BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
NEW YORK—Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced a policy by his administration that he said is intended to reduce the number of people who are homeless in this city by two-thirds within five years. Couched in terms of concern for the “truly needy,” a key aspect of this policy is a more stringent use of eligibility requirements for those applying for shelter. One method, already used by city housing officials, is to disqualify people more systematically on the grounds that they have the “option” of doubling up with relatives.

More than 38,000 workers are living in shelters throughout the five boroughs, according to the New York Department of Homeless Services—a 60 percent jump since 2001. This increase coincides with the five-year cutoff period for workers receiving federal welfare payments.

The main increase in recent years has been in the number of families, mostly single women with children. Some 9,000 families with 16,000 children are now staying in city shelters. Many of these are workers who end up in a shelter on a short-term basis. Some are evicted from their apartments after losing their jobs, or after a family health crisis or a case of domestic violence, and manage to get back into an apartment after a few months.

In addition, several thousand working people are living on the streets. Although city officials report nearly 2,700 people in this situation, the Coalition for the Homeless challenges that figure as a substantial undercount, without offering its own estimate. In 1990 the U.S. Census Bureau reported some 10,000 people sleeping in public spaces in New York City, but that number is considered an undercount as well. A significant number of workers living on the streets are ill, physically or mentally. Instead of being provided with medical care, which they cannot afford, they are thrown onto the streets. Hassled by the police, some have been pushed out of central Manhattan and are reappearing in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. A few months ago, for example, cops in the Bronx shut down an encampment of homeless workers living under a bridge not far from my apartment complex.  
 
Rise of homelessness in late ’70s
Homelessness became a mass phenomenon in cities across the country in the late 1970s, with the onset of the economic crisis resulting from the long-term decline in profit rates that marked the end of the post-World War II expansion. In New York City the number of working people—mostly men— sleeping in parks, on sidewalks, and in subway stations, as well as in shelters, grew sharply in the early 1980s.

The number of homeless here peaked around 1987, and declined sharply in subsequent years, as the city administration of Edward Koch built new housing and moved in thousands of previously homeless people, reported Shelly Nortz of the Coalition for the Homeless in an August 4 phone interview.

As the economic crisis deepened, however, homelessness again began to rise in the late 1990s.

The sharp rise in the number of workers who are homeless since 2001 coincides with the five-year cutoff for people receiving federal welfare benefits. In 1996 President William Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

The “welfare reform” law stipulated a five-year lifetime limit on receipt of federal welfare payments. That period was supposedly to allow people to make a transition from welfare to a job. When it ended, however, thousands would go off the “five-year cliff,” as the late Democratic senator Daniel Moynihan had warned at the time the law was passed.

Of the nearly 122,000 families in New York City that were cut off over the course of 2002, tens of thousands either have found no jobs or earn poverty-level wages. The year 2002 marked the largest one-year jump in homelessness in the city in nearly two decades.  
 
Abuse and degrading conditions
At the 200-plus shelters around the city, workers face degrading conditions and a callous bureaucracy that treats them like criminals. Many are kicked out for breaking the long list of rules.

Meanwhile, workers living on the streets are harassed and arrested by the cops. The New York Police Department’s “Homeless Outreach Unit” arrests people for “crimes” such as sleeping in the park.

Those applying for shelter must produce documents to prove they are homeless, such as eviction papers or letters from the landlord who threw them out. Families must prove they are really a family, presenting birth certificates, custody papers, or certification as domestic partners. About half the families applying for shelter are rejected for not answering to the satisfaction of their interrogators. One of the most hated institutions is the Emergency Assistance Unit (EAU) in the Bronx, the only remaining site in New York City where families can apply for shelter. Working people applying for shelter complain of abusive treatment by guards and caseworkers. They report that food in the cafeteria is often spoiled and has made many people sick.

“The city places many families in temporary housing night after night, requiring that they return to the Emergency Assistance Unit repeatedly before they are assigned something more permanent,” reported Stephanie Carberry in a January 1 article in the Gotham Gazette. They must continue to trek back to the Bronx even if they are staying at a distant site and their children are forced to miss school. All family members must be present at the interviews or the application is rejected.

For years, families waiting to be placed in shelters routinely had to spend the night sleeping on the floors of the EAU, a practice that was finally declared illegal and halted last year. City authorities have now said they will shut down the notorious facility and replace it.

“It’s like a prison,” Kevin Woods, in his early 20s, told the Militant in an August 3 interview outside the EAU. “The conditions are horrific.” Woods said he moved to New York from California to live with his brother and sister-in-law. But his brother got divorced and Woods was kicked out of the apartment, he said. Because of a knee injury that has required several operations, he’s been out of work and now without a roof over his head.

“I have three kids, and the one-year-old has asthma,” said José Rodríguez. “They are constantly getting sick. They don’t get to sleep. And sickness spreads around.”

“They say we’re not eligible because we can go back to Puerto Rico and live with my grandmother,” said Sharon Cepeda. “That would be 12 people in a house in San Juan.”

“They call us ‘clients,’ but we feel like inmates,” Woods said of the EAU.  
 
Bloomberg plan
On June 23 the Bloomberg administration announced a plan whose stated aim is to cut the number of homeless people by two-thirds by the year 2009. This is not a bill before the city council but new guidelines the administration is already using.

One aspect of the plan announced by Bloomberg is to more aggressively enforce existing eligibility requirements. If a homeless person has relatives in the city, a caseworker may deem that they have “other housing options” and try to disqualify them from being sheltered, a method that is already commonly used. Those who are rejected may challenge the ruling and eventually gain shelter, but the effect of the policy is to discourage a larger number from doing so, said Nortz from the Coalition for the Homeless.

The June 27 issue of the New York Daily News reported on the case of Jackie Vanleuvan, 21, and her eight-month-old daughter. The EAU rejected her, saying she had the “option” of living with her father—who had recently kicked her out of the house.

“Those who are ineligible for shelter cannot continuously clog the system and divert scarce resources that should go to those truly in need,” said Bloomberg in announcing the new plan.

The rulers of New York applauded the mayor’s proposal. A June 27 editorial in the Daily News declared that the problem is all the single mothers who “just decided to move out with the kids because they couldn’t get along with grandma.”

A second component of the Bloomberg plan is to finance 12,000 new units of “supportive housing” for the homeless. These are subsidized apartments combined with a building with social workers and a staff of psychiatrists and doctors.

The promise of new housing construction for the homeless may seem attractive and, if implemented, might even reduce the number of those in shelters or on the streets for a few years. Bloomberg’s speech announcing the plan was “interrupted 10 times by applause from homeless advocates and business leaders,” the Daily News reported.

But the mayor’s plan does nothing to address the decline in real income and the general shortage of affordable housing, not to mention the housing budget cuts, which will only lead to more workers pushed out onto the street.

In addition, to stay in the “supportive housing,” workers must submit to demeaning “mandatory monitoring” and a host of rules supervised by social workers.

Working people seeking a place to live have to deal with a huge government bureaucracy, including the Department of Homeless Services, welfare, and public housing authorities, as well as an associated army of social workers, therapists, and poverty pimps. There are at least 250 agencies in New York that “help” the homeless. Many of them, relying on government or private grants, have a stake in perpetuating this bureaucratic and demeaning set-up. The only “solution” offered by the capitalist rulers and their apologists, including the “caring” reformers, is to police workers who are homeless and to shift them from one place to another.

To gain acceptance for this disregard for human needs, they portray those lacking a home as elements to be viewed with suspicion and scorn. They promote the ongoing divisions between workers who have jobs and the unemployed, most pauperized sections of the working class.

From the capitalist standpoint, affordable housing for all and eliminating homelessness are not “realistic,” that is, not profitable.

The working-class movement, however, has a different approach. That is the subject of the article on page 9.

Paul Pederson contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Why capitalism creates a housing crisis  
 
 
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