[Peace-discuss] NYTimes.com Article: New Wave of the Homeless Floods Cities' Shelters

[Barbara Dyskant]

And here is the "companion article" to the one about "Congress in a Giving
Mood".

This article from NYTimes.

New Wave of the Homeless Floods Cities' Shelters

December 18, 2001 

By PAM BELLUCK


 

With unemployment rising and housing costs still high,
cities around the country are experiencing a new and sudden
wave of homelessness. Shelters are overflowing, and more
people this year are sleeping on floors in dingy social
service centers, living in cars or spending nights on the
streets. 

In New York, Boston and other cities, homelessness is at
record levels, a consequence of a faltering economy that
has crumbled even further after the Sept. 11 attacks. 

A survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors released last
week found that requests for emergency shelter in 27 cities
had increased an average of 13 percent over last year. The
report said the increases were 26 percent in Trenton; 25
percent in Kansas City, Mo.; 22 percent in Chicago; 20
percent in Denver; and 20 percent in New Orleans. 

An unusual confluence of factors seems to be responsible
for the surge. Housing prices, which soared in the
expansion of the 1990's, have not gone down, even though
the economy has tumbled. A stream of layoffs has newly
unemployed people taking low-wage jobs that might have
otherwise gone to the poor. Benefits for welfare recipients
are expiring under government-imposed deadlines. And
charitable donations to programs that help the
disadvantaged are down considerably, officials around the
country said, because of the economy and the outpouring of
donations for people affected by Sept. 11. 

"This is an unprecedented convergence of calamities," said
Xavier De Souza Briggs, an assistant professor of public
policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard. "It's really a crisis." 

More than half the cities surveyed by the mayors' group
reported that in the last year people had remained homeless
longer, an average of six months. 

There is no total number for the homeless nationwide.
Experts said it was difficult to compare the situation with
statistics in previous decades, because counting methods
have improved. Yet, several experts said they believed that
the increases reported by cities like Boston and Chicago
reflected a national trend. 

"My impression is there is more homelessness now than there
was 20 years ago," Gary Burtless, an economist at the
Brookings Institution, said, adding that he believed that
economic factors were not the sole explanation. 

"I think that there must be a greater segment of our
population that has tenuous connections to family and
friends, and therefore has fewer resources to fall back on
when something very bad happens like when they lose their
job," he said. 

An increasing proportion of the homeless are families with
children, compared with the chronically homeless who often
have serious mental illness or substance abuse problems.
Requests for shelter from families with children increased
in three-quarters of the cities surveyed. In more than
half, families had to be broken up to be accommodated in
shelters. 

Some newly homeless people have jobs but do not earn enough
to allow use of a home. Low-cost housing is so tight that
one-third of the vouchers for the Section 8
subsidized-housing program are being returned unused,
according to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development. 

Several experts and advocates for the homeless predicted
that the number of homeless people would rise in coming
months as states and cities, facing budget crises and
burdened with security costs, scaled back on financing for
housing and other programs that help keep people from
becoming homeless, like rent assistance and health care. 

A senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless
in New York, Patrick Markee, said: "Now, especially since
Sept. 11, we're seeing the recession effect, low-wage
workers who were just holding on, messengers, people who
work in restaurants turning up at our door. We're going to
see it get worse over the next few months." 

In Rhode Island, the state is dropping a $5 million housing
program from its budget. Yet this month, a crush of
homeless people forced the opening of a shelter in an old
convent in Warwick, the first new shelter for the homeless
in the state in 10 years. This year, 120 families with
children have slept on the floor of Travelers Aid, a social
service center in Providence that is not a shelter. 

In New York, the number of people in shelters, 29,802 as of
last month, is the highest ever. According to the Coalition
for the Homeless, the number of families in shelters has
grown 50 percent in three years, to 6,669, while the
percentage of children in shelters has risen 60 percent, to
12,576. Mr. Markee said 1,500 families were being housed in
welfare hotels, three times as many as three years ago. 

In Boston, officials conducted a census of the homeless on
Dec. 10 and found 6,001 homeless people, a record, said
Kelley Cronin, director of the Emergency Shelter
Commission. Ms. Cronin added that the number of people on
the street, 277, was also the highest on record. 

Chicago reported in the mayors' survey that the number of
people who were homeless or receiving emergency assistance
to keep them from becoming homeless had jumped, to 19,421
from 15,682 last year. 

In a school district in Sacramento, Liane Ramirez, who
works with homeless families, said she had already seen
twice as many families living in their cars as she had seen
in the previous few years combined. 

"We feel like we're seeing a lot more first-time
scared-to-death homeless," Ms. Ramirez said. "And we're
looking at working homeless, not just welfare homeless." 

Some aspects of the problem seem clearly related to the
terrorist attacks. 

Before Sept. 11, the Boston Rescue Mission, a large
shelter, had a $90,000 contract with Delta Air Lines to
clean the carpets of its planes. The contract, which the
airline had been planning to double, employed 30 homeless
people from the shelter, said John Samaan, the president of
the mission. After Sept. 11, Delta halved the contract
instead, putting one-third of the workers out of work. 

In Portland, Ore., the Goose Hollow Family Shelter, the
largest family shelter in the city in the winter, usually
receives thousands of dollars in donations in September,
said Chuck Currie, its director. This year, it received one
contribution, for $100. 

"I've heard other agencies say contributions have dropped
20 percent to 70 percent," Mr. Currie said. 

Programs that provide services to the homeless are also
bracing for the state budget cuts. 

In Illinois, homeless services are highly likely to be
affected by state plans for a $485 million budget cut. 

"It's going to send programs like ours into a tailspin,"
said Diane Nilan, an administrator at a large shelter in
Aurora, a Chicago suburb whose shelter has been so crowded
that Ms. Nilan has asked for a portable classroom to add
space. 

In many cities, shelters said they were seeing more people
who became homeless after having lost jobs or being priced
out of apartments. 

In Dallas, Oscar Turner, 52, was laid off from his
$8-an-hour job as a Wal-Mart greeter in early October and
has been staying at free shelters, unable to afford the
small rent that he had paid before. Mr. Turner has looked
for work with the city as a crossing guard or maintenance
worker, but so far, he said, "it's not going too good." 

In Charlotte, N.C., Tyrone Hicklen, 43, was laid off at a
party-supply store and has been living in shelters for two
months. Unable to find work, he is heading to Kansas to
enroll in a truck-driving school. 

In Rhode Island, John Swenson, 44, took refuge at the
Warwick shelter with his 10-year-old son, Michael, after he
could not find work at his home in Hyannis, Mass., and lost
a part-time job cooking hamburgers in Warwick. 

"It's kind of late in life to be needing something," said
Mr. Swenson, unemployed for the first time in 15 years and
used to $14-an-hour jobs. 

"I knew there were shelters," he said, "and that's part of
what kept me out of them. On the Cape, I helped paint the
shelter in Hyannis. I went from painting a shelter to being
in one."