Coalition for the Homeless: View from the Street 2021 April 2021 VIEW FROM THE STREET UNSHELTERED NEW YORKERS AND THE NEED FOR SAFETY, DIGNITY, AND AGENCY By Lindsey Davis By Senior Director of Crisis Services, Coalition for the Homeless Foreword by Kim Hopper Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health Coa- lition for the Homeless: View from the Street 2021 SAFETY, DIGNITY, AGENCY 11 Coalition for the Homeless: View from the Street 2021 March 2021 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was conceived, designed, and executed with the invaluable help of Kim Hopper, whose decades of influential work with, and on behalf of, people experiencing homelessness continues to shed light on the path forward. This project would also not have been possible without the help of Coalition for the Homeless staff who generously volunteered their time and expertise during countless late nights and early mornings, including Liz Henderson, Katie Mack, Lauren May, Jenn Solomon, Joseph Timmons, and Destini Torres. A special thanks to Steven Lopez and Juan De La Cruz without whom we would not have reached nearly as many of our unsheltered neighbors, and to Tim Campbell for helping shepherd this project through to its completion. Finally, thank you to Dave Giffen for envisioning this project with me more than three years ago and giving voice to the experience of the unsheltered New Yorkers we serve. SAFETY, DIGNITY, AGENCY 2 Coalition for the Homeless: View from the Street 2021 INTRODUCTION March 2021 Forty years ago, the Community Service Society of New York published what proved to be a momentous study of the “Homelessness has taken on a rarified connotation lives of homeless New Yorkers, Private Lives / Public Spaces, that I’m a stereotype instead of being minus a which “sought to obtain the perspective of the chronically home, and the two shouldn’t be connected, but mentally disabled as they were confronted by day-to-day they are. survival problems.” The authors of that report, Ellen Baxter and Kim Hopper, would go on that same year to co-found the We’re not your enemies. We’re your sons and Coalition for the Homeless along with a young lawyer named daughters, fathers and mothers, and nothing has Bob Hayes. Two years earlier, Hayes had brought a class- changed except that I don’t have access to a key action lawsuit on behalf of homeless adult men, Callahan v. and an apartment.” - E.D., survey respondent Carey, arguing that a constitutional right to shelter exists in New York. That case was settled when the Callahan Consent Decree was signed in August 1981. The right to shelter was The voices of the people we spoke with in the course of later extended to include homeless adult women, and then, conducting these interviews were very clear. When asked through subsequent litigation brought by The Legal Aid what it would take for them to come indoors, the most Society, to homeless families with children. frequent response was “housing.” They all want help, but they are simply not getting the help they need. It’s not that The findings in Private Lives / Public Spaces were featured they hadn’t been approached by City outreach teams – the as a front page story in The New York Times on March 8, vast majority (84 percent) reported having met outreach 1 1981, the day before the report’s official release. The Times workers. But those teams, generally promising nothing more piece cited the report’s conclusion that the City was falling than a trip to a shelter intake facility, were not offering “woefully short” in its efforts to provide meaningful shelter anything of value to the respondents. to homeless New Yorkers – as evidenced by the presence of some 36,000 people sleeping on the streets at the time. The HRA official’s contention 40 years ago that “There An official in the Human Resources Administration (HRA) are some people who choose not to come to the shelters” defended the City, asserting, “There are some people who illustrates how insidious the misperception of the idea of choose not to come to the shelters.”2 “choice” can be, and how it can be used to shift blame to those who have been failed by our tattered social safety net A follow-up Times piece three days later focused on the and broken housing system. The choice between another methodology of the report, and brought even more public night on the streets or another night in a shelter – the attention to the plight of homeless New Yorkers and to perceived cost of which is one’s safety, dignity, and agency5 3 the groundbreaking work of Baxter and Hopper. The two – is in fact no choice at all. researchers saw Private Lives / Public Spaces “as a means ultimately of seeking improved conditions” for the people The more than 200 unsheltered New Yorkers interviewed they were interviewing, believing that “public policy could for this report, and the thousands more we did not have the be more effectively designed were it formulated on a more opportunity to speak with, are not staying on the streets by informed basis.”4 choice. They stay there because our systems have failed them again and again. They want, and deserve, better: Access to Over the past four decades, a network of shelters has grown the most basic necessities of daily life, including food, water, from 3,600 beds in 1981 to today’s sprawling system that clothing, bathrooms, and health care; emergency shelters shelters roughly 56,000 people a night, and yet “street that meet their immediate needs and treat them with respect; homelessness” has remained stubbornly persistent. and, most of all, the safety, dignity, and independence that Advocates have kept up the fight to make the City and come with having a home of one’s own. State more responsive to the actual needs of homeless New Yorkers and, as noted above, to design public policy on a more informed basis. But that, of course, requires listening Dave Giffen to those who are experiencing homelessness – which is why Executive Director we embarked on this project. Coalition for the Homeless 1 Bird, D. (1981, March). Hope is Urged for 36,000 Homeless in City’s Streets. The New York Times, Section 1, Page 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Johnston, L. (1981, March). A Journey Into the City’s Netherworld. The New York Times, Section B, Page 3. 4 Hopper, K., Baxter, E. (1981). Private Lives / Public Spaces, Homeless adults on the Streets of New York City. Community Service Society. 5 “Agency” in this report refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices. SAFETY, DIGNITY, AGENCY 3 Coalition for the Homeless: View from the Street 2021 FOREWORD: A FAMILIAR PLACE, REVISITED The middle-class person asks: “How did the everyday ministry of assistance to those currently these people get here? Who are they? Where experiencing homelessness or threatened with it, and the close tracking of structural roots, corrective efforts, are their families? How did they fall so low?” and gathering trends, are also part of it. So, too, are We all harbor fears about the difference be- litigation, legislation, and policy-making. Finally, and too tween the mad street people and ourselves. little appreciated, there’s advocacy’s insistence that we How far are we from losing all our money and continue the argument about who we are as New Yorkers our grace and ending up ranting on a corner, and to whom the city belongs.8 holding up a piece of cardboard over a cup? But my task here is to say why, after so much talk to so little avail (or so my dream figures implied),9 we still - E. Swados, 1991 need to hear from the street. To do this, I first need to underscore what makes this question so pressing in I’d been struggling for several months to draft a foreword New York. The growing presence of the street-dwelling for this report when I was drawn up short by a dream: homeless poor doesn’t distinguish this city from other Someone (me?) had managed to locate and re-interview outposts of urban gentrification and displacement. San the hundreds of homeless folks from whom researchers Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Houston, had coaxed “their story” over the past four decades. They Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Philadelphia all boast sizeable all wanted to know the same thing: What difference had street populations. The puzzle is this: Alone among U.S. it made? cities, since 1981, New York has had a court-entered right to shelter, one that has withstood decades of litigation, Whoa. pushback, and policy maneuvering to relax or vacate it.10 Nonetheless, the numbers of the unsheltered homeless I had been trying to write something that would do justice are regularly replenished and may even be growing.11 This both to the still-unsettling spectacle of the street and report seeks to take stock of those apparently expanding to the utterly familiar, almost clichéd reality of public ranks, to communicate something of their lived reality, homelessness as urban backdrop. I’d toyed with the idea and to ask – once again – why not otherwise? What would of municipal shelter as the housing market’s lower deck it take? in late liberal New York.6 But I hadn’t been asking that prior question: What good would it do to add one more How advocacy works lament to a decades-long miserere? Hadn’t it all been said – sometimes stridently, sometimes plaintively, often Stubbornly bearing witness to unmet need, tracking trends, enough incoherently – many times before? Besides, don’t and documenting the failed mechanisms of assistance we have the necessary statistics, shelter records, and trend (including unheeded or worked-around court orders)12 data to make the argument soundly, empirically? Even make up much of the job of advocacy.