July 16, 2012 |
It's a searing hot Sunday in the Bronx, and young women and couples
with small children sweatily make their way up the ramp to the
PATH building,
New York City's shiny new intake center, where homeless families with
children must go to get placed in shelters. That's the hope at least. A
couple that went in right around the time I showed up exits the building
about half an hour later, and the man is pissed; it doesn't look like
they had any luck today. Everyone looks anxious as they walk up the
ramp; clearly this is a situation where there had better be a Plan B if
getting themselves and their kids into a shelter is not in the cards.
A young couple with the cutest twin toddlers I've ever seen walks up
and sits on the curb. I point this out to their parents and for a second
they beam, but then they go back to looking very worried. This is
their 3rd trip to PATH this week. The first two times they were turned
away, when their caseworker
s decided they should
stay with Amanda's mom instead. Her mom disagreed. Now, the couple has
come prepared, bearing a letter in which her mom assures the Department
of Homeless Services just how unwelcome her daughter and grandchildren
are. "Hopefully this time it'll work, and we'll have a place to stay,"
says Amanda, 18, who took her first trip to PATH at 17, when her
mother kicked her out of the house for the first time. "We're hoping to
get placed in Brooklyn, where I'm from, but even the Bronx would be
fine, as long as we have a place."
The twins are crying the whole time. The man picks up one kid and their
heavy luggage flips the stroller on its back, upending the other twin,
who starts screaming as the dad frantically tries to right the fallen
stroller; no one who comes here is having a very good day. It's tough
with the twins inside the building too, because they can't bring in food
or water, according to Amanda. "We have to pour out our water bottles
before we go inside."
To keep out more dangerous things, the building has a full-on security
apparatus with metal detectors in the entry way and harried security
guards rushing families through. Hanging from each of their belts is an
extendable baton, in case any trouble gets past the metal detectors.
Outside, a new family walks up the ramp every five to 10 minutes. One
woman's baby is only a week and a half old; she's draped a piece of
cloth over his stroller to protect him from the heat.
Candace, 26, is heavily pregnant -- she's going to have a baby girl at
the end of July. She's anxious to make her appointment because she
really needs a place to stay, but before she goes she politely offers
that the new PATH building is nicer than when she first came here at 17.
"Everything's clean, everyone is polite," she says softly, then
scrunches up her face. "In the old one there was feces, regurgitations,
and flies everywhere."
***
After hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005, advocates for the
homeless were horrified to find that the storms had left one in 50
American kids without a home, a record high, according to a report by
the
Coalition for Family Homelessness. But
only a few years later the financial crisis outperformed nature in
casting catastrophe on poor Americans. After record foreclosures,
layoffs and budget cuts that hit poor families the hardest, America is a
country where one out of 45 kids doesn't have a home. That totals 1.6
million children in 2010 without a permanent place to live, an increase
of 448,000 in just three years. Forty percent of the kids are under 6.
"As a society, we bear responsibility for creating this second disaster
and for responding to its aftermath," concludes the report, before
detailing how many states fall short in working to prevent family
homelessness and in taking care of families who've lost their homes.
"Many places in the country don't have shelters," says Diane Nilan,
an advocate for the homeless who ran several family shelters in
Illinois and since 2005 has traveled around the country raising
awareness about homeless families (
Hear Us). "In
some cases, you have to travel five or six counties over to get to a
shelter. Often they're filled or gender-segregated. Then the family has
to decide whether to sleep in a car, or to farm the kids out to friends,
or split up," Nilan says.
The Southern states, which are also some of the nation's poorest, have
the worst access to homeless shelters: of Mississippi's (poverty rate
25.87
percent) 82 counties, only 17 offer a
family homeless shelter, according to the
Red, White and Blue Book, which
compiles information about services for homeless families. There are 23
in Alabama. Louisiana's homelessness rate doubled between
2007 and 2009, and that year researchers estimated that
30 percent of the state's homeless families ended up sleeping in their cars or in abandoned buildings.
A motel is another less-than-ideal option. "These
are families who have jobs paying minimum wage salaries, so they turn
to motels, get stuck in this cycle of having to pay all their income for
housing to avoid the streets," Nilan says.
Given how little low-income Americans get paid and how much they get
charged for rent in many parts of the country, it's actually a miracle
that even
more families haven't been pushed out of their homes.
In
California, the average two-bedroom rental requires a $26-an-hour
salary while minimum wage in the state is $8, according to a National Low Income Housing Coalition study.
Here's what happened to a family Nilan met in Florida.
The parents both worked at restaurants in New Orleans, but Hurricane
Katrina wiped out their jobs and their home and sent them to Nashville.
When "the floods came back and upended them again," they asked
their 8-year-old daughter where she wanted to go. "Disney World!" she
said. Not a bad idea, they figured, since tourist traps are filled with
restaurants where they could find jobs. But when they got there they
couldn't find steady work (Orlando has an 8.7 percent unemployment
rate). Sometimes the mom had a job, sometimes the dad did. Mostly the
jobs were part-time and temporary. To make ends meet, Nilan says, they
rented one of the beds in their motel room to a 53-year-old homeless
vet. DIY homeless shelter.
***
An interesting fact about family homelessness: before the early-1980s,
it did not exist in America, at least not as an endemic,
multi-generational problem afflicting millions of poverty-stricken
adults and kids. Back then, the typical homeless family was a
middle-aged woman with teenagers who wound up in a shelter following
some sort of
catastrophic bad luck like a house fire. They stayed a short time before they got back on their feet.
In the 1980s, family homelessness did not so much
begin to grow as it exploded, leaving poverty advocates and city
officials stunned as young parents with small children overwhelmed the
shelter system and spilled into the streets. In New York City, the rate of homeless people with underage kids went up by 500 percent between
1981 and 1995. Nationally,
kids and families made up less than 1 percent of the homeless
population in the early 1980s, according to advocate and researcher Dr.
Ellen Bassuk. HUD estimates put the number at 35 percent of
people sleeping in shelters in 2010.
"All of a sudden, around the early 1980s we started to see tons of families who were there because of poverty,"
Ralph da Costa-Núñez, who worked in Mayor Ed Koch's administration and is now CEO of Homes for the Homeless, tells AlterNet.
The reasons behind the jump in family homelessness are not complex,
Núñez says.
"It was the gutting of the safety net. Reagan cut every social program
that helped the poor. Then there's inflation so their aid checks are
shrinking. Where are they going? Into the streets, into the shelters."
The administration was especially keen to cut low-income housing programs. Peter Dreier
writes that Reagan created a housing task force, "
dominated by politically connected developers, landlords and bankers." They
and the president were in agreement that the market was the best way to
address housing for the poor, and instituted cuts in government
spending that yielded almost instant results. In 1970, Dreier writes,
there were more low-income housing units than families who needed them,
but "by 1985 the number of low-cost units had fallen to 5.6 million, and
the number of low-income renter households had grown to 8.9 million, a
disparity of 3.3 million units."
At a 1985 hearing before the Senate subcommittee on housing and urban affairs,
Barry Zigas, the president of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition,
called the administration's approach toward the poor a "scorched-earth policy." President Reagan offered a sunnier view on the TV show
Good Morning America,
saying, "What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware
of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times,
and is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are
homeless, you might say, by choice."
"I thought we were going to make it to go away," Nunez tells AlterNet.
"And one day I had to tell Mayor Koch, this is here to stay."
Continuing in the tradition of his Republican predecessors, President
Bill Clinton's tough-love welfare reforms were especially tough on poor
women and children. The
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Act,
which replaced a New Deal welfare program for the poorest families, put
work requirements and time limits on assistance. As Nunez puts it,
their benefits would run out and, "Boom! Where do they go? The shelters
and the streets."
TANF decreased welfare caseloads from "12.3 million recipients per
month in 1996 to 4.4 million in June 2011" according to a National
Poverty Center
policy brief, a
drop that has been touted as a success even though in many cases
families just couldn't get access to benefits they needed -- many had
not rocketed out of poverty on their bootstraps. Either way, TANF plays
out a whole lot differently today than during the Clinton years when the
economy was relatively strong.
A
New York Times piece titled "
Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit" details
TANF's downsides in our current predicament -- the caseloads stayed the
same during record joblessness, and women and kids have had to resort
to desperate measures to make it, like skipping meals, scavenging
through trash, and going back to abusive relationships.
If they end up without a home -- whether that means they're staying
with relatives, or sleeping on the ground, or in their car, or in
abandoned buildings, or in shelters -- here is what their lives look
like: To start with, the moms are likely to suffer depression, anxiety disorders, or PTSD, because a large percentage of
sheltered mothers "have experienced physical and sexual assault over
their lifespan," according to the National Child Traumatic Stress
Network. Homelessness itself compounds their trauma, especially if they
don't get treatment, both because it's stressful to be homeless and
because not having shelter makes the families vulnerable to more
violence. Being homeless, or the economic or personal horrors that led
to homelessness, or being raised by parents fighting mental problems,
means that many kids suffer from psychological disorders. "Half
of school-age homeless children experience anxiety, depression, or
withdrawal compared to 18 percent of non-homeless children," according
to the Traumatic Stress network.
"Homeless children worry about where they will sleep on a given night,
and if they have a place to sleep, they are afraid of losing it
,"
the Traumatic Stress Network continues. "Older children worry about
being separated from friends and pets, and they fear that they will be
seen as different among new peers at school. They also worry about their
families: their parents, whose stress and tension is often shared with
the children, and their siblings, for whom they see themselves as
primary caregivers. More than half of homeless children surveyed also
said that they worried about their physical safety, especially with
regard to violence, guns, and being injured in a fire. One-quarter of
homeless children have witnessed violence in the family."
Being adrift is likely to make little boys aggressive and little girls depressed and withdrawn, according to a report by
the Family Housing Fund. Homeless
children get sick more often than poor children who have a
home. They're more likely to have respiratory and digestive infections,
stunted growth, anemia, TB, and asthma. They are prone to dangerous
chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, peripheral vascular
disease, endocrine dysfunction, or neurological disorders, according to
the Family Housing Fund.
School is a disaster. Since many homeless families have to move
constantly, the kids get pulled in and out of school and can end up
being held back. Often they are too hungry or stressed to learn. It's
tough to do homework, even if they've landed in a shelter, because e
ven the mundane becomes stressful. "Let's
say you have six to eight families in a shelter, each in a room, and
there are two to three kids in a family" says Bassuk. "That's a lot of
kids running around. It's chaos. The whole family sleeps in the same
room; if one kid gets an earache, nobody sleeps."
"It's so mind-blowing for me," says Diane Nilan. "No matter what we've
done -- and I've been involved in significant advocacy efforts to
enlighten Congress -- there's this mindset, I don't know if it's denial
or what, to totally ignore the people who are the most vulnerable.
You see abysmal conditions that little babies are growing up in. They're in the prime period of human development," she says. "It's a horrible, horrible oversight, the way we are neglecting little kids when they need us the most."
***
The tough-love approach still has its fans. In
2004, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a plan to slash
the rate of homelessness in the city by two-thirds in five years. One
curious feature of his Five-Year Plan was to limit priority access to
federal programs that put homeless families into homes. Struggling New
Yorkers, the administration was sure, were hustling the system by
showing up at shelters pretending to be homeless in order to grab up
federal aid.
So priority Section 8 rent assistance was
thrown out in favor of bootstrappy initiatives like the Advantage
program, which was designed to teach important life lessons about
self-sufficiency and financial responsibility by cutting off aid after
two years.
A few years later, one in three homeless families that participated in Advantage ended up
back in the shelters. As with everything else, the financial crisis made everything worse.
"It's
not like rents went down in NYC with the recession," Patrick Markee of
Coalition for the Homeless tells AlterNet. "The gaps between incomes and
rents has gone higher and higher."
The Advantage program train-wrecked when New York state discontinued
its part of the funding in 2010. The Bloomberg administration then gave
poor families a great lesson in financial responsibility by killing the
program and cutting off payments to participating families last
February. Right now, 43,000 people are
sleeping in municipal shelters in NYC, 17,000 of them children. It's a
10 percent increase from last year and the highest number since the Great Depression.
"You've got more families than ever," Markee says. "The shelter system is bursting at the seams."
Tana Ganeva is AlterNet's managing editor. Follow her on
Twitter or email her at tana@alternet.org.
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