Nikita

Right now I’m employed by Picture The Homeless (PTH) as the Rental Subsidies Organizer, a campaign to get around changing New York City’s shelter & homeless policies. We focus attention on DHS, HRA, ACS in order to assure that the 34,000+ shelter residents and God only knows the number of street homeless are assisted with real housing – real housing. I came to this job through NYC shelter system. Picture The Homeless didn’t actually get me out of the shelter, they just showed me how to navigate the system. The staff & members at PTH have been dealing with the issues that I face now and have faced since 1999, its inception. We know the policies of the NYC shelter system, and have found ways to deal with it on a small scale. This why the fight is so important to me, because people don’t have the knowledge [to navigate the system.] There’s so much misinformation out there. It comes from staff that is poorly trained and poorly educated on policies, from homeless & formerly homeless individuals in the system who are not keeping up with the changes, it comes from misconceptions of homelessness… just to name a few. What’s your story? In 2004 I came to NYC to get my daughter and take her back to Rochester after her mother passed away at the age of 47. My daughter was a B+ average student in a Catholic school, living with her stepfather. At his and the principal’s urging, I was encouraged to stay here and let her finish out the school, year. He then moved his significant other in, and she changed the locks on us. The decision was put to my daughter: we could either stay and go into the shelter system, or go to Rochester where I had a job and prospects of an apt. She wanted to stay, so we entered the shelter system. My experience was a little daunting, but not unbearable because I’ve been able to adapt to various environments. I made it my mission to either be out of the system in a year’s time, or return to Rochester. In trying to navigate the system, one of the residents at my shelter told me about PTH, who had a lot of info on how to get through our ordeal, I didn’t immediately go, because I thought I could do it on my own. I was trying to get housing and employment on my own, separate from subsidies etc. But after realizing how drastically the rents had changed in NYC, I knew I was going to need some assistance. The only subsidy available at the time was Housing Stability Plus (HSP), a five year for which you had to have an open PA case, and fall under the guidelines of HRA, which means if you made anything over the federal poverty guidelines, you weren’t eligible. On top of that, the program had a 20% step-down [reduction in the amount of subsidy] each year. And your stipend from HRA didn’t increase with the step-down. I got HSP without knowing the full details of how it worked, and I didn’t find all this out till after I’d found a job with a catering company making $15/hour. Being on a short leash with the timeline that I’d set for myself to come out of the shelter system, when I learned what my options were – keep your job and lose the rental assistance, or keep the rental assistance and lose the job, I decided to stay with the program in order to leave the shelter system ASAP. This was 2005. I moved out of the shelter Dec 31 of 2005. I’d had the job for 4 months, and I was just ducking and dodging until – with them taking the social security number and all, it gets back to HRA. When HRA finds out people are working, it usually cancels their HSP – but the program was still very very new, and at the shelter where I was, the staff wasn’t very knowledgable about HSP. So I basically tap danced and held my worker off before I was given an ultimatum. They ask you for documentation, you pull up short on it, you make another appointment, and like that. Now I have the task of going out and finding an apt for my daughter and myself with the HSP program. Let me also say that in the shelter, we stayed in a single room in bunk beds – just she and I. These conditions would not be acceptable under ACS, but it is acceptable under DHS guidelines… something I haven’t been able to figure out yet. After about 7 months of coming to PTH and going out looking for a job that fit the criteria for HRA, and looking for an apartment and going to my various HRA appointments, nothing happened – no prospects of an apartment, no prospects of a job, no prospects of a program that was realistically going to assist my daughter and me. This is when I decided that I’d stay in the fight with PTH to change this program and a lot of the other city policies. What’s happening now? My daughter is back in Rochester – she said she wanted to stay, then she didn’t… she has a lot going on. Her mother died, she’s 16 years old, she was in the shelter system, she says she’s gay… her grades started dropping off in the shelter system, and we went into family counseling. As a parent the only thing I knew to tell her was that she’s smarter than this… You want to give your children what they want, but if I had it to do over again, we would’ve left. While fighting on the policies with PTH, I found a 1-br apartment for my daughter and myself. The voucher is $820, and the landlord wants $900. So in order to come out of the shelter I had to make a decision – stay in the shelter and look for an apartment for $820, or take a very nice apartment and make an $80 side deal [paying the landlord the extra money myself.] So I chose to make the $80 side deal. Unlike a lot of others who chose to take a side deal, I was able to find money by [working extra,] doing civic participation workshops that encourage shelter residents to register to vote, and engage our organization in change and other odd jobs. Obviously those aren’t legal under HSP, but this kept me from falling into rent arrears and going back into the shelter system, while all around me people are falling into arrears with no option of help or employment, and going back into shelter. PTH along with others got the DHS to realistically look at changing a flawed program, and they introduced in April 2007 the Advantage program – which does allow an individual coming out of shelter to go to work and still receive a rent subsidy. But the kicker here is, this program only lasts for 2 years. And if you take an apartment that, after 2 years, if you can’t afford the rent, you’re going to wind back up in the shelter system. Unfortunately, the system has changed the criteria to re-enter the shelter system and made it much harder. So this is where my fight and PTH’s fight, is. To get the system to implement a system much closer to Section 8, and encourage people to find good wage-paying jobs. That’s 2007. FOR INFO ON NIKITA'S RENT SUBSIDIES CAMPAIGN: http://www.picturethehomeless.org/rentsubsidies TO CONTACT NIKITA: nikita@picturethehomeless.org * 646-314-6423