, one of whom was less than two years
old, is blamed upon their parents. The mother and father, it appears, had left the children in order to go out into the streets and search for cans and bottles that they could turn in for cash, perhaps in order to buy food. They are charged with “endangerment” and put in jail before their children can be buried. The city’s response is not to criticize the hotel management but to increase funds available for burying poor children.

Kim: “There are worse hotels than that. The Allerton is worse. Same thing there: You have to beg for toilet paper in the lobby. The Bayview—that’s in Brooklyn … Owned by a criminal. It costs a lot. I think it’s something like $100—more than here. One hotel, the Holland, makes $3 million every year. Most of these people owe the city money in back taxes. Does the city seize their buildings? No. But they’ll put a woman on the street because she owes $200 to her landlord.”

As she observes, however, hotel owners are not the real issue; giving more than brief attention to such individuals diverts from more important problems. Cities, moreover, can deal with such exposures easily. It is a common practice of officials everywhere, once an atrocious situation has been publicized, to make amends in a determined but selective manner. For this reason it is possible that the Brooklyn Arms or Martinique may have been shut down before too many years. It is also possible that the Martinique, which has received unusual scrutiny, may in time be turned into a showpiece of benevolence and order to discredit those who have condemned its recent practices.