urban social policy

city. 'They treat you like an inmate," Springs said.

OUI\ LOCAL COI\1\ESPONDENTS

HIDDEN CITY New York has more homeless than it has in decades. What should the next mayor do?

BY IAN FI\AZIEI\

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 ex- actly. 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 "mod- ern 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 be- fore, 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 home- less shelters in the city. Imagine Yankee Stadium almost four-fifths full ofhome- less families; about eighteen thousand adults in families in New York City were homeless as ofJanuary, 2013, and more than twenty-one thousand chil- dren. 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 fre- quent the streets may have a philosoph- ical streak they share with passersby, and of course they sometimes panhan- dle. 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 transpor- tation, 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 passen- gers, 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 or- dinary 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 de- spite 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 pros- pect or a threat. I nodded back, genially.

Christina came down the sidewalk pushing a stroller. With her were her

THE NEW YOI\KEI\, OCfOBEI\ 28, 2013 39

nineteen-year-old daughter, her seven- teen-year-old son, her fifteen-year-old daughter, and two grandchildren. They had just picked up the younger grand- child from a shelter where she was liv- ing with her other grandmother. We all went in, lifting the strollers, and crowded into the small elevator. The se- curity person at the desk asked Chris- tina ifl was with her and she said I was. At the door to her fourth-floor apart- ment, she took out a single key, unat- tached 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 ofP.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 Bloom- berg. The program was cut. She lost the apartment, complicatedly, somehow without being evicted right away, al- though if she had been, she said, she would have qualified for other, prefera- ble housing.

An accordion file of documents leaned at her ankle. Everybody has doc- uments, but the homeless must keep theirs always close by. She showed me letters with letterheads and foxings and penci~ 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 smok- ing a lot of marijuana, and this course taught me how to recognize my triggers. Boredom was one of my triggers"), Ad- vanced Relapse Prevention, and My Change Plan. 'What I'm waiting for is

40 THE NEW YOI\KEI\, OCTOBER 28, 2013

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 hy- gienic-but I don't want to move. Sta- bility 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 mo- ment, sliding in silently like the check- out 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 eigh-

teen, 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 home- less kids, and only has about two hun- dred 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 O!reens and we had about three hours of sleep and then they brought us back

here at seven this morning to be reas- signed, 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?"

T o get to the PATH center, you take the No. 4 train to Grand Con- course-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 De- partment of Homeless Services offices on Beaver Street, in downtown Man- hattan), 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 hol- idays, city shutdown or hurricane disas- ter, PATH never closes.

Often, it is a parking lot of strollers, a basic part oflife 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 el- evators while standees press themselves against the walls. Plastic bags of posses- sions 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 child- hood 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 re- membered fondly by nobody. Staffers,

city officials, advocates for the home- less, 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, includ- ing the very old and infants, routinely spent the night there. In 2002, a six- teen-year-old boy killed himself when he learned that his family had to go back there. Linda Gibbs, now the dep- uty mayor in charge of Health and Human Services, which includes the Department of Homeless Services, was Mayor Bloomberg's first D.H.S. com- missioner. She took the new mayor on a tour of the E.A.U. one Sunday morn- ing 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 re- laxation. 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 ofits humane yet business- like approach to homelessness.

The "PA" in PATH's acronym-Pre- ventive Assistance--comes across force- fully 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 re- sources for those who truly merit them, PATH searches out every possible alter- native to city-funded shelter. Usually, its efforts focus on finding relatives with

"Please read back that last remark in a more murdery voice. "

•

whom the family seeking shelter can stay. Patiently and firmly and with end- lessly 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 Wil- liams 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 guaran- teed 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 cirys taxpayers "to call their representa- tives in Albany and say, We ain't gonna do this anymore.' " Had he elaborated, he could have put the blame on litera- ture. 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 Dick- ens affectingly described the squalor of the Five Points slum in what became Chinatown. Jacob Riis, a Danish immi- grant, read Dickens, and later filled his own expose, "How the Other Half Lives," with heart-wrenching, Dicken- sian 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 re- forming 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 cor- nerstone 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 De- pression ongoing and his mayoralty in its fift~ year, LaGuardia persuaded the

THE NEW '1'01\KER., OClDBER. 28, 2013 41

"lfyou can stand the cuteness, take a look at my cat. "

•

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 Calla- han 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 ad- dressed. In the prosperous decades fol- lowing 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 Bow- ery. In 1964, a team of researchers look- ing for people spending the night in the city's parks found only one homeless man.

42 THE NEW YOI\KEI\, OCTOBER 28, 2013

•

Then, all at once in the mid-seven- ties, homeless people seemed to be ev- erywhere. 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-occu- pancy 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 va- grancy. 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 oflivable 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 ad- vocacy for the homeless, he had a Cath- olic-school background-Archbishop Molloy High School, in ~eens, and Georgetown University. Mter 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 home- less 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 Oc- tober of 1979 on behalf of three home- less 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, un- sanitary, 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 Bow- ery. 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 pro- vided.'" Then he said, "In our presenta- tion 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 Oc- tober, and the plaintiffs asked for an expedited verdict because winter was coming on. While awaiting the de- cision, Hayes let Callahan stay at his apartment; with some companions they made a big Thanksgiving dinner. Later, after Callahan moved out, Hayes no-

ticed that his Archbishop Molloy High School class ring was missing.

On December 5, 1979, Justice An- drew Tyler, of the New York State Su- preme 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 re- quested seven hundred and fifty beds; the city, caught short, asked that the number be left flexible. Plaintiffs will- ingly agreed. Hayes knew that city officials had no idea how many homeless men there actually were. Soon, more than a thousand men were seeking shel- ter 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 alcohol- ism 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 toi- let paper in the bathrooms became the subjects of court orders. A consent de- cree in 1981 between the state and the city and the plaintiffs agreed on guide- lines to manage the requirements of the Callahan decision, but other suits con- tinued, including those which eventu- ally 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 shel- ter called the Saratoga Family Inn. It is on Rockaway Boulevard by J.F.K. Air- port, across the highway from one of those long-term parking lots which ele- vate 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 advertis- ing 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 re- porter. 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 peo-

ple coming out the door. Kiki had many long braids and an antic manner. Peo- ple 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 cor- ner 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 back- tracked to Brooklyn, changing at outly- ing stops. Broadway Junction, neat the Qieens-Brooklyn border, was jumping like Times Square. In Bedford-Stuyves- ant, I got off a C train at Nostrand Av- enue and walked a few blocks to the vast

~~ ~ L· G () :_,

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"Wait. Don't look. O.K, over my lift shoulder-is that God?"

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, orig- inally from Lake City, F1orida, who pre- fers to sleep on the street near the shel- ter-''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 as- pect, 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 shel- ter occupies another former psychiat- ric 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' " sworse.

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 wear- ing a pair of trousers that appeared to be riding very low, as the style now

''Even your sleep is curmudgeonly."

has it, but actually they were an optical illusion. The boxer shorts at the top of the trousers were a part of the garment itsel£

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 rap 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 down- town 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 Satur- day evening, but Rick was not around. In the Village, I found a few small home- less encampments under construction hoardings, but the only person I recog- nized 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 illumi- nated 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 blueT -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 won- dering 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, accompa- nied by a woman with a clipboard. Peo- ple got sorted out into the right vehi- cles. 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 watch- ing 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 depar-

tures and arrivals occupy the subbase- ment 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.

D eputy 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 get- ting 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 (inappropri- ately, 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 mil- lions, 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 gen- eral 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 re- markable thing. Gibbs gen- erally refers to them and to others in advocacy groups as "the litigants." The term ap-

plies, 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 Cal- lahan. She pronounces the word "liti- gants" 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, down- town, while Markee and Brosnahan told me of the many things the Bloom- berg administration had done wrong. On another afternoon, in a small con- ference room at City Hall, not far away, I met with Gibbs and two of her col- leagues 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 di- rectives 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

THE NEW YOI\1\ER, OCTOBER 28, 2013 45

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 vacat- ing all preceding court orders and re- placing 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 mis- take 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 de- cades' 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 per- manent 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 avail- ability, and because we discovered that the chance of getting Section 8 was op- erating 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 per- manently 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

46 THE NEW YOI\J(EJ\. OCTOBER 28. 2013

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 ad- ministration wanted to start a new rent- subsidy program. But when they an- nounced, 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 apart- ment's market rent and thirty per cent of the renter's income. When asked about the program by the News, Markee pre- dicted 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. com- missioner, announced that no Advan- tage recipients had gone back to being homeless, and he quoted Markee's ear- lier prediction derisively, without men- tioning him by name. But in 2011 the state, facing a budget shortfall, with- drew 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 re- turned to the shelter system.

The collapse of Advantage contrib- uted greatly to the rise in homeless numbers during Bloomberg's third term. Most of the heads of house- holds 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 con- dition of city life, and the possibility alarmed him. He said, 'We are too strong, and too smart, and too compas- sionate 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 Solu- tions Beyond Shelter: The Action Plan for New York City." The administra- tion'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 home- less 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 popula- tion was climbing every year, exacer- bated by the '08 market crash, and con- tinuing upward even after the crash's effects on the city had begun to abate.

Faced with questions about these numbers-evidence of what was shap- ing up as the worst failure of his ad- ministration-the Mayor grew peevish. He blamed "the advocates" for Advan- tage's failure, saying that they had lob- bied to end the Advantage program (they supported ending it only because they wanted to replace it with some- thing better, they countered). Here- ported 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 obliga- tion, 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 deter- mination 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 reputa- ble organization."

T he difference in philosophy is fun-damental, and it goes way back. In the years after the Civil War, a Mas- sachusetts 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 work- ing." 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 adminis- tration has subscribed to it. The May- or's plan to reduce homelessness has al- ways 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 stan- dards 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 be- gin with, they had to look for jobs and apartments, attend regular meetings with social workers, and obey all shel- ter rules. Their homelessness was mostly their fault, and so their behav- ior had to change.

Then, there's the other philosophy, which says that it's not their fault. What the homeless need, this other philoso- phy 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 char- acter but a lack of places in the city where they can afford to live and ofjobs that pay a decent wage. The problem

5K.ETCHBOOK. BY BAI\IW BUTT

'This is the break room, where we watch reruns of classic security footage."

•

is not inside but outside. No change in personal behavior is going to make rents cheaper. According to this phi- losophy, the PATH center's relentless search for relatives with whom appli- cants for shelter can double up or tri- ple 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 danger- ous 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 pov- erty 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 York- ers. 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 thou- sand 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 spend- ing more than thirty per cent of her in- come. If you multiply 3.1 by eight hours a day by five days a week, you get a hun-

48 THE NEW YOI\KEI\. OCTOBEI\ 28. 2013

•

dred and twenty-four hours; a week only has a hundred and sixty-eight hours.

The number of market-rate rental apartments available to those oflow in- come 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 exis- tence of so many people who are home- less 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 in- come in rent and that others are living doubled up and tripled up and in un- improved basements and in furnace rooms-conditions that recall the days ofJacob 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 compar- ative authority the C.F.H. has gained

thereby, its suggestions are likely to be more listened to. Joe Lhota, the Repub- lican 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 resi- dents listed their previous dwelling as an out-of-state address.

Bill de Blasio, the probable next mayor, wants to ease the D.H.S. restric- tions determining who qualifies for shelter, set aside public-housing va- cancies for the homeless, come up with a new rent-subsidy plan involv- ing a voucher system by which rent- challenged tenants can afford their own apartments, and build a hundred thou- sand new units oflow-income housing. Campaign contributions he has re- ceived from slum landlords who profit from running crummy shelters worry some observers, and should; the condi- tion 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 hous- ing 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 resent- ment, as ifby 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 carry- ing 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 O!Ieen. A family member of Jay's was about to show up with Qyeen's cage and food when I finally declined. Jay and I talked on the phone a few times after that-the fam- ily member's cell phone had my num-

ber. 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. Hershel- ter apartment, which she showed me, was spotless. Paul, an older West In- dian 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 han- dler and shipper in Staten Island and was sleeping on the couches of friends. Sherron, 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 ofher 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 re- mind me of the ghostly streaks on pho- tos of the city from long ago, where the camera's slow shutter speed could cap- ture 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 Gonz- zales-could still be reached after a few weeks had passed. That their cell phones continued to work made them also pho- tographable, and Springs's portrait ac- companies 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 contro- versies. 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 ofMayor 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 sup- ply under Koch, and as these problems intensified his administration adopted a plan of setting aside buildings that had been seized in tax default and re- habilitating 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 sub- sidized 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 be- came longer, and his weariness at his job greater, until finally he decided to quit. He did a stint with the presti- gious Manhattan firm ofO'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 ver- sus 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 super- market. After nine years, he moved back, to Hartsdale, New York, where he is now a senior vice-president at a company that pro'(ides 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 experi- ence 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 ac- cepted 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 rec- ognized 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 ad- vocates to do something about housing for the homeless he might not have been forced to undertake his in rem pro- gram. 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 veryun-Kochlike thing," Hayes said. "He thanked me." +

THE NEW YORKER. OCTOI}Eft 28. 2013 49

Note:  I  could  not  access    an  e-­‐version  of  this  article  that  was  published  in   Urban  Geography  32  (2011),  933-­‐955  

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE

Don Mitchell Syracuse University

Under Review

Urban Geography

Abstract:

The goal of this paper is to set the context for the other papers in this

special issue. The issue asks, To what degree is homelessness in developed cities

in Europe and Asia “Americanizing”? In what ways are the histories and

geographies of homelessness converging on something like an “American”

model, and in what ways are they diverging? Using a historic-geographic

approach to understanding the production of homelessness in the United States

and the varying urban and national responses to homelessness that have resulted

(both cultural responses generally and policy and legal responses more

particularly), the paper seeks to provide a synoptic overview of homelessness in

the United States. Surveying changing policies and practices from the colonial

period to the present, the paper explains how homelessness in the United States

has developed and changed, and why it has taken the specific social form that it

has. By doing so, it establishes a basis of comparison for the papers that follow.

2

INTRODUCTION

To call homelessness in the United States a “crisis,” is to abuse language.

Homelessness is a permanent and necessary part of the US political economy (Marcuse

1988), even if its specific form, its intensity, and the way it is managed, is historically and

geographically variable.

Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, the nature of

homelessness in the US altered significantly, leading to a more diverse, and much larger

street population than in the previous decades. The seemingly-sudden explosion of street

populations in the early years of the Reagan era led to a great deal of activism, often in

the face of a hostile national government, a rapid expansion of the emergency shelters,

experiments in a “continuum-of-care” approach to housing the homeless, and eventually

the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. With the deepening of

neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, however, the US witnessed what many commentators

refer to as “compassion-fatigue.” The expansion of the shelter system and the various

programs of the McKinney act seemed to do little to lessen the presence of visible

homeless people in cities. As cities were struggling to remake themselves as more

“competitive” in the markets for footloose capital, tourists, suburban visitors, and

gentrifiers, homeless people, and the facilities that served them (shelters, drop-in centers,

half-way houses, etc.), were seen more and more as liabilities.

The response was a criminalization of homelessness in many cities. Laws were

passed that outlawed everything from sleeping outdoors, to sitting on sidewalks, to free

food giveaways. A traditional division between “deserving poor” (women, children, and

those who behaved themselves in ways dominant society deemed sufficiently grateful to

3

charity) and “undeserving poor” (men of working age, those who lived on the streets or

who refused to enter shelters or rehabilitation programs) was reasserted – with a

vengeance.

While anti-homeless laws were somewhat successful in pushing the most visible

homeless out of the most prominent public spaces, and while the boom-times of the

Clinton era encouraged the sense that those who remained homeless were somehow

themselves at fault, thus turning attention away from structural analyses of homelessness

in America (giving many a sense that 1990s policies of “tough love” for the homeless and

welfare rescission for the rest of the poor were successful), the current economic crisis

has led once again to a rapid increase in the population of the new homeless, increased

strain on the always inadequate emergency shelter and food systems, and a return of

visible street homelessness in most cities. Despite a new ideology of “housing first” for

homeless people (displacing the old continuum of care model that asserted that homeless

people’s problems with drugs, alcohol, or mental illness had to be tacked before stable

housing was offered), the public housing sector and broader low-income housing markets

have been eviscerated by forty years of underinvestment, gentrification, and outright

destruction, suggesting that possibilities quickly addressing the latest manifestation of

homelessness in the United States are extremely limited.

The purpose of this paper is to fill out the above history of the changing nature of

homelessness and responses to it, while placing that history in its political-economic

context. In doing so, it will show how a specifically “American-style” homelessness has

been created and open the question of the degree to which this “style” has been replicated

as neoliberalism – that mix of market adulation, punitive policing of the poor, and

4

traditional notions of individualism – has been globalized in the wake of the collapse of

state socialism and the scaling back of social welfarism. Precisely this topic will be

examined in the following papers.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES

It is customary, in both academic and policy circles in the United States, to base

analyses of homelessness on the question, “Who are the homeless?” (e.g. Blau 1993;

Erickson, and Wilhelm 1986, Part IV). This question is answered at the aggregate level

by seeking to determine the percentage of homeless people who are mentally or

physically ill, addicted to drugs or alcohol, have criminal records, or suffer from some

other moral impairment or form of deviancy; such analyses seek to parse the homeless

population by race, gender, age, and other characteristics. Homelessness is understood in

this discourse as a problem of “impaired capacity,” and those who suffer from this

malady are themselves often seen as the cause of “structural problems in the economy”

(Hopper et al 1985, 189; cf. Tier 1998). In other words, homelessness is argued to be a

characteristic of persons, rather than a condition of the political economy.

The Deserving and Undeserving Poor

Such an argument reinforces the traditional divide in American society (and the

west more broadly) between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In Colonial

America, this distinction was subsumed under a broader one differentiating between

“neighbor” and “stranger,” a distinction that “weakened but never disappeared” as it was

supplemented in the “early nineteenth century with a distinction between the ‘worthy’

5

and ‘unworthy’ poor” (Rothman 1987, 11-12).1 The characteristics of the poor – are they

neighbors or strangers, Americans or immigrants, able bodied or infirm, young or old? –

determined their moral standing, and thus both the cause of their poverty and the

appropriate response (the provision of shelter, incarceration in jail or work house, or

being driven out of town). As Hopper et al (1985, 189) summarize, “Despite stubborn

indications to the contrary, homelessness has traditionally been viewed as a problem of

troubled – and troublesome – individuals. The terms of the accusation may change, but

the logic does not.”

The logic is an ideological one that hides an economic one. The process of what

Marx called “primitive” or “original” accumulation in England – the engrossment of land

into great estates, the enclosure of commons, the breaking down of feudal and guild

bonds, and the rise of manufacturing and industry – violently uprooted peasants and

created whole armies of “masterless men:” “beggars, robbers, vagabonds” (Marx 1987

ed. 686). To control these new classes of the dispossessed there developed “a bloody

legislation against vagabondage” that sought to control movement, compel labor, and

punish those who resisted (Beier 1986; Hill 1972; Ribton-Turner 1887). Both the

problem of “masterless men” and the solution were imported to America with the

colonies – for example, poor laws that prescribed “pillorying, branding, flogging, or ear

cropping … those migrants who could not give ‘a good and satisfactory accounting of

their wandering up and down’” (DiPastino 2003, 6, quoting Jones 1984, 39), enforced

labor in the workhouse, on the rock pile, or in the harvest for even for those who could,

or the simple expedient of “warning out” (that is, forcing back on the road) those who

6

showed up in town with no visible means of support, and were undeserving of local

sympathy (Rothman 1987, 12).

Vagrancy laws were a key means of controlling both the “wandering poor” and

freed or escaped slaves and they reinforced a sharp divide between insiders in society

(including those who might be deserving of some charity) and outcasts who threatened

the stability and order of that society (Cresswell 2001; Monkonnen 1984; Schweik 2009).

Yet, “the poor of the nineteenth century city were everywhere apparent. Begging was

commonplace. Rag-pickers foraged through garbage for discarded and scrap food. ‘Wild

children’ roamed the streets” (Hopper 2003, 30). Behind this visible façade of poverty

lay “a huge reservoir of sickly, poorly paid, badly housed, and frequently unemployed

people,” a “disreputable poor” that “charity did little to ease … preferring instead to

pioneer new disciplinary techniques for their edification” (Hopper 2003, 30-31).

Tramping and the Rise of Skid Row

Nonetheless such outcasts were, many of them, an economic necessity. Not just

Marx’s lumpenproletariat, “tramps” were a vital source of flexible and seasonal labor in

both ante- and postbellum America, harvesting bonanza wheat crops, building canals and

railroads, felling trees in the forests, and so forth (DiPastino 2003; Higbie 2003;

Monkkonen 1984). Such labor was particularly important, and particularly visible, in the

years after the Civil War. The rapid industrialization of the United States, and the rapid

engrossment of land that accompanied it (complicated, but by no means eliminated by

various homestead policies), created a massive demand for mobile labor. As Kusmer

(1987, 23) writes, “The increasing number of homeless men during the very period when

7

the United States was emerging as an industrial nation was no coincidence. The new

vagrancy was an indigenous aspect of a country in rapid transition from an agricultural

and small-town society to one centered in great cities.”

Three crucial results of the rise of this massive “reserve army” of migratory and

often homeless men (and some women) are particularly important for understanding

contemporary homelessness in America. The first is that it generated a serious moral

panic among the emerging bourgeoisie, especially in times of economic crisis (e.g. 1873-

1878; 1893; 1912-1913) when the bourgeoisie’s own precarious social stability was at

risk, and when the army of tramping workers exploded in size (Cresswell 2001).2 As a

result vagrancy laws were reinforced and new policing methods – sometimes quite

violent – were introduced to contain and corral the wandering poor while separating the

worthy (those willing and able to work) from the unworthy (those less willing or able, or

those deemed “agitators”) (Monkkonen 2004). These “tramp scares” expressed

themselves as “struggles between the propertied and unpropertied over the use of public

space, fears about the growth of a propertyless proletariat, and anxieties about the loss of

traditional social controls in America” (DiPastino 2003, 8) – all struggles, fears, and

anxieties strongly revived in the current era of homelessness.

The second, not unrelated, result was the development of a specific geography of

homelessness in the United States. On the road, this geography took the form of hobo

“jungles” or encampments at the edges of cities, in disused spaces along rail lines, and so

forth. For workers between jobs, jungles often served as spaces of community (not

without hierarchy and internal forms of exploitation and domination among the hobos),3

places where the sting of the police baton was less frequent, and zones of relative safety

8

from a deeply hostile settled society. In cities skid rows – whole districts of single-room

occupancy hotels (SROs), flophouses, municipal lodging houses, cheap bars and cafés,

labor agencies, missions, whorehouses, and other businesses and services geared towards

poor and migratory workers – developed at the edges of downtowns. Tramping workers

“wintered over” in skid row, and returned to them between short-term jobs in the

harvests, mines, and woods. A “home-guard” class of relatively immobile, frequently

unemployable (because of age, infirmity, or addiction) “bums” found cheap housing – or

at least a bed in a mission – and a relatively benign police presence in skid row (Bahr

1970, 1973; Groth 1994; Hoch and Slayton 1989; Kasinitz 1984; McSheehy 1979;

Schneider 1984).4 “Unfit mothers,” prostitutes, and other poor women also found shelter

on skid row, though boarding houses in working class neighborhoods housed many

working women, while settlement houses in various districts provided a home for the

most “deserving” of the others. Skid rows thus developed in most American cities as

specialized districts for housing, maintaining, and managing the massive (and in fact

highly differentiated – DiPastino 2003, 8-9) reserve army of labor, an army that expanded

and shrunk with the economic fortunes of the nation.

The third result, concomitant in part on the “discovery” of this emerging

geography, was the development of an extensive social science literature on the

phenomenon of vagrancy, tramping – and homelessness. Economic crisis always brought

with it a significant rise in the numbers of those (including large numbers of women and

children) seeking shelter in lodging houses, police station basements, or shantytowns

erected in parks or on wasteland, but the phenomenon of wandering men, and the

perceived disaffiliation from society that marked them never disappeared. Skid row was,

9

by the beginning of the twentieth century, apparently becoming home to a permanent

class of the unemployed and semi-employed. Researchers in the emerging social

sciences sought to parse out just who it was that habituated skid row (see, e.g.

Solenberger 1911), and to explain their disaffiliation from family and the comforts of a

settled home as some sort of perversity or personal defect (Parker 1919), even a way of

life chosen by men divorced from the norms of society (Anderson 1923). Homelessness

– a condition not always marked by a lack of shelter, but rather characterized by a lack of

tight ties to bourgeois family and society – was increasingly seen as a function of

individuals’ characters (Hopper et al 1985; Hopper 2003; Cresswell 2001), as political-

economic analyses of the role of hoboes and other marginal workers society were

downplayed.5 The effect was to classify homeless people as external to society, rather

than as integral to its functioning. The preferred intervention, therefore, was typically

charity and moral instruction (as with the Salvation Army and the thickets of Christian

“rescue” missions that sprouted in skid rows across the country) that sought to reintegrate

those that could be saved.

Whatever the theories of the social scientists, and whatever the interventions of

the charities, both were overwhelmed by the explosion of need that marked the

Depression. Charity collapsed under the weight of both numbers and the contradictions

of its own ideology as millions lost their houses and sought shelter wherever they could.

On the basis of surveys, the hobo-sociologist Nels Anderson estimated in the spring of

1933 that 1.5 million people slept in public shelters or out of doors, and additional

millions filled the flophouses and commercial lodging houses; more still, no doubt, were

doubled up with relatives. The term “homeless” was newly reserved “for those unable to

10

pay for shelter of any sort” (DiPastino 2003, 200-201). Other research exposed the

appalling conditions – the dilapidated and overcrowded houses, the airless, firetrap

tenements, the neighborhoods still without plumbing or safe water – within which much

of the working class lived.6 And unprecedented migrations of new “tramps,” new

migratory workers – the masses, often whole extended families, fleeing drought and

economic collapse in the Dust Bowl states – created housing and political crises in rural

and urban areas alike (Stein 1974; Gregory 1989). Economic explanations of the new

homeless and poorly housed were unavoidable, as were solutions targeted at the

conditions that produced homelessness, rather than the characteristics of the homeless

themselves.7

Welfare, American Style

Keynesian interventions in the U.S. economy beginning in the 1930s and 1940s

were halting, discontinuous, and frequently contradictory. Nothing like Britain’s

Beveridge Plan for post-war Britain, and certainly nothing like the social welfarism of

Europe, was ever developed. But the effect of what interventions there were on the

nature of homelessness, and its geography, was profound. The Wagner-Steagall Housing

Act of 1937 created a national program of public housing for the first time. Imagined in

the first instance as workers’ housing, the act had the effect of expanding the pool of low-

cost housing, and relieving pressure on overcrowded tenement districts. The major 1949

amendment to the act promoted slum clearance and urban development as well as

rehousing in massive projects (Hackworth 2007, 44-53). These acts, others that followed,

together with the heavy subsidization of suburban housing (through tax breaks as well as

11

through the creation of the federal interstate highway system), had profound effects on

skid rows in many cities, beginning a long decline of single-room occupancy hotels

(SRO) and rooming house districts (Groth 1994, chapter 9; Fishman 1987; Jackson

1985).

Make-work programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works

Progress Administration, provided immediate relief to the un- and underemployed,

especially young and single men, eating into the traditional pool of recruits for the

migratory labor forces. The military draft, war-oriented production, and thus full

employment of World War II had an even more profound effect.8 State planning of

industry, some support for unionizing, the invention of Social Security, the development

of state and corporate pensions, a modicum of health insurance, and what eventually

came to be known as the “Great Compromise” between capital and labor after the war (a

compromise that traded high wages and job security for labor peace), all radically

transformed the labor market, cementing a “fordist” regime of accumulation and social

regulation. While some transient labor was still required in the economy in seasonal

industries like agriculture, the bracero guest-worker program (1942-1964), helped assure

that such work would be conducted largely by a non-white and immigrant labor force,

one often excluded from the fruits of the post-war boom (Galarza 1964, 1977). “The

Great Depression, which began by sending millions to lodging houses, jungle camps, and

public shelters,” DiPastino (2003, 219) concludes, “ended by confirming hobohemia’s

[skid row’s] demise and recommitting the nation to the suburban domestic ideal.”

As a result, the structure of homelessness – and most especially its representation

– changed. Women and children were never absent from the ranks of the homeless, nor

12

were people of color, all critical members of the lower rungs of the working class –

though neither were they counted as part of the new, post-war homeless. These homeless

were the residents of the remaining SROs, missions, and lodging houses, and they tended

to be white, elderly, male, and rarely transient. They were frequently alcoholic. They

were either minimally employed, or unemployable. They were modern society’s outcasts

(Cayo Sexton 1986).9 They were “disaffiliated men” – disaffiliated from the nuclear

family (both the ideal and the reality) and disaffiliated from society. Urban sociologists

“characterized skid row as a world apart, an isolated enclave of damaged white men who

had failed to take up their proper roles as family breadwinners” (DiPastino 2003, 231;

Hopper 2003, 45; cf. Bahr 1970; Bahr and Caplow 1971). They were truly the

undeserving poor, since they had failed to avail themselves of the benefits of the new

postwar era. In this way, despite (and probably because of) the construction, at least in

part, of what Jessop (2002) termed the Keynesian welfare national state, homelessness

could be made to fit a traditionally liberal ideology, in which opportunities for individual

success were everywhere available, and thus lack of success was a function of either a

character fault, a (bad) choice, or some combination of the two. But one salient fact

remained the same: the homeless were at root people “whose presence represents

unneeded labor,” and as such they remained “a drain on households [and] an affront to

the peaceful enjoyment of civic space” (Hopper 2003, 45).

THE GREAT U-TURN10

“So long as the appearance of unusual numbers of homeless men (in addition to

the accepted residuum of ‘unemployables’) can be framed as a temporary aberration,”

13

writes urban anthropologist Kim Hopper (2003, 46), “the fiction can be maintained that

homelessness signifies nothing other than deranged mentalities, bad habits, or faulty

coping skills of those whom it affects.” By the early 1980s, this fiction was, in fact, quite

difficult to maintain. Uneven recovery from the deep recession of the 1970s, the rapid

slide into a new recession in 1981, and the massive deindustrialization that had begun in

some areas as early as the 1960s, but really gathered force after the oil shocks of 1973-

1974; the steady erosion of union rights and benefits since the end of World War II;

changes in housing markets; and the defunding of public housing: all these combined to

produce a massive wave of new homelessness as Ronald Reagan took office as

President.11

Dedicated to dismantling what was left of the welfare state, the Reagan

administration helped usher in what Jessop (2002) awkwardly calls the Schumpterian

workfare postnational regime, but which has more generally come to be known first as

“post-fordism” and now by the shorthand “neoliberalism” (cf. Harvey 2005). Marked by

a market fundamentalism (in ideology, if not practice), a new flexibilism in labor markets

was pushed at the expense of employment guarantees, and wages for working people

were forced downward. The pace of deindustrialization in core countries, including

especially America, increased (Bluestone and Harrison 1982; Harrison and Bluestone

1990). Whole towns and cities were wiped out as footloose factions of capital scoured

the globe looking for cheap labor, lax environmental regulations, or large subsidies and

tax breaks (see, e.g. Linkon and Russo 2003). Factions of capital that were locally

rooted, to say nothing of local people, struggled to find ways to survive in an

environment where places were now in competition with each other (Harvey 1989, 2001,

14

chapter 16). A new regime of accumulation and new modes of social regulation were in

the making. Homelessness both resulted from these processes and, many thought,

exacerbated them – and, as we will see, created a particular challenge both for

accumulation and regulation.

The Reassertion of Structure

Between 1979 and 1985, 10 million jobs were lost in the U.S. economy; over one

million jobs were wiped out in the manufacturing sector alone during the Reagan years

(Wolch and Dear 1993, 4). Those that remained were radically restructured in the years

that followed, as the assault on unions, wage guarantees, basic welfare entitlements and

the public housing sector, continued unabated. The result was a “new” homelessness that

could not so easily be ascribed merely to personal character faults. Estimates in the mid-

1980s of the number of people who were homeless, either chronically or at some point

during a year, ranged from between 250,000 and 3 million (Kondratas 1986). What

marked this new homelessness was its sudden visibility. Streets, especially streets in the

Central Business District, were full of homeless people. They were young and old men,

women, children, teens, whole families. They were disproportionately Black. No longer

confined to the old skid row, the homeless littered the sidewalks and parks on the

everyday paths of urban residents and suburban commuters alike. In some places – parks

like San Francisco’s Golden Gate or New York’s Tompkins Square, empty lots like at the

edge of Los Angeles’ historic skid row – large shanty towns and encampments

developed, a sight not seen since the Depression. Shelters were overwhelmed.

Homelessness looked like a crisis.

15

It was a crisis that clearly reflected massive transformations in the economy

designed to restock the ranks of the reserve army. By 1983, to take just one indicator,

15% of the US population lived below the official poverty line (Wolch and Dear 1993,

7). By 1985, one million fewer households were receiving federal housing assistance

than before Reagan was elected (Wolch and Akita 1989). Arguments that individualized

homelessness at the expense of structural accounts seemed to do a poor job of explaining

this new homelessness. So too did the traditional division between deserving and

undeserving poor blur, if not disappear altogether.12

As a result, due to the work of a growing cadre of “homeless advocates” (e.g. the

then-new Coalition on the Homeless, as well as innumerable local shelter operators and

other activists), as well as movements of the homeless themselves (such as the Center for

Creative Non-Violence in Washington, DC), the crisis was addressed, to some degree,

through a massive and rapid expansion of the shelter system (over strong resistance from

the Reagan Administration), made possible in part by the McKinney-Vento Act of 1987.

A patchwork of shelters, some government-operated, many private charities, developed

in all major cities to address immediate needs for shelter.13

The 1980s crisis that so rapidly expanded the ranks of the homeless was a crisis

for people made homeless, of course, but it was also a crisis of capital. The massive

deindustrialization of the 1970s and 1980s, was accelerated, if not launched, by the

multiple crises of 1973-1975: the oil embargo-induced global recession, the breaking

down of the post-war “Bretton Woods” monetary agreements, and most of all the

increased falling rates of profit in the key industries of the “fordist” era such as coal,

steel, automobiles, etc. These crises expressed themselves in the United States as “a

16

deliberate structural adjustment” (Gilmore 2007, 40; Davis 1986) that freed some capital

to seek new places for investment.

In some cases these were literally places, as capital sought safe havens in the built

environment (Harvey 1982, 1989; Smith 1990, 1996). Redevelopment zones bulldozed

into existence as a result of the housing acts, and older neighborhoods ripe for

gentrification, both served as magnets for footloose capital. There was, in Smith’s (1979)

memorable phrase, a “back to the city movement by capital.” His full line is that it was a

“back to the city movement by capital not people,” but it is more accurate to say it was a

back to the city movement by capital at the expense of poor people. Not only were

redevelopment zones targeted, but so were skid rows and other inner-city neighborhoods.

In downtown San Diego, for example, considered by its Chamber of Commerce to be the

“crown jewel” of redevelopment and gentrification in the United States, as many as half

of the 5000 SRO rooms existing in 1976 were gone by 1988, and rents on the remainder

increased 80% between 1980 and 1985 alone. New high-end apartment towers, boutique

hotels, a festival market place, and a fully gentrified “Gaslamp Quarter” replaced not

only the SRO rooms, but also a long-standing mission, shelters, and other services for the

poor and homeless.14 The street homeless population exploded, even as services for them

were eliminated (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, 49-58). The back to the city movement of

capital – gentrification – in other words, both produced homelessness, and exacerbated

the difficulty of life for those made homeless.15

Simultaneously, and whatever the structural causes of homelessness, the

continued (and growing) presence of homeless people in cities was seen as a threat to

localized capital accumulation under these new conditions of footlooseness (Mitchell

17

1997). Homeless people – and their services – in CBDs and nearby areas targeted for

gentrification were said to deter inward investment as well as the willingness of tourists

and suburban shoppers, two central pillars of the new, post-deindustrialized, urban

economy. In an era of heightened competition between places many cities found it a

structural necessity to remove homeless people and their services (Mair 1986). Despite

the blurring of the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in the early 1980s,

and despite a great deal of public support for the expansion of the shelter system, pressure

mounted in most cities to move shelters out of downtown. As a result, new “service-

dependent ghettos” sprang up in disinvested parts of many cities (Dear and Wolch 1987).

As importantly, it quickly became apparent that much of this public support for

homeless people was abstract, in that neighborhoods quickly organized to keep shelters

and other services out. Sometimes this Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) mentality was an

overt circling of the class wagons, or a raw expression of fear of the scary other (Amster

2004; Brinnegar 2003; Takahashi 1998). At other times it was expressed in a highly

sophisticated set of arguments about spatial equity, structural solutions to homelessness

(which shelters do little to address), and the availability of better sites elsewhere (Lyon-

Callo 2001). The location of services in poor and working class neighborhoods (Wolch

and Dear 1993, 169), or their outright banishment from whole jurisdictions (Amster

2004; Brinnegar 2003), thus reflected the geography of power in contemporary cities. It

was – and is – a geography of power that often works through a scrim of compassion.

Appeals to volunteer at soup kitchens rarely go unheeded, and holiday-time fundraising

drives, often featuring the face of a pitiable elderly homeless man, or a darling but

disheveled homeless child (with Madonna-like mother), are an annual success. This is a

18

distanced compassion. As one shelter operator in San Diego commented, her agency

received “great donations from businesses that are located blocks away,” while those

nearby both did not support the shelter and on many occasions actively fought its right to

be there at all (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, 64-65).

The Great Ideological U-Turn

Even distanced compassion began to break down within a few short years after

the explosion of the “new homeless” in the early 1980s. Even before the end of the

decade commentators were beginning to speak of “compassion fatigue” among the

populace (Millich 1994), as the massive expansion of the shelter system, the invention of

various “continuum of care” models for addressing homeless people with a multiplicity

of impairments, and other attempts at “solving” the homeless problem proved to be of no

avail. From a structural perspective, it is hardly surprising that the streets of American

cities remained packed with homeless men, women, and children at the end of the Reagan

era (which was also the highpoint of the first wave of gentrification: cf. Smith 1996). It

is also hardly surprising that the early successes of homeless advocates – the winning of a

right to shelter in New York, the passing of the McKinney act, and various local,

rearguard actions that defended the rights of homeless people to be on the streets – were

met with a strong, coordinated ideological campaign designed to reassert homelessness as

a personal characteristic, and even more as a personal choice. Conservative newspaper

columnists (George Will, John Leo), conservative think tanks (American Enterprise

Institute, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute), and special-interest law scholars

worked assiduously to re-demonize the homeless, reframing homelessness not as a result

19

of economic restructuring, and certainly not as a concomitant and necessary part of

capitalism, but rather as a problem of public order (Tier 1993, 1998; MacDonald 1995)

and of legal systems gone awry.

If the singular achievement of the New Deal of the 1930s and the development of

a rudimentary welfare state in the 1950s was to admit that some dysfunctionality in

society was structural and an inevitable part of the normal workings of capitalism, it took

a generation for the courts to catch up. Vagrancy and other laws that punished the poor

for a condition beyond their control remained on the books, and enforced, until the 1960s

when courts engaged in what conservative law scholars called a “constitutional

revolution” (Ellickson 1996). Among other things (such as finding new protections

against police abuse and for the rights of suspects), this revolution struck down what are

known as “status crimes.” In the early 1960s, for example, the U.S Supreme Court found

that jailing someone for being an addict was a violation of protections against cruel and

unusual punishment (J. Smith 1996). By 1973, after a number of lower courts had

already similarly struck down vagrancy laws for punishing the status of being poor (and

for violating the right to travel by imposing an unfair means test on that right), the

Supreme Court declared vagrancy laws to be overly vague and unenforceable. Such laws

handed too much discretion to the police to “move along” those they did not like.

Miscreants now had to be punished for what they did, not for who they were. In a sense,

in other words, this “constitutional revolution” sought to fashion a legal regime that

better matched the post-war welfare state’s regime of accumulation and system of social

regulation.

20

As the guarantees of that welfare state were wiped out in the 1980s and 1990s,

and as ever-larger numbers of people ended up on the streets, conservative critics called

for a reassertion of order. What was at stake, for them, was not status, but misbehavior.

The new, revolutionized legal regime was inadequate to the problems of public order that

faced cities (Ellickson 1996; Tier 1993, 1998). Leading the charge was the influential

analysis, A Nation in Denial (Baum and Burnes 1993) which argued forcefully that

homelessness indeed was a problem of individuals, and especially of individuals who

were addicted or mentally ill. Structural explanations of homelessness, they argued, did

more harm than good to homeless people since they led towards inappropriate solutions

(such as shelter, housing, and various other forms of welfare), rather than address the

actual needs of addicted and ill people. While the intent of Baum and Burnes (1993) was

not to recriminalize homelessness, their analysis was latched onto by those – from

pundits to policy makers – who wanted exactly that. Given that homelessness was a

function of disordered individuals, some even suggested rounding them up and

“quarantining” them on decommissionsed military bases (Hamill 1993, cited in Mitchell

2003, 179).16 Others, not going quite so far, sought new laws that outlawed many of the

things homeless people do (sleeping in public, sitting on sidewalks, begging for change,

collecting recyclables) in the name of restoring order in the wake of the constitutional

revolution. For them, the “freedom” hailed by the revolutionized legal regime of the

1960s had brought little more than “chaos” to the streets of American cities (MacDonald

1995).

A dual ideological move was at work. In the first place, homelessness was

(re)defined down to a set of individual characteristics and, especially choices. Whether

21

or not Baum and Burnes (1993) supported criminalizing homelessness, they provided its

ideological justification:

By perpetuating the myth that the homeless are merely poor people in need of

housing, … advocates reinforce and promote the most pernicious stereotypes

about poverty in America. The vast majority of poor people in America are not

homeless. Poor people do not live on the streets, under bridges, or in parks; do not

carry all their belongings in shopping carts or plastic bags; do not wear layers of

tattered clothing and pass out or sleep in doorways; do not urinate or defecate in

public places; do not sleep in their cars or encampments; do not harass or

intimidate others; do not ask for money on streets; do not physically attack city

workers and residents and do not wander in the streets shouting at visions and

voices (as quoted in Kelling and Coles 1996, 65; Mitchell 2003, 202-203).

Homelessness in other words, was a choice, and not a good one for either the individuals

or society. That it was a choice, according to Heather MacDonald (1995) of the

Manhattan Institute, was shown irrefutably by an experiment in San Francisco where few

street-homeless people given vouchers for a stay in a church shelter actually took them;

fewer used them. Of the 3000 general assistance recipients who claimed homelessness in

the mid-1990s, only 700 availed themselves of a program where they gave their $345

general assistance checks over to an advocacy organization that would arrange a voucher

for a stay in an SRO, returning a $65 (that is just over $2.day) allowance to the recipient

for all other expenses. In other words, homeless general assistance recipients were

choosing to be homeless, when there were other options available. The ability to make

22

such choices, to be in charge of one’s own life, was, of course a primary plank in the

dawning neo-liberal order (Harvey 2005).17

The second move undergirded the ideology of choice and freedom with a

discourse – and eventually set of rules – demanding “responsibility.” If one was to make

choices, then it was important that the freedom to do so was exercised responsibility. As

MacDonald (1995, 181) put it, “liberty consists not in overturning social rules, but mutual

adherence to them.” For those incapable of exercising responsibility, society had an

obligation to impose order, both for their own sake, and for the sake of the public at large.

If the economic reforms and social welfare dismantlements of the 1980s represented a

“roll-back” phase of neoliberalism, then the new rules on welfare recipients (time limits,

enforced job-searching, etc.), laws governing the behavior of homeless people (enforced

sobriety as a condition of shelter, laws against sitting down on the sidewalk), coupled

with this roll-back phase to initiate a “roll-out” phase of neoliberalism geared towards

making a new kind of responsible and accountable neoliberal social subject (Peck and

Tickell 2002). The effect was a fairly thorough ideological u-turn that reinvigorated the

classical divide between worthy and unworthy poor. The deserving were those willing to

accept responsibility for their condition, accept charity or other interventions with a

proper degree of humility, begin the hard work of getting clean and grasping hold of the

lowest rungs of the labor market, and never backsliding. The undeserving were all the

others.

The rolling-out of new disciplinary measures for the homeless – disciplinary

measures meant to push the deserving onto the path of individual responsibility, and to

discipline the undeserving – garnered a great deal of popular support, even among

23

putative liberals tired of stepping over or around “the problem lying on our sidewalk” as

one prescription for restoring order in the city put it (Paisner 1994). The main question,

then, was what sort of programs, policies, and patterns of policing ought to be rolled out

to encourage the deserving and punish those who chose not to properly govern

themselves.

Experiments in Regulation

In this political and economic climate, there was little interest in facing the

growing low-income housing crises, including years- and decades-long waiting lists for a

place in public housing, that faced most American cities. Nor, at least in mainstream

circles, was there much interest in addressing the inequities and abuses inherent in a

thoroughly transformed labor market: temporary labor agencies, which often opened

offices right next to homeless shelters, became America’s largest employers and were

notorious for skimming wages, charging usurious fees for cashing paychecks, and, by

their rules, making it almost impossible to make enough in a day to pay for all one’s

needs (Purser 2009; Van Arsdale 2003). Certainly, in the wake of the rollback of the

state in the 1980s, the “end of welfare as we know it” in the Clinton era, and the

concerted class project to turn the state into an engine for the upward redistribution of

wealth (Harvey 2005), there was little stomach for collective, state-led responses to

homelessness in the 1990s.

Instead, as a first response, there was a more full-fledged turn to charity, to the

“shadow state” (Wolch 1990), as the first line of defense against the vagaries and

violences of “the market.” This “proliferation of private, quasi-private, quasi-public,

24

voluntary and commercial agencies providing services heretofore supplied by the

government … effectively extended the penetration of government oversight into the

lives of service operators and consumers” (Wolch and Dear 1993, 14), masking direct

state disciplinary powers, but making them no less real for those subject to them. Those

subject to them were also, often, once again required to endure religious proselytizing

and other forms of indoctrination as the price of a bed or a meal. No longer was the

language of rights associated with housing and shelter, even if New York’s shelter

requirement remained in effect; now housing was a privilege or a gift. In order to receive

food stamps, a right, for example, claimants often had to work through agencies like the

Salvation Army or food banks, one of which is rooted in a religion to which one may not

subscribe, the other of which is a creature of large corporate donations, governmental

largess, and laws regulating political activities (Heynen, forthcoming). Discipline

worked in two directions here: on the charitable organization which relies on the good

will of political and economic elites for their very survival (cf. Poppendieck 1999); and

on the individual seeking shelter or food, who is subject both to the disciplinary logic of

the neoliberal state and the rejuvenated paternalism of the charitable agency (Fraser and

Gordon 1992).

Even with the massive expansion of the shadow state, even with this first step

towards a new regulatory regime after the end of welfare, even with the long, though

decidedly uneven, economic boom of the 1990s, cities continued to be confronted by

large numbers of homeless people filling shelters, sleeping in doorways, hanging out in

parks, and otherwise threatening the precarious economic success of newly gentrified

downtowns. Responding to the necessity of removing homeless people from

25

redeveloping downtowns, cities experimented with a range of environmental and legal

interventions which are better described as anti-homeless rather than anti-homelessness

(Mitchell 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 2003).

San Diego is typical in that regard.18 To jump start its redevelopment, the city

heavily subsidized the building of a massive festival marketplace mall adjacent to the

historic center of the city Horton Plaza – a square deeded to the city for public use in

1894. Horton Plaza Shopping Center, though built with a significant amount of public

funds, was private property, and explicitly so. One of its main selling points, to tourists

and suburban shoppers, was that homeless people could be fully excluded from the

precincts of the mall. Indeed, drivers could enter the enclosed parking decks that

surrounded the mall on three sides and spend a day at the mall without ever once setting

foot on a public street. Before Horton Plaza Shopping Center was built, one manager of

the facility remarked, “there was no reason to come downtown … it was all sailors,

homeless people.” Horton Plaza Shopping Center “created the first public space in

downtown for people from the suburbs … to begin the process of coming back into the

neighborhood,” said another merchant (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, 49, 52). The historic

square that fronted the shopping center was seen, however, as a “homeless haven” and so

the city paid the mall developer to redevelop the park. The only public toilets in

downtown were removed, the bus stop was moved down the street, the park was re-

landscaped, with fences around the central lawns and new historic-style benches –

benches with the added benefit of wrought iron armrests that made it impossible to lie

down – were installed. When these modifications did not discourage the homeless (and

elderly poor) from hanging out in the park, the city first removed the benches closest to

26

the department stores, and eventually removed all the benches and tore up the lawns and

replaced them with prickly plants, a change that city council thought would drive out the

homeless and “save the park” as liberal council member Bob Filner put it (Staeheli and

Mitchell 2008, 60). Such anti-homeless environmental designs are now commonplace in

American cities, as is the removal of public space to the precincts of private property

(Davis 1990; Flusty 2001; Miller 2007; Staeheli and Mitchell 2008).

Typical as they maybe, such design interventions, also do little more than move

homeless people from one place to another. To further manage the presence of homeless

people, therefore, new laws are invented. These laws make it illegal to sleep or camp in

public, to beg or beg aggressively (or in particular places), to cut across or loiter in

parking lots, to wash motorists’ windscreens or provide other services, to hand out free

food or sometimes even eat in public places, to drink alcohol or be drunk in public, to sit

or lie on sidewalks (Mitchell 1998a; 1998b). Such laws are supported by “quality of life”

police campaigns, which focus on penalizing small infractions (such as jaywalking or

urinating in public) on the theory that small acts of disorder inevitably lead to more major

crime (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling and Coles 1996). They are further supported by

the creation of Business Improvement Districts that levy businesses and property owners

a special (and private) tax to provide “enhanced” levels of street cleaning, and specialized

private police forces empowered to “move along” homeless people in a way public police

are often legally prevented from doing – a program called “Clean and Safe” in San Diego

(Staeheli and Mitchell 2008). To their defenders such laws and policing practices combat

the growing “disorder” of the streets and enforce commonly accepted rules of “civility”

thereby making urban public spaces attractive to everyone (Ellickson 1996; Kelling and

27

Coles 1996; Tier 1998). To their critics, they are designed at best to make the “homeless

invisible” as one shelter operator in San Diego put it (Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, 62); at

worst they are designed to eliminate any place in the city for the homeless to “be” – to

live (Waldron 1991). Such laws and policing practices legally “annihilate” the very

spaces that homeless people must rely on for everyday life in the post-welfare world

(Mitchell 1997). For homeless advocates such policies produce “mean streets” without

doing anything to address the causes of homelessness.

Whatever the criticism, by the dawn of the 21st century, such policies of “zero

tolerance” of the homeless seemed to be working in many cities. New York, especially

Manhattan, once the poster-city for homelessness out of control, was heralded by the end

of the 1990s for the miracle of its transformation and the near-invisibility of its street

homeless population. That this population had mostly been pushed – and bused – to the

outer-boroughs was rarely commented on. Instead Manhattan was seen as just the kind

of place that the new mandarins of the global economy, the hordes of European and

Asian tourists, and even the great suburban masses of New Jersey wanted to be – even

after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If relatively large numbers of homeless people

remained visible on the streets and in the parks of San Francisco or Los Angeles it was

because their mayors and city councils had not shown the sort of consistent resolve in the

face of homeless advocates as had New York’s Mayor Giuliani (MacDonald 1995).

Such resolve was necessary. In the mid 1990s, the most conservative estimates

held that there was a nationwide nightly “bed shortage” of at least 425,000. That is, there

were nearly a half million people who had no place to sleep except in streets and parks –

no access to a shelter bed, no access to transitional housing, no possibility of doubling up

28

with relatives, and certainly no hope of permanent subsidized housing. During the day,

when many shelters are closed, there were at minimum 700,000 people who had no

choice but to wander about (or maybe spend the day dozing in a library, if they could get

away with it) (Foscarinis 1996). A decade later in 2006 – even before the current, deep

economic crisis, which is very much a crisis of housing – the demand for emergency

shelter increased nationwide by 9% over the previous year (which itself saw a large

increase over the year before). 23% of all requests for emergency shelter went unmet;

29% of requests by families for emergency shelter could not be accommodated (U.S.

Conference of Mayors 2006). By the most reliable estimates, some 3.5 million

Americans experienced homelessness over the course of the year; there were at minimum

800,000 people who were literally homeless each night in 2006; countless more were

illegally doubled up, living in substandard housing, or otherwise at risk of homelessness

(NCH 2007). In other words, whatever the claims for their efficacy in “restoring order”

to American cities, and whatever the claims made on behalf of the greater efficiency of

the shadow state in addressing homelessness, homeless policies in the United States over

the past two decades have done nothing to lessen the problem, nothing to address the

chronic shortage of low-income housing in the nation, and probably much to make the

lives of homeless people more difficult. They have certainly exacerbated the “struggles

between the propertied and unpropertied over the use of public space, fears about the

growth of a propertyless proletariat, and anxieties about the loss of traditional social

controls in America,” that DiPastino (2003, 8) identified as indicative of homelessness’s

formative years.

29

Housing First

Against this rising tide of homelessness, against the seeming intractability of the

homeless “crisis,” a new ideology and new policy for addressing homelessness has

arisen. Called “Housing First,” the policy is – despite its name, and whatever the

intentions of some of its architects – not a housing policy; it is a treatment program

(Tsemberis et al, 2004).19 Housing First is aimed at the 10-20% of homeless who are

“hard core:” addicted or mentally or physically ill homeless people who “spend years

cycling between streets, shelters, jail cells, and emergency rooms” (Graves and Sayfan

2007). Studies have shown that this population uses a disproportionate amount of

services and costs cities a disproportionate amount of money. Studies have shown that it

is not unusual for 10% of the homeless population in a city to use 50% of shelter

resources (Culhane 2008; Culhane et al 2008). Housing First operates on the quite

reasonable assumption that the addicted or the mentally or physically ill might have a

better chance of managing their conditions if they are in a stable, safe, comfortable home,

a home over which they have some degree of control and within which they have some

degree of sovereignty. Housing First turns its back on the ideology that governed much

policy concerning the “hard core” homeless: that in order to be “rewarded” with a home,

one had to show that they were clean or sober, following their regimen of medication, or

otherwise worthy and deserving. Instead, it argues that by first having a home, the “hard

core” can become worthy and deserving.

Strongly supported by the Bush Administration (and continued under President

Obama), Housing First has spread through a series of pilot programs across the U.S. and

seems largely successful in its primary aims. But even though it is generally less

30

expensive than the total cost of emergency shelter, emergency room care, and other

services for the “hard core,” it is inadequately funded, and indeed, in some jurisdictions it

drains money from services for that other (and growing) 80 to 90% of the homeless (Law

2007). It is also fundamentally misguided, if its propagandists are to be believed. For

them, homelessness of this sort is “not an inevitable price of capitalism” (Graves and

Sayfan 2007). But, it must be countered, homelessness of the other sort – the

homelessness that confronts the supermajority of 80-90% – is an inevitable price of

capitalism. And precious little is being done for them.

Housing policy for the past 40 years in the United States has consisted of

underfunding and eliminating public housing,20 subsidizing middle- and upper-class

homeownership through tax policy, and encouraging staggering debt, both credit card and

mortgage, for lower income families as owner-occupied housing “filtered down” to them.

Changes in banking laws, coupled with sloshing surpluses of finance capital looking for

investment outlets in the built environment, led to a historic housing boom and bubble, a

classic crisis of overaccumulation, leading to the rapid, indeed uncontrollably spiraling,

devaluation that marked 2007-2008 (cf. Harvey 1982, chapter 7). This “destruction of

value” is not only throwing workers out of their homes, as foreclosure rates hit historic

highs and especially as speculative investors in rental housing lose their shirts and their

evicted tenants pay the costs, it is also, and inevitably, restocking the reserve army. The

real unemployment rate (measuring the underemployed as well as those “actively looking

for work,” but excluding all those warehoused in prisons was well as those who have

“dropped out” of the labor market) in the U.S. in winter 2009 was approaching 15% and

by the end of the year had exceeded 17%. And as Harvey (1982, 202) argues, “by

31

throwing workers out of work capitalists in effect discard variable capital and thereby

transform the endemic problem of crisis for the industrial reserve army into a condition of

chronic maladjustment and social breakdown.” Housing First might address some of this

chronic maladjustment – like the prison system it is designed to contain the inevitable

social maladies that attend capitalism’s contradictions – but, like laws banning giving out

free food in public parks or increasing police power to enforce trespassing laws (Mitchell

and Heynen, 2009), it does nothing to address the structural production of homelessness

in America.

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE

Contemporary homelessness in America has been shaped by its historical

geography. It has a particular structure, a particular form. Its current features are easy to

identify. There is a large, visible street population in most American cities, and while its

size has fluctuated since its massive explosion at the end of the 1970s, and while any

number of efforts to push it into invisibility have been tried (see, e.g. Takahashi 1998,

chapter 8), it has not gone away. Like the poorly housed that Engels famously wrote

about, it has just been shifted from place to place by a bourgeoisie with no other

solutions. This visible homelessness is a chronic not a crisis or emergency condition; it is

an inevitable feature of American-style capitalism, even if it might grow during times of

economic downtown. Both the population of visible, street homeless, and the population

of homeless people residing in public and private shelters, transitional housing, sleeping

in cars, or doubling up with friends and relatives – sometimes “couch surfing” their way

32

through their whole social network – are structurally determined by changes in labor

markets, the minimal rise and thorough evisceration of the welfare state, and the

destruction of low-cost and public housing through disinvestment, gentrification, and the

neoliberal shift towards market “solutions” to low income housing problems.

Across its history, though occasionally waning as activists and advocates have

struggled to change the dominant discourse, homelessness American style has been

marked by a strong and consistent distinction between “deserving” and “undeserving”

poor. In the immediate wake of a natural disaster, the homeless are often considered

deserving (just as long as they quickly pull themselves up by their bootstraps), as are

many children and occasionally women; men, the putatively employable, and people of

color are rarely so. This distinction continues to drive public policy, even as Housing

First has reworked it to some extent (largely because, as one of its gurus, Phil Mangano

says, “cost benefit analysis may be the new compassion:” Graves and Sayfan 2007). For

the “deserving” poor, charity-based aid, and now especially faith-based charity aid, and

the shadow state more generally, provide beds, addiction and job counseling, and not a

little “tough love” (see Staeheli and Mitchell 2008, 66). Such makeshift charity has

replaced the aid-as-right that marked the welfare state (even the U.S.’s minimal one that

lasted from the 1930s to 1970s). For the “undeserving” homeless, there is an increasingly

punitive legal regime marked by anti-homeless laws, enhanced trespassing laws, limits on

general assistance cash payments to homeless people, and other measures targeted at

homeless peoples’ ability to be in a particular locale.

Simultaneously, cities have used zoning laws, use-permit systems, and

negotiations with NIMBY activists to confine the warehousing and containment of

33

homeless people in specific areas of the city (often away from downtown), creating

“service-dependent ghettos” (Dear and Wolch 1987; Wolch and Dear 1993). They have

further encouraged the creation of Business Improvement Districts and “Clean and Safe”

programs to clean out the homeless and clean up after them when they have gone.

Cityscapes have been remade with “bum-proof benches,” spiky landscaping, randomized

sprinklers, CCTV networks, and other environmental interventions designed to make it

impossible for homeless people to linger (Davis 1990; Flusty 2001).

Some, and perhaps all, of these traits (or ones like them) can be found in other

national settings (as the other papers in this issue show). But these characteristics are

most prominent in the United States, which, after all, hosted the weakest post-World War

II welfare state, and which has gone the farthest in dismantling what little of it there was.

With the neoliberalization of economies and states around the world, with the diffusion of

what used to be called the “Washington consensus” of market fundamentalism, with the

“fast policy transfer” and sharing of so-called “best practices” on a global scale, to what

degree has this American-style homelessness globalized? Does the specific historical and

geographical trajectory of homelessness in the United States make it unique? Are other

nation-states now recapitulating homelessness, American style, in whole or in part? The

following papers address just these questions.

NOTES

1 There is now an excellent literature on the history of homelessness in relation to poor law in the United

States; see among others: Cresswell (2001); DiPastino (2003); Hopper (2003); Kusmer (2002); Piven and

Cloward (1971).

34

2 At times of economic crisis such as the 1870s and 1930s, the number of women among the tramping

homeless increased greatly, though vagrancy remained a largely male preserve (Cresswell 2001; Weiner

1984)

3 A quite specific, and hierarchical language describing homeless men developed at the end of the

nineteenth century: hobos were those who wandered in search of work; tramps were those who wandered

but did not work, and bums were those who stayed put on skid row and did not work.

4 “Relative” is the important word. Law scholar Robert Ellickson (1996, 1208-1209) is incorrect when he

argues that a drunk “bum” on skid row would never be “moved along” by the police; but he is correct that

policing – though often impressively violent (Bittner 1967, McSheehy 1979) – was often less rigid than in

other parts of the city. For an analysis, see Mitchell (2003), pp.214-216.

5 A significant exception is Anderson (1923).

6 Conditions were often appalling for the white and European-immigrant working classes; they were on the

whole far worse for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Mexican-Americans.

7 Analyses and policy interventions aimed at the characteristics of homeless people never disappeared, of

course (cf. Sutherland and Locke, 1936; Crouse 1986).

8 As did the heavy subsidization of college and university education for veterans guaranteed under the post-

war G.I. Bill.

9 The first wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1960s, which moved the mentally ill out of the total

institution of the asylum, and into unprepared and underfunded neighborhoods for care, reinforced the

notion that street and homeless people were predominantly “not like us” (Lamb 1986; Dear and Wolch

1987).

10 The title is borrowed from Harrison and Bluestone (1988)

11 The public housing sector was never robust, In the mid 1990s, only 1.2 million of 112.3 million housing

units could be considered “public” – a far cry from the 25% of units that remained public in the UK and

the 44% that were public in the Netherlands (Hackworth 2007, 41).

12 Conservative scholars and pundits tried valiantly to keep it alive – and eventually succeeded in reviving

it, as we will see. See, e.g. Main (1986).

35

13 The landscape of shelters was highly variable. Some cities, like Phoenix strongly resisted opening new

shelters, while others, like New York City, were required by court order to provide shelter for anyone who

asked for it (Alter et al 1986; Hopper and Cox 1986; Main 1986).

14 These were pushed to an evolving service-dependent ghetto at the southeast edge of downtown, an area

now threatened by development associated with the new San Diego Padres baseball stadium.

15 The strategies of survival for homeless people in 1980s America were well-documented and are

impressive in their creativity. See Coleman (1986); Hopper et al (1985); Rowe and Wolch (1990); Wolch

et al (1993).

16 This desire is not a think\g of the past. Among the reader comments on a recent story about St. Louis

parks department employees destroying the belongings of dozens of homeless people camping in a park

next to city shelters (which themselves were over-full) are a remarkable number calling for the active

incarceration and quarantining of all homeless people – this in the midst of the deepest economic crisis

since the Depression. See, Carolyn Tuft, “City Apologizes to the Homeless,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

November 5, 2009 (together with posted comments), http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/st-louis-crime-

beat/2009/11/05/st-louis-park-rangers-get-tough-on-homeless/ (accessed November 8, 2009).

17 When the experiment MacDonald describes failed, San Francisco citizens made receiving GA contingent

upon proof of housing. If a rent receipt was not produced, recipients were struck from the rolls. In other

words, the homeless were made ineligible for GA.

18 The following discussion draws on Staeheli and Mitchell (2008), chapter 3.

19 It is also a repudiation of the analysis and arguments made in Baum and Burnes’s (1993) A Nation in

Denial.

20 Under the Clinton Administration the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development eliminated a

requirement that every unit of public housing destroyed had to be replaced. Local housing and

redevelopment authorities could now rip down public housing projects without worrying about building

new ones (Hackworth 2007, 50).

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State of the Homeless 2012

If Not Now, When?

New Record High in NYC Homelessness

Mayor Bloomberg Has a Final Chance to Help Homeless Kids and Families Escape the Shelter System

June 8, 2012

By Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst

Coalition for the Homeless 129 Fulton Street

New York, New York 10038 www.coalitionforthehomeless.org

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 2

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012

Over the past year, New York City’s homeless shelter population soared to its highest levels ever, with more than 43,000 homeless New Yorkers – including a record 17,000 children – bedding down each night in municipal shelters. Indeed, by any measure, last year was the worst for New York City homelessness since the Great Depression. And one of the major reasons is that, for the first time since modern homelessness began, the City provides no housing assistance to help homeless children and adults move from shelters to permanent housing. But even in the midst of this worsening crisis, Mayor Bloomberg still has a chance to reverse course. As he completes his next-to-last City budget, the Mayor can embrace proven solutions that will actually reduce New York City’s homeless population; save taxpayer dollars spent on the expensive emergency shelter; and most important, help thousands of children and families escape the hardships of homelessness. The Coalition for the Homeless urges Mayor Bloomberg to partner with New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to enact her plan to restore priority use of Federal housing programs for homeless New Yorkers, as well as to create a new rental assistance program modeled on proven Federal rental vouchers. The Speaker’s plan is designed to help thousands of homeless children and families move from the shelter system into permanent housing each year. The Coalition’s State of the Homeless 2012 report spotlights alarming new City data documenting yet another all-time record homeless shelter population, and shows how the proposed City Council plan would finally stem the tide of rising homelessness. Following are highlights of the report:

 Homeless shelter population at all-time record high: More than 43,000 homeless people – including more than 17,000 children – slept each night in municipal shelters in April 2012.

New York City: Census of Homeless People in the

Municipal Shelter System, 1983-2012

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

1 9

8 3

1 9

8 4

1 9

8 5

1 9

8 6

1 9

8 7

1 9

8 8

1 9

8 9

1 9

9 0

1 9

9 1

1 9

9 2

1 9

9 3

1 9

9 4

1 9

9 5

1 9

9 6

1 9

9 7

1 9

9 8

1 9

9 9

2 0

0 0

2 0

0 1

2 0

0 2

2 0

0 3

2 0

0 4

2 0

0 5

2 0

0 6

2 0

0 7

2 0

0 8

2 0

0 9

2 0

1 0

2 0

1 1

2 0

1 2

A v e ra

g e D

a il y C

e n s u

s o

f H

o m

e le

s s A

d u lt s a

n d

C h il d re

n R

e s id

in g i n

t h e M

u n

ic ip

a l

S h

e lt e r

S y s te

m

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

April 2012

Shelter Census:

43,082

March 1987

Shelter Census:

28,737

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 3

 Dramatic increase in homelessness: The New York City shelter population is 10 percent higher than the previous year, and is fully 39 percent higher than ten years ago, when Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 Number of homeless children at record highs and rising: More than 17,000 homeless children slept each night in municipal shelters in April, an increase of 12 percent from the previous year and a 32 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 Family homelessness at crisis levels: More than 10,000 homeless families slept in shelters each night in April, an increase of 8 percent from the previous year and a 49 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 Families stay longer in shelter system: Over the past year, the average shelter stay for homeless families rose by 28 percent, from nine months to nearly twelve months.

 More homeless single adults in shelter than any time since the late 1980s: For the first time since the late 1980s, there are now more than 10,000 homeless single adults sleeping each night in the shelter system, 28 percent more than when Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 More New Yorkers experience homelessness: During FY 2011, nearly 113,000 New Yorkers slept in the municipal shelter system, a remarkable 36 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 More children experience homelessness: During FY 2011, more than 40,000 children slept in the municipal shelter system, a 30 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

Number of Homeless Children in the New York City

Shelter System, 1983-2012

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

14,000

16,000

18,000

1 9 8 3

1 9 8 4

1 9 8 5

1 9 8 6

1 9 8 7

1 9 8 8

1 9 8 9

1 9 9 0

1 9 9 1

1 9 9 2

1 9 9 3

1 9 9 4

1 9 9 5

1 9 9 6

1 9 9 7

1 9 9 8

1 9 9 9

2 0 0 0

2 0 0 1

2 0 0 2

2 0 0 3

2 0 0 4

2 0 0 5

2 0 0 6

2 0 0 7

2 0 0 8

2 0 0 9

2 0 1 0

2 0 1 1

2 0 1 2

N u m

b e r

o f H

o m

e le

s s C

h il d re

n R

e s id

in g i n t h e M

u n ic

ip a l S

h e lt e r

S y s te

m

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

April 2012

Homeless Children:

17,247

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 4

Part I New York City’s Homeless Shelter Population Soars to New All-Time Record High New York City’s homeless shelter population has, during the past year, reached its highest levels ever, with more than 43,000 homeless New Yorkers – including a record 17,000 children – bedding down each night in municipal shelters. By any measure, the past year was the worst for New York City homelessness since the Great Depression. Following is an overview of the past year:

 In April 2012, the most recent month for which complete data is available, an average of 43,082 homeless people slept each night in the municipal shelter system.

 This represents a 10 percent increase from the previous year (April 2011), and is 39 percent higher than ten years ago, when Mayor Bloomberg took office (January 2002).

 In April 2012 an average of 17,247 homeless children slept each night in municipal shelters, and this year the number of homeless New York City children reached the highest level ever recorded.

 The number of homeless children in April, 17,247 kids, represents an increase of 12 percent from the previous year and a dramatic 32 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 In April 2012 an average of 10,322 homeless families slept in shelters each night, an increase of 8 percent from the previous year.

 The number of homeless families sleeping each night in shelters has risen by a remarkable 49 percent since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

New York City: Census of Homeless People in the

Municipal Shelter System, April 2012

17,247

15,787

10,048

Children

Adults in Families

Single Adults Note: Average number of homeless single adults, homeless children, and homeless adult

family members, residing in the municipal shelter system.

Source: City of New York, NYC Stat, shelter census reports

Total NYC

Municipal

Shelter

Population:

43,082

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 5

 Over the past year (April 2011 to April 2012), the average shelter stay for homeless families rose by 28 percent, from nine months (278 days) to nearly twelve months (357 days).

 In April 2012, there were an average of 10,048 homeless single adults sleeping each night in municipal shelters, 28 percent more than when Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 For the first time since the late 1980s, there are now more than 10,000 homeless single adults sleeping each night in the shelter system.

 During FY 2011 (the last City fiscal year for which complete data is available), 112,689 New Yorkers slept in the municipal shelter system, a remarkable 36 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 The number of New Yorkers who slept in the shelter system in FY 2011 (112,689 people) declined slightly (less than 1 percent) from the previous fiscal year (113,553 people), but is still the second- highest number of New Yorkers using the shelter system since the City began keeping such records.

 During FY 2011, 40,238 children slept in the municipal shelter system, a 30 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 During FY 2011, 31,982 homeless single adults slept in the municipal shelter system, a 23 percent increase since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

Number of Homeless Families in the New York City

Shelter System, 1983-2012

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

1 9

8 3

1 9

8 4

1 9

8 5

1 9

8 6

1 9

8 7

1 9

8 8

1 9

8 9

1 9

9 0

1 9

9 1

1 9

9 2

1 9

9 3

1 9

9 4

1 9

9 5

1 9

9 6

1 9

9 7

1 9

9 8

1 9

9 9

2 0

0 0

2 0

0 1

2 0

0 2

2 0

0 3

2 0

0 4

2 0

0 5

2 0

0 6

2 0

0 7

2 0

0 8

2 0

0 9

2 0

1 0

2 0

1 1

2 0

1 2

N u

m b

e r

o f

H o

m e

le s s F

a m

il ie

s R

e s id

in g N

ig h tl y i n

t h

e

M u

n ic

ip a l S

h e lt e

r S

y s te

m E

a c h M

o n th

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

April 2012

Homeless Families:

10,322

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 6

NYC Homeless Families Staying in Shelter Longer (Average Number of Days in Shelter System)

278

302

313 320

326 325 320

326

341 346 347

352 357

200

220

240

260

280

300

320

340

360

380

APR

2011

MAY

2011

JUN

2011

JUL

2011

AUG

2011

SEPT

2011

OCT

2011

NOV

2011

DEC

2011

JAN

2012

FEB

2012

MAR

2012

APR

2012

A v a

g e

N u

m b

e r

o f

D a

y s H

o m

e le

s s F

a m

il ie

s R

e s id

e i n

N Y

C S

h e

lt e

r S

y s te

m

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services, NYC Stat

New York City: Average Daily Census of Homeless Single

Adults in the Municipal Shelter System, 1983-2012

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

9,000

10,000

11,000

1 9 8 3

1 9 8 4

1 9 8 5

1 9 8 6

1 9 8 7

1 9 8 8

1 9 8 9

1 9 9 0

1 9 9 1

1 9 9 2

1 9 9 3

1 9 9 4

1 9 9 5

1 9 9 6

1 9 9 7

1 9 9 8

1 9 9 9

2 0 0 0

2 0 0 1

2 0 0 2

2 0 0 3

2 0 0 4

2 0 0 5

2 0 0 6

2 0 0 7

2 0 0 8

2 0 0 9

2 0 1 0

2 0 1 1

2 0 1 2

A v e ra

g e D

a il y C

e n s u s o

f H

o m

e le

s s S

in g le

A d u lt s i n t h e M

u n ic

ip a l S

h e lt e r

S y s te

m

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

April 2012

Adult Shelter Census:

10,048

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 7

New York City: Average Daily Census of Homeless Single

Adults in the Municipal Shelter System, 1983-2011

5 ,0

6 2

6 ,2

2 9

7 ,2

1 7

8 ,9

2 0

9 ,6

7 8

9 ,6

7 5

9 ,3

4 2

8 ,5

3 5

7 ,6

8 7

6 ,9

2 2

6 ,3

1 6

6 ,1

0 6 6 ,5

4 1 7 ,0

3 6

7 ,0

9 6

6 ,8

5 9

6 ,7

7 8

6 ,9

3 3 7

,4 7 9

7 ,7

5 5 8 ,2

0 0 8 ,6

0 8

8 ,1

7 6

7 ,6

6 1

6 ,9

8 9

6 ,8

5 8 7

,4 2 7

8 ,7

4 5

9 ,5

6 9

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

7,000

8,000

9,000

10,000

1 9 8 3

1 9 8 4

1 9 8 5

1 9 8 6

1 9 8 7

1 9 8 8

1 9 8 9

1 9 9 0

1 9 9 1

1 9 9 2

1 9 9 3

1 9 9 4

1 9 9 5

1 9 9 6

1 9 9 7

1 9 9 8

1 9 9 9

2 0 0 0

2 0 0 1

2 0 0 2

2 0 0 3

2 0 0 4

2 0 0 5

2 0 0 6

2 0 0 7

2 0 0 8

2 0 0 9

2 0 1 0

2 0 1 1

A v e

ra g

e D

a il y C

e n

s u

s o

f H

o m

e le

s s S

in g

le A

d u

lt s i n

t h

e M

u n

ic ip

a l S

h e

lt e

r S

y s te

m

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

Number of Different Homeless Adults and Children Who

Slept in NYC Shelters Each Year, FY 2002-FY 2011

82,808

95,388

104,028

98,241 96,612

102,187

109,314

105,365

113,553 112,689

60,000

70,000

80,000

90,000

100,000

110,000

120,000

FY 2002 FY 2003 FY 2004 FY 2005 FY 2006 FY 2007 FY 2008 FY 2009 FY 2010 FY 2011T o ta

l U

n d u p li c a te

d N

u m

b e r

o f

P e rs

o n s W

h o U

ti li z e d t

h e M

u n ic

ip a l S

h e lt e r

S y s te

m a

t

S o m

e T

im e D

u ri n g E

a c h F

is c a l Y

e a r

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services, Critical Activities Reports

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 8

NYC: Number of Different Homeless Children Who

Slept in Shelter System Each Year, FY 2002-FY 2011

30,884

36,271

39,342

35,254

33,471

35,811

38,813 39,227

42,888

40,238

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

FY 2002 FY 2003 FY 2004 FY 2005 FY 2006 FY 2007 FY 2008 FY 2009 FY 2010 FY 2011T o ta

l U

n d u p li c a te

d N

u m

b e r

o f

C h il d re

n W

h o U

ti li z e d t

h e M

u n ic

ip a l S

h e lt e r

S y s te

m a

t

S o m

e T

im e D

u ri n g E

a c h F

is c a l Y

e a r

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services, Critical Activities Reports

NYC: Number of Different Homeless Single Adults Who

Slept in Shelter System Each Year, FY 2002-FY 2011

26,050

27,868

29,666 29,179

28,752 28,693 28,912 28,249

29,645

31,982

20,000

22,000

24,000

26,000

28,000

30,000

32,000

FY 2002 FY 2003 FY 2004 FY 2005 FY 2006 FY 2007 FY 2008 FY 2009 FY 2010 FY 2011

T o ta

l U

n d

u p

li c a te

d N

u m

b e r

o f S

in g

le A

d u

lt s W

h o

U ti li z e d

t h e

M u n

ic ip

a l S

h e

lt e r

S y s te

m a

t

S o m

e T

im e D

u ri

n g

E a c h F

is c a l Y

e a

r

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services, Critical Activities Reports

Note: FY 2008 through FY 2010 data do not include homeless adults residing in shelters for veterans and shelters for long-term street homeless

individuals (i.e., "safe haven" shelters and "stabilization" beds), because DHS did not include this data in its reports.

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 9

Part II If Not Now, When? How Mayor Bloomberg Can Still Reverse Course and Help Reduce NYC Homelessness Perhaps the biggest factor contributing to unprecedented homelessness in New York City is that, for the first time since modern homelessness emerged more than three decades ago, the City has no housing assistance for homeless adults and vulnerable children to escape homelessness. To address this glaring need, the New York City Council and Speaker Christine Quinn have proposed a plan to resume the priority use of Federal housing programs to help homeless kids and families leave the shelter system, and to create a new local rental assistance program modeled on Federal housing vouchers. The City Council plan would return to the successful approach of previous New York City Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani – and even Mayor Bloomberg in his first term. Following is background on the successful use of Federal housing programs to reduce homelessness and the City Council’s forward- thinking plan:

 Beginning under the Koch administration, the City of New York began helping homeless families re- locate from the municipal shelter system to permanent housing by allocating a modest share of scarce Federal public housing apartments (administered by the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA) and Federal housing vouchers, known as Section 8 vouchers.

 From FY 1990 through FY 2005, under four New York City mayors, the City helped 53,302 homeless families – including more than 100,000 children – move to long-term, permanent housing (18,340 families with public housing and 34,962 families with Section 8 vouchers).

Before and After NYC Helps Homeless Families

with Federal Housing Resources: Average Number of Homeless Families in Shelter Each Night

5,916

9,134

-

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

City Helps Homeless With Federal Housing

Resources (FY 1990-FY 2005)

City Denies Federal Housing Aid to Homeless

(FY 2006-FY 2011)

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 10

 Over the same period, an additional 11,292 homeless families with more than 20,000 children were moved from shelters to City-funded apartments assisted by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

 The priority use of Federal housing programs, begun by Mayor Koch, was continued under Mayors Dinkins and Giuliani and even under Mayor Bloomberg in his first term, when it contributed to a significant reduction in family homelessness from 2003 to 2004.

 Academic research over two decades shows overwhelmingly that homeless families who exit the shelter system with Federal housing assistance have the lowest rates of return to shelter.

 In contrast, families who exit the shelter system with no housing subsidies have the highest rates of return to shelter – in some studies, half of all such families return to homelessness.

 In 2004, the Bloomberg administration commissioned the Vera Institute to conduct a comprehensive study of family homelessness. The City-commissioned Vera Institute study found that families leaving the New York City shelter system with Federal housing assistance have very low rates of return to shelter.

 According to the City-commissioned Vera Institute study, only 2.1 percent of families who left to NYCHA public housing returned to shelter after two years, and only 3.6 percent of families leaving with Section 8 vouchers returned after two years.

 In contrast, the Vera Institute study found that, after two years, 31.9 percent of families leaving shelter to unknown arrangements returned to the system, and 19.3 percent who left to unsubsidized housing also returned to shelter.

Federal Housing Programs Lead to Low Rates of Return

to the Shelter System for Homeless Families

31.9%

19.3%

4.5% 3.6%

2.1%

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

Unknown

Arrangements

Own Housing

(Unsubsidized)

All Subsidized

Housing

Section 8 Voucher NYCHA Public

Housing

P e

rc e

n ta

g e

o f

F a

m il ie

s R

e tu

rn in

g t

o S

h e

lt e

r S

y s te

m A

ft e

r T

w o

Y e

a rs

Source: Vera Institute, "Understanding Family Homelessness" (2005)

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 11

 Nevertheless, in October 2004 the Bloomberg administration announced its break with the successful policy of using Federal housing programs, with the denial policy fully implemented a year later.

 As a result of Mayor Bloomberg’s denial policy, in FY 2011, when the number of homeless children and families reached all-time record highs, the City assisted only 202 families with Federal housing programs (99 families with public housing and 103 families with Section 8 vouchers).

 When the Bloomberg administration announced the denial policy in late 2004, City officials claimed that cutting off homeless New Yorkers from Federal housing assistance would lead to fewer families entering the shelter system. The opposite has happened.

 In FY 2005, when the Bloomberg administration first enacted the denial policy, 8,986 homeless families entered the shelter system. In FY 2006, the following year and before the economic recession began, 10,251 homeless families entered the shelter system, a 14 percent increase.

 In FY 2011, 13,543 homeless families entered the shelter system, a remarkable 51 percent more than in FY 2005, the year the denial policy was implemented.

 During the period when the City used Federal housing resources (FY 1990-FY 2005), an average of 5,916 homeless families resided each night in municipal shelters.

 In the period since the Bloomberg administration enacted its denial policy (FY 2006-FY 2011), an average of 9,134 families resided each night in municipal shelters, 54 percent more than under the previous policy. In April 2012 there were an average of 10,322 homeless families with 17,247 children sleeping in the municipal shelter system.

Homeless Families Receive Only a Tiny Fraction of

Federal Housing Assistance, FY 2011

5,650

99 -

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

All NYC Families Placed into Public Housing

Apartments

NYC Homeless Families Placed into Public

Housing Apartments

N u

m b e

r o

f N

Y C

F a

m il ie

s a

n d

H o m

e le

s s F

a m

il ie

s P

la c e

d i n

to P

u b li c H

o u s in

g

A p

a rt

m e n

ts

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services, Mayor's Management Report

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 12

 In late March 2011, the City terminated the flawed, time-limited Advantage rental assistance program for all shelter residents, which the Bloomberg had used since 2007 as a replacement for Federal housing programs. Since that time, the City has provided no housing assistance whatsoever to help homeless children and families move from shelters to permanent housing.

 In February 2012, New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn proposed, in her “State of the City” address, a plan to resume the use of Federal housing programs to help homeless New Yorkers and to create a new local rental assistance program modeled on the successful Section 8 voucher program.

 In her “State of the City” address, Speaker Quinn declared:

“As we work to provide all our neighbors with an affordable place to live, we can’t ignore the growing number of homeless New Yorkers. There are currently 10,000 families living in homeless shelters in New York City, some with children just a few months old. If these kids are going to have a fighting chance, we need to get their families back on the path to stable housing. But for many, our shelter system has become a dead end. Without a rental assistance program for the homeless, most families have no way to access long term housing. “They either end up back on the street, or return to crowded shelters night after night. That’s not the New York City we know. This is a city that catches you when you fall, and helps set you back on your feet. That’s why Council Member Annabel Palma and I are calling on the City to create a new program to get homeless families off the streets, out of the shelters, and into their own homes. “Working together we can create a brand new rental assistance program to help families cover rent in private buildings. And we need to prioritize homeless New Yorkers for NYCHA apartments and Section 8 vouchers, so we can get even more families into long term stable housing. By the way, this isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the fiscally responsible thing to do. The average cost of a rental subsidy for a family of four is $800 a month. To house that same family in a shelter? $3,000.”

 In April 2012, the City Council included the homeless housing assistance proposal in its City Charter-mandated response to Mayor Bloomberg’s FY 2013 preliminary budget plan:

“A BETTER APPROACH TO HOMELESSNESS “The Council continues to call into question the Administration’s decision to terminate the Advantage program, which was the City’s sole rental assistance program for the homeless. The Administration decided it would discontinue the Advantage program – which provided rental assistance for homeless individuals and families for up to two years – when State and Federal support was pulled. At the time the City announced the elimination of the program more than 15,000 Advantage clients were accessing the rental subsidy program. The Council calls upon the Administration to prioritize a viable solution to keep former Advantage families currently in apartments housed. “The Department of Homeless Services’ (DHS) shelter census numbers are again at a record high after years of consistent increases, with over 40,000 adults and children spending the night in its shelters currently. The Council welcomes any opportunity to work with the Department of Homeless Services to identify and promote paths for homeless families and singles out of the shelter system and into permanent housing. Specifically, we encourage DHS to work with the Housing Authority (NYCHA) to restore the preference for homeless families for vacant NYCHA units and available Section 8 vouchers, as well as to work with the Council to create a pilot rental subsidy program to replace the Advantage program and help transition families out of shelter and into appropriate permanent housing.”

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 13

 The City Council plan can be enacted very quickly because the highest priority category for NYCHA-administered public housing and housing vouchers continues to be for shelter residents referred by the NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration – meaning those agencies merely need to resume such referrals.

 If enacted by the City, the City Council plan would result in housing assistance for thousands of homeless children and adults each year.

 The City Council plan would not only help thousands of children and families escape the shelter system and reduce the homeless shelter population. It would also save millions of dollars in City and State taxpayer dollars spent on the shelter system.

 Currently it costs an average of $36,000 per year to shelter a homeless family in the municipal shelter system, with much of that cost borne by City and State tax dollars as well as Federal welfare dollars administered by the State.

 In comparison, the cost of providing a Section 8 voucher to house a family is approximately $10,000 per year – less than one-third the cost of shelter – with nearly all of the cost paid for by the Federal government.

 The Coalition for the Homeless urges Mayor Bloomberg and City officials to enact City Council Speaker Quinn’s homeless housing assistance plan, and begin stemming the tide of rising homelessness in New York City.

NYC Homeless Families Assisted by Federal Housing

Programs Each Year, FY 1990-FY 2011

2 ,1

8 3

2 ,0

1 0

2 ,7

4 3 3

,2 0 2

4 ,0

4 2

2 ,8

5 7

3 ,5

3 7

3 ,6

4 6

3 ,5

3 0

3 ,0

3 5 3 ,4

1 8

2 ,8

5 2

2 ,8

8 0

3 ,9

7 5

5 ,7

7 7

3 ,6

1 5

7 7 9

6 2 6

6 7 8

4 8 9

3 2 7

2 0 2

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

F Y

1 9 9 0

F Y

1 9 9 1

F Y

1 9 9 2

F Y

1 9 9 3

F Y

1 9 9 4

F Y

1 9 9 5

F Y

1 9 9 6

F Y

1 9 9 7

F Y

1 9 9 8

F Y

1 9 9 9

F Y

2 0 0 0

F Y

2 0 0 1

F Y

2 0 0 2

F Y

2 0 0 3

F Y

2 0 0 4

F Y

2 0 0 5

F Y

2 0 0 6

F Y

2 0 0 7

F Y

2 0 0 8

F Y

2 0 0 9

F Y

2 0 1 0

F Y

2 0 1 1

N u

m b

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o f H

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a r

Source: Mayor's Management Reports and NYC Department of Homeless Services

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 14

NYC Homeless Families Placed into City-Assisted

Apartments Each Year, FY 1990-FY 2011

2 ,0

7 1

1 ,9

0 8

1 ,3

9 2

9 9

9

1 ,2

0 4

1 ,1

8 1

5 1

4

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7

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4

2 5

0

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2

1 8

4

1 8

8 3 0

9

1 5

6

1 0

3

1 5

8

3 5

0

1 7

3 2 5

0

1 3

4

2 0

-

500

1,000

1,500

2,000

2,500

F Y

1 9 9 0

F Y

1 9 9 1

F Y

1 9 9 2

F Y

1 9 9 3

F Y

1 9 9 4

F Y

1 9 9 5

F Y

1 9 9 6

F Y

1 9 9 7

F Y

1 9 9 8

F Y

1 9 9 9

F Y

2 0 0 0

F Y

2 0 0 1

F Y

2 0 0 2

F Y

2 0 0 3

F Y

2 0 0 4

F Y

2 0 0 5

F Y

2 0 0 6

F Y

2 0 0 7

F Y

2 0 0 8

F Y

2 0 0 9

F Y

2 0 1 0

F Y

2 0 1 1N

u m

b e

r o

f H

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s s F

a m

il ie

s M

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e lt e

r in

to A

p a

rt m

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ts C

re a

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o r

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rv e

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m e

n t

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re s e

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ti o

n a

n d

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Source: Mayor's Management Reports, Department of Homeless Services

Coalition for the Homeless State of the Homeless 2012 15

Notes on Data Sources

 Homeless shelter population data since September 2011 is taken from NYC Stat, administered by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations, and is published pursuant to Local Law 37 of 2011, which requires various City agencies to report accurate data on the number of people residing in City- administered shelters. This report uses homeless shelter population data from these reports consistent with shelter census reports published by the City since the early 1980s, and includes shelters currently administered by the NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and three shelters for homeless families currently administered by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), which have been included in 25 years of previous shelter census reports. The NYC Stat reports can be found here: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/nycstat/html/reports/reports.shtml

 For the period before September 2011, data for homeless families and children is from DHS’s “Emergency Housing Services for Homeless Families Monthly Report,” which has been published by the City since the early 1980s. This DHS monthly report includes approximately 200 families (with approximately 1,000 people) who reside in homeless shelters currently administered by HPD.

 For the period before September 2011, data for homeless single adults in municipal shelters is from the following DHS reports: (1) DHS daily census reports for shelters for homeless single men and women, which have been produced daily by the City since 1982; (2) DHS census reports for shelters for homeless veterans; and (3) DHS census reports for “safe haven” shelters, which are restricted to long-term street homeless adults. (Note that the large majority of shelters for veterans and “safe haven” shelters were once included as part of the DHS daily adult shelter census report. These shelters were “converted” to different service models beginning in 2007 and were then excluded, in various stages, from DHS daily adult shelter census report and from DHS’s website.) Data for homeless single adults also includes data for homeless people sleeping in DHS “stabilization beds,” which are also restricted to chronically street homeless adults, but only since July 2010; this data is taken from DHS “Critical Activities Reports,” available on the DHS website.

 Data about Federal housing programs, the Advantage program, and other housing subsidy programs is from the City of New York, Mayor’s Office of Operations, “Mayor’s Management Report” for various years, available at http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/html/home/home.shtml, as well as from DHS “Critical Activities Reports,” available on the DHS website.

For more information, please visit www.coalitionforthehomeless.org.

129 Fulton Street New York NY 10038 www.coalitionforthehomeless.org 212.964.5900 fax 212.964.1303

NEW YORK CITY HOMELESSNESS The Basic Facts

 In recent years, homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great

Depression of the 1930s.

 In October 2012, there were an all-time record 48,700 homeless people, including 11,700 homeless families with 20,400 homeless children, sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Families comprise nearly three-quarters of the homeless shelter population.

 During each of the last three years, more than 110,000 different homeless men, women, and children slept in the New York City municipal shelter system. This includes more than 40,000 different homeless New York City children per year.

 The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters is now 57 percent higher than in January 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg took office.

 Research shows that the primary cause of homelessness, particularly among families, is lack of affordable housing. Surveys of homeless families have identified the following major immediate, triggering causes of homelessness: eviction; doubled-up or severely overcrowded housing; domestic violence; and hazardous housing conditions.

 Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have much higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems.

 Each night thousands of unsheltered homeless people sleep on New York City streets, in the subway system, and in other public spaces. There is no accurate measurement of New York City’s unsheltered homeless population, and recent City surveys significantly underestimate the number of unsheltered homeless New Yorkers.

 Studies show that the large majority of street homeless New Yorkers are people living with mental illness or other severe health problems. Four out of five street homeless New Yorkers are men.

 As in other American cities, New York City’s unsheltered homeless population is concentrated in the central business district – that is, midtown Manhattan. Surveys show that nearly 60 percent of New York City’s unsheltered homeless population is in Manhattan.

 African-American and Latino New Yorkers are disproportionately affected by homelessness. Approximately 53 percent of New York City homeless shelter residents are African-American, 32 percent are Latino, 7 percent are white, 1 percent are Asian-American, 1 percent are Native American or other race/ethnicity, and 6 percent are of unknown race/ethnicity.

Updated December 2012.

For more information, please visit www.coalitionforthehomeless.org..

Homelessness in New York City Updated November 2012

Chart 1

10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

50,000

1 9 8

3 1

9 8

4

1 9 8

5

1 9 8

6

1 9 8

7

1 9 8

8

1 9 8

9

1 9 9

0

1 9 9

1

1 9 9

2

1 9 9

3

1 9 9

4

1 9 9

5

1 9 9

6

1 9 9

7

1 9 9

8

1 9 9

9

2 0 0

0

2 0 0

1

2 0 0

2

2 0 0

3

2 0 0

4

2 0 0

5

2 0 0

6

2 0 0

7

2 0 0

8

2 0 0

9

2 0 1

0

2 0 1

1

2 0 1

2

Number of Homeless People Each Night in the NYC Shelter System, 1983-2012

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYCStat, shelter census reports

October 2012: 48,694

Homelessness in New York City Updated November 2012

Chart 2

20,383

17,843

10,468

Number of Homeless People Each Night in the NYC Shelter System, October 2012

Children

Adults in Families

Single Adults

Source: City of New York, NYCStat

Total NYC Municipal

Shelter Population:

48,694

Homelessness in New York City Updated November 2012

Chart 3

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

1 9 8

3 1

9 8

4

1 9 8

5

1 9 8

6

1 9 8

7

1 9 8

8

1 9 8

9

1 9 9

0

1 9 9

1

1 9 9

2

1 9 9

3

1 9 9

4

1 9 9

5

1 9 9

6

1 9 9

7

1 9 9

8

1 9 9

9

2 0 0

0

2 0 0

1

2 0 0

2

2 0 0

3

2 0 0

4

2 0 0

5

2 0 0

6

2 0 0

7

2 0 0

8

2 0 0

9

2 0 1

0

2 0 1

1

2 0 1

2

Number of Homeless Families Each Night in NYC Shelter System, 1983-2012

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYC Stat, shelter census reports

October 2012: 11,678

Homelessness in New York City Updated November 2012

Chart 4

0

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

1 9 8

3 1

9 8

4

1 9 8

5

1 9 8

6

1 9 8

7

1 9 8

8

1 9 8

9

1 9 9

0

1 9 9

1

1 9 9

2

1 9 9

3

1 9 9

4

1 9 9

5

1 9 9

6

1 9 9

7

1 9 9

8

1 9 9

9

2 0 0

0

2 0 0

1

2 0 0

2

2 0 0

3

2 0 0

4

2 0 0

5

2 0 0

6

2 0 0

7

2 0 0

8

2 0 0

9

2 0 1

0

2 0 1

1

2 0 1

2

Number of Homeless Children Each Night in NYC Shelter System, 1983-2012

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYCStat, shelter census reports

October 2012: 20,383

Homelessness in New York City Updated November 2012

Chart 5

0

2,000

4,000

6,000

8,000

10,000

12,000

1 9 8

3 1

9 8

4

1 9 8

5

1 9 8

6

1 9 8

7

1 9 8

8

1 9 8

9

1 9 9

0

1 9 9

1

1 9 9

2

1 9 9

3

1 9 9

4

1 9 9

5

1 9 9

6

1 9 9

7

1 9 9

8

1 9 9

9

2 0 0

0

2 0 0

1

2 0 0

2

2 0 0

3

2 0 0

4

2 0 0

5

2 0 0

6

2 0 0

7

2 0 0

8

2 0 0

9

2 0 1

0

2 0 1

1

2 0 1

2

Number of Homeless Single Adults Each Night in NYC Shelter System, 1983-2012

Source: NYC Department of Homeless Services and Human Resources Administration and NYCStat, shelter census reports

October 2012: 10,476