Access to shelter is not a "loophole"!!!

City, failing to “reduce homelessness” by solving problems with housing and jobs, finally just shuts families out of shelter. by Sophia Bryant The city has a problem: Bloomberg promised he would reduce the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds by 2010. But people are still poor and they can’t afford housing. So now, the city is making it even harder for families to enter the shelter system – they’re punishing the people who need housing for the simple fact that shelter numbers aren’t going down. NBC News: “New NYC Policy For Homeless Who Seek Shelter After 5pm.” www.wnbc.com/news/14314709/detail.html?taf=ny New York Times: “Homeless Families in New York Lose a Loophole” www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/nyregion/11homeless.html?_r=2 DHS denies that people are homeless, and calls them “ineligible for shelter” First, they’re insisting that homeless people are not really homeless. Shelters have been asking people where they last stayed, and then saying they’re not eligible for shelter because they can go back there. If people don’t go – and have to come back to the shelter again for a bed for the night – the city says they’re “working the system.” Then they say they’re closing some loophole. This is how they decide whether you sleep in a bed or on the street: they investigate you to see everywhere you’ve lived in the past – they especially go by the last two places you lived. And the majority of the time, they say you’re not homeless because you can just go back there. Even if the person you stayed with has written a letter to say you can’t. In some situations, the people you were staying with jeopardized their own housing by letting you stay there, like NYCHA tenants – they can be evicted for letting you stay with them. But DHS still wants you to go back there. [See Carlos & Linda for a first-hand account.] One person was told by the shelter “just ask them if you can sleep in their bathtub.” Another person, they told them to ask their friend to put up a partition in their living room. A pregnant woman and her boyfriend were sleeping on a friend’s couch, and DHS told them “when the baby comes, all three of you can just sleep on the couch.” Someone else stayed with a friend for 4 months and then her friend said she just couldn’t do it anymore. When the woman applied for shelter, DHS sent an inspector to the friend’s house, who left a notice to insist that the woman be allowed to stay there. DHS inspectors came over and over, and posted so many notices on the house that the friend got a sanitation ticket. And it’s like welfare, where they turn you down for all kinds of silliness, just to see how desperate you really are. They think there are people who don’t need it and are trying to work the system? There’s always going to be someone like that. But we’re talking about a lot of people here who have no alternative! And DHS makes a LOT of mistakes in determining eligibility. One part doesn’t know what the other part is doing. There are so many people there who haven’t been trained well or are just incompetent. It stinks from the minute you walk through the door. We told all of this to Maryanne Stretzman, the Policy & Planning person at DHS in August. She looked at us all shocked, and told us to get the names of the caseworkers so they could investigate. Well the person is not gonna tell you they said that! And lose their job? But it seems pretty clear that DHS tells the caseworkers “tell ‘em anything.” ”Closing a loophole?!” DHS plays dumb while downsizing shelter & housing. DHS Commissioner Rob Hess and Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs have both said that they’re just “closing a loophole” used by people who aren’t really homeless to get into shelter. Are they serious? They act like this is a joke – that you’d leave your apartment day after day and go into the shelter. Anybody who wasn’t desperate would be coming there to be turned down time after time. It’s just unbelievable how many times people have been turned down – we know people who have been turned down 75 times. They really want to discourage you, but the people who really need housing just have to keep trying. Especially if they have kids. I’ve been there, I know. It’s only people who really have nowhere to go. DHS told us, in writing, that people are leaving their apartments and re-entering shelter in order to get housing under the new program. They claimed that’s why they stopped offering the Advantage program, and now they claim it’s why they’re denying emergency shelter to families. But let me tell you, these people are not coming in trying to get the new subsidies that DHS is supposed to be offering. People don’t even know about the Advantage program at all. Picture the Homeless conducts research interviews with people coming into the Riverview Job Center, where people go to open up a case for welfare to pay their rent to the shelter. We’ve interviewed about 100 people since July. Not one of them knew about the programs that are available. Most people don’t have a clue about the housing subsidies. And the people who are thinking about subsidies are hoping for Section 8, which is basically dead. They didn’t suddenly hear about a new program and dump their apartments. How about solving people’s housing-and-jobs dilemma instead of shutting down access to shelter? Family homelessness has jumped by more than 1000% since last year, which should be incredibly embarrassing for Bloomberg (whose 5-year plan to end homelessness was launched in 2005.) Why did homeless family numbers explode? People’s rent is increasing so high and so fast that they can’t afford to pay. There’s no viable job training for people who need it – HRA is sending people through programs that don’t produce anything. Worse, they act like people can live off of $10/hour. And the jobs that people do get through HRA are mostly minimum wage. Now if rent for a studio is $850, and you have children and a partner so you need a little more space, by the time you pay rent it’s going to be $1000 or more. Rents are going up even more dramatically in poor communities, as they’re doing anything and everything to take back these buildings. They’re going up on people’s rent by hundreds of dollars. There’s definitely no new housing for poor people. And all the new buildings going up – even the ones that have 20% of units set aside for poor people – they’re not even renting those to us, the developers would often rather let them sit vacant. Or rent them under the radar to people who aren’t poor. The Catch-22 of finding an apartment: City screw-ups lead to blacklisting of subsidized tenants People who did have subsidies from HRA have been getting evicted too. In a huge number of cases, HRA stopped paying people’s rent either by mistake or because a person’s welfare case got sanctioned. The person winds up in housing court, they get evicted, they get back into the shelter if they’re lucky – but now they’re blacklisted because they’ve been to housing court. If they manage to find another apartment, now they need a guarantor. And no one is talking about helping get that off people’s records. No housing, no shelter, record homelessness. When will Bloomberg finally face up? If something doesn’t change, people are actually going to be living in the shelter as a permanent address. DHS themselves just identified 100 families that have been in shelter for between 5 and 20 years! Hess told us that at our last meeting with him, in June 2007. The average person we talk to is saying they’ve been in shelter from 1-3 years. After 90 days you’re eligible for a subsidy – apparently it takes the City 45 days to do the paperwork to open a welfare case and tie it to the shelter system – although it’s not clear what they do with the other 45 days,. Then you’re supposed to be able to look for an apartment, and they say it shouldn’t take you more that 2-3 months. That’s a lie! Landlords were a little leery of DHS and HRA to begin with. But DHS and HRA messed up Advantage so bad that landlords don’t want to touch it. It’s incredibly hard to get out of the shelter. The shelter workers push you to get out – harassing people, punishing people, putting people on contracts saying that you MUST see at least 2 apartments per week, and that you’ll find something within 10-30 days. If you don’t, they bump you to another shelter, one that’s worse, as punishment. And there are some really terrible family shelters. Single shelters too – the stories are just crazy. DHS policy is just further and further removed from reality – Hess and Bloomberg have no idea what it’s like to be in the shelter. They have no idea what people go through on a daily basis. They think that people want to come in there? They even ask people who are working to quit their jobs in order to stay in the shelter! And then three months down the line they tell you to go out and get a job, and be self-sufficient. Great, you’re really making it easy for people to be self-suffficient! And people are really, really upset. And they don’t understand what they’re doing to these children either, traumatizing them. Reality check: access to shelter is not a loophole. Bloomberg, Gibbs and Hess need to think about what’s the real reason for this many people being homeless, and come up with a viable solution. It’s not about people didn’t pay their rent and they’re drug addicts and they’re playing the system. People want to work. The majority people have been working all their lives. A lot of people have lost their jobs for all kinds of reasons. Rent is high. Poor neighborhoods are gentrifying. People just aren’t making it. No one is rolling the dice, leaving their apartments to get into shelter. There’s no loophole to close. There’s just a huge number of homeless families, trying to figure out where they can possibly go.