Rachel and Her Children (3 page)

As families are compelled to choose between feeding their children or paying their rent, homelessness has taken on the characteristics of a captive state. Economic recovery has not relieved this crisis. Adults whose skills are obsolete have no role in a revived free market. “The new poor,” according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “are not being recalled to their former jobs, because their former plants are not being reopened…. Their temporary layoffs are from dying industries.”

Two million jobs in steel, textiles, and other industries, according to the AFL-CIO, have disappeared each year since 1979. Nearly half of all new jobs created from 1979 to 1985 pay poverty-level wages.

Increased prosperity among the affluent, meanwhile, raises the profit motive for conversion of low-income properties to upscale dwellings. The Conference of Mayors reported in January 1986 that central-city renewal has
accelerated homelessness by dispossession of the poor. The illusion of recovery, therefore, has the ironic consequence of worsening the status of the homeless and near-homeless, while diluting explanations for their presence and removing explanations for their indigence.

But it is not enough to say that this is not a “temporary” crisis: Congressional research indicates that it is likely to grow worse. The House Committee on Government Operations noted in April 1985 that, due to the long advance-time needed for a federally assisted housing program to be terminated, the United States has yet to experience the full impact of federal cuts in housing aid. “The committee believes that current federal housing policies, combined with the continuing erosion of the private inventory of low-income housing, will add to the growth of homelessness….” The “harshest consequences,” the committee said, are “yet to come.”

New York does more than any other city I have visited to serve the homeless. But what it does is almost imperceptible in context of the need.

New York is spending, in 1987, $274 million to provide emergency shelter to its homeless population. Of this sum, about $150 million is assigned to homeless families with children. Nonetheless, the growth in numbers of the dispossessed far outpaces city allocations. Nine hundred families were given shelter in New York on any given night in 1978; 2,900 by 1984; 4,000 by the end of 1985; 5,000 by the spring of 1987. The city believes the number will exceed 6,000 by the summer of 1988. With an average of 2.3 children in each homeless family in New York, and with a significant number of two-parent families in this group (many men, not being included on a woman’s welfare budget,
have not been recorded), these estimates suggest that over 20,000 family members will be homeless in New York by 1988: nearly the number of residents of Laramie, Wyoming, or Key West. This does not include the estimated increase in those homeless
individuals
(12,000 or more) who will be given shelter by the end of 1988; nor does it include at least another 40,000 people who will be refused or will no longer try to locate shelter. Nor does it include the hidden homeless (over 300,000). By 1990, the actual homeless, added to the swelling numbers of the hidden homeless, will exceed 400,000 in New York. The population of New York is 7 million.

There is another reason to examine New York City. New York is unique in many ways but, in homelessness as in high fashion, it gives Americans a preview of the future. Millions of Americans, secure at home on New Year’s Eve with relatives or friends, watch the celebration in Times Square on television as they face the promises or dangers of the year ahead. Almost half the homeless families sheltered in hotels in New York City now are living within twenty blocks of Forty-second Street and Broadway.

The Martinique Hotel at Herald Square and the Prince George Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street near Fifth Avenue, both under the same management, are the largest family shelters in New York—and, very likely, in America.

The first step brings a family to its Income Maintenance (welfare) center. If the center cannot offer shelter before evening, the family goes to one of a number of Emergency Assistance Units (EAUs), which are open all night and on weekends. The EAU assigns the family either to a barracks shelter (these large, sometimes undivided
buildings are called “congregate” shelters by the city) or to a hotel. For several years, city policy has been to send such families to a barracks shelter first, on the assumption that the publicized discomforts of these places—inability of residents to sleep or dress in privacy, for instance—will discourage families doubled up or living in substandard buildings from requesting shelter.
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Once families are placed in such a shelter, many are obliged to go back to their welfare center in the morning in the effort to restore lost welfare benefits. (Families are frequently cut off by sudden changes of address.) Many end up at an EAU at night hoping for assignment to a safer shelter. After the barracks, the next stopping place is likely to be one of a large number of “short-term” hotels, where a family may spend a night, a weekend, or part of a week, after which they go back to the EAU in the hope of being given a less temporary placement. This hope is generally disappointed. “Instead,” according to a study by the New York City Council, “the homeless family often must stay at another short-term hotel for a few days before returning to the EAU. This cycle can continue for months, even years.”

The luckier families are sometimes placed at this point in a “twenty-eight-day hotel.” The time limit is established by a number of hotels in order to deny the family occupancy rights, which take effect after a residence of thirty days. After this interval the family goes back to an EAU in the hope of being placed in one of the long-term hotels.

There are hundreds of families, however, who for various
reasons get no placement and spend weeks commuting between the daytime welfare center and the evening EAU. According to the New York Human Resources Administration (HRA), families are not to be forced to sleep all night at EAUs. As we will see, this has happened frequently. Because the HRA is “able to place a family anywhere in New York City,” the city council has observed, “this seemingly endless shuttling between hotels and shelters can come to resemble a game of ‘human pinball.’” Two thirds of these pinballs are dependent children.

The next stage, one that many families do not reach for months, is to be placed in one of the long-term hotels. There were fifty-five of these hotels when I first visited New York in 1985. There now are over sixty. Approximately 3,400 families had been placed in these hotels by 1986. The rest remained in congregate shelters, in short-term hotels, or (those who were very fortunate) in model shelters operated by nonprofit groups.

Of the hotels, eleven house more than 100 families each. Of these, all but three are in Manhattan. Six hotels, all in Manhattan, house a total of approximately 1,500 families. Although populations in particular hotels rise and fall somewhat inexplicably, the three largest (Prince George, Martinique, and Holland) together housed over 1,000 families at the start of 1986. While the Prince George housed 444 families and the Martinique 389, family size in the Martinique was larger than the norm, so more children may have been living in this building than in any other shelter in New York.
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The average length of stay in these hotels in 1986 was thirteen months. In the Martinique it was longer: sixteen
months. In one hotel, the Carter, near Times Square, length of stay had grown to nearly four years at the time of writing.

The city council notes that families living in two model shelters have a shorter length of stay: eight months and four months respectively. These are also the facilities that charge the city least for rental and provide the most effective social services, including help in finding housing. The city council believes this represents a strong rebuttal to the arguments in favor of “deterrence.” Comfortable and healthy shelter does not seem to foster lethargy or to induce dependence. We will return to this.

The next step for homeless families in long-term hotels is to begin the search for housing. For a number of reasons which we will learn directly from the residents of these hotels, getting out to search for housing is a difficult task. Because of the shortage of low-income housing, which has brought these people here to start with, the search they are obliged to undertake is almost always self-defeating. Even for public housing in New York, the waiting list contains 200,000 names. There are only 175,000 public housing units in New York. Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins calculates the waiting time at eighteen years.

After eighteen months of residence in a hotel, a family is allowed to use a city van to look for housing. At the Martinique, however, the waiting time is thirty months. Only thirty-five families in the Martinique have lived here long enough to meet this stipulation. Pregnant women in their third trimester and mothers with infants are now given first priority.

The small but excellent shelters operated by nonprofit groups charge the city $34 to $41 nightly to give housing
to a family of four. Hotels like the Martinique charge $63 nightly for a family of this size. Rents in the Martinique Hotel are said to be determined by the number of people in a room or by the number of rooms a family is assigned. Families of five or more are generally given two rooms. Average monthly rents may range from $1,900 (family of four) to about $3,000 (family of six). A barracks shelter costs $65 a night to house a family of four people; but additional costs for social services and administration, according to the
New York Times
, bring the actual cost of barracks shelters to about $200 nightly for a family of four—$70,000 if projected for a year. Cost and quality bear no relation to each other.

Several mothers of large families in the Martinique have observed that rental costs alone over the course of three years would be equal to the purchase price of a nice home. The city pays only one quarter of these hotel costs. The state pays an additional quarter. The remaining half is paid from federal funds.

If unsheltered, virtually none. If sheltered, and enrolled on all the proper lists, they receive some combination of the following: a twice-monthly AFDC allocation (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) to meet basic costs of life; a monthly food-stamp allocation; a “restaurant allowance,” calculated by Robert Hayes in 1986 at seventy-one cents per meal per person; a very small sum of money to pay transportation costs to aid in search of housing; Medicaid; an allocation for nutrition supplements to pregnant women and to children under five. This assistance—a major weapon in preventing infant death—is known as WIC (Women, Infants, Children). More than half the
women and children eligible for WIC in New York City don’t receive it.
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In addition to these benefits, a family in the Martinique receives a rental check for the hotel. This is a two-party check and must be obtained by going to a welfare center. The city requires families to travel, often considerable distances, to obtain these checks at welfare centers in the neighborhoods from which they were displaced. A woman living in the Martinique almost two years travels three hours by bus and subway twice a month, and waits an average of four hours, to receive the check she then hands over at the desk in the hotel.

We have seen the waiting period for public housing. For private housing a number of programs, both federal and local, offer subsidies to bridge the gap between the family’s income and prevailing rents. Chief among these is Section Eight, a federally supported plan that offers a “certificate” to an eligible family, which is then presented to a landlord as a guarantee that government will pay a certain portion of the rent. Federal cuts in Section Eight make these certificates quite scarce. The reluctance of landlords to accept them often renders their possession worthless. Once a certificate has been assigned, it must be used in a fixed period of time. In one familiar instance, a woman who has lived in several places like the Martinique has been “recertified” for seven years but cannot find a landlord to accept her.

Without subsidies, the maximum rent a family on welfare is allowed to pay in New York City is $244 for a family of three, $270 for a family of four. If the government were to raise these limits by $100, sufficient to approach the lowest rents in New York City, the cost would still be less than one-fifth what is spent for hotel rentals.
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Some of them are; and some of this group were probably as tortured and disordered long before they came here as they are right now. Most, if those I’ve come to know are a fair sample, certainly were not—not before the sledgehammer of dispossession knocked them flat. Many people in these buildings do need medical help; some need psychiatric care, which they are not receiving. But the focus of this book is not on ancillary aspects of the fact of homelessness. It is on the
meaning
of that fact. The emphasis, again, is not on individuals, though individual homeless people will be seen and heard from in these pages; the focus is on families and children. The focus, again, is not on “the urban underclass,” though some of the families we will meet are products of an underclass existence; the focus, rather, is on the way that homelessness
creates
an underclass, enhances the underclass that may already have existed, and, combining newly poor and always-poor together in one common form of penury, assigns the children of them all to an imperiled life. Black families represent the largest single group in New York City’s shelters; but many who are white, Hispanic, and of multiracial parentage are homeless too. All participate in one desegregating fact: absolute destitution which, unlike most other
aspects of life in America, is blind to color, race, or place of birth.