The second component in the program is the so-called “case management.” Once a client is receiving assistance, whether they are in a clinic, are back on welfare, or have received alternative housing, it must be checked to ensure they are fulfilling their new tasks and obligations and not sliding back down into old habits.
“We even have to visit Clifford every month and tell him that he needs to pay the rent on time and has to fill in his welfare paper at the end of the month,” Mason-Ailey says. Clifford is the poster boy for MTA/Connections, a success story described on the program’s flier. Mason-Ailey shows me a New York Newsday article. “His Life was Like a Box of Grenades,” the headlines scream sensationally, a variation of Forrest Gump’s “Life is Like a Box of Chocolates.”
Clifford was the ultimate mole man. In pitch dark tunnels, Clifford was shooting up heroin with blunt and bent needles, using the one arm that was OK to inject it into his other arm that was partially paralyzed. That’s to say, if he wasn’t suffering delirium tremens from drinking cheap vodka and whiskey. Six stories deep under Grand Central, he had crawled away so as not to face his shattered life. Thanks to the efforts of two outreach workers from MTA/Connections, as well as Sergeant Bryan Henry and a fellow homeless man, Clifford saw the light again. He successfully made it through rehab, got his identity papers back, and could apply for welfare. Now Clifford lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, the proud owner of a doorbell and his nameplate on the door.
The program has become so effective that Amtrak now has consulted MTA/Connections to help with their problem with the homeless of Penn Station. Under new regulations, the police can evict the homeless from the Amtrak stations if they become a nuisance. Apart from a prohibition of urinating in public, panhandling, playing loud music and selling merchandise, it is currently also forbidden to sleep lying flat. But the homeless are very inventive, Mason-Ailey explains. “They found out pretty fast that the police could not intervene if they slept sitting straight up. And those that wanted to lie down just went one story below, to the waiting room of the New Jersey Transit where the NYPD doesn’t have jurisdiction. In no time, Penn was crowded again with homeless who were sleeping side-by-side, sitting up with their garbage bags. No regular traveler dared to sit between them anymore. In these situations we can offer our services and make a difference.”
“If we accept that people will settle down in the tunnels, we are only pushing the problem farther down into the deep,” says Shary Siegel. “And with every day someone lives on the street, it is harder to get him back.”
Shary Siegel is the coordinator from the MTA/Connections teams. Mason-Ailey introduced us because I want to join her tunnel teams. Siegel’s office is on Columbus Circle, from her window at the 30th story you have a view over the whole of Central Park.
Siegel finishes a phone call with the assistant of Secretary Cisneros, and tells an outreach team to make sure Clifford hands in his welfare forms in time. She runs her hands through her messy hair, and apologizes for making me wait so long.
“It’s a complete madhouse here,” she sighs when a staff member puts a pile of new faxes on her desk. Siegel draws the organizational structure of MTA/Connections for me on a big sheet of paper: where the money is coming from; which organizations are involved; which federal, state, and city institutions are currently giving grants; to whom to they must report; who has the final decision making power. By the end of it, she has drawn a cryptic chart with arrows and dotted lines and acronyms written all over it: DHS; BRC; HUD; HHC; BID; HPD.[66] Siegel sees me painfully copying the picture in my notebook and has to laugh. “Sometimes I lose the oversight as well. A good exercise to draw it again.”
“We lose a lot of energy fighting bureaucracy to get someone placed in a program or alternative housing,” Siegel points out the basic problems. “Some apartments are only for psychiatric cases, but they need an official doctor’s declaration that they are drug and disease free before a landlord will accept them. We have to get people identity papers, and put them on welfare. When we pick someone up and bring him to the hospital, we sometimes see how much worse some cases are. Completely run down by every disease imaginable. We see the final result of all social evils: disrupted families; a failing shelter system; abused women. Some people will always be vagrants, loners, and losers. That’s life. But if people are sliding down the abyss, it is our duty to intervene.”
Siegel works the phone to arrange for me to go down with her teams. They work with a police escort, and after countless calls she winds up speaking with subway police spokesman Al O’Leary. I have already spoken to him three times. O’Leary is short. “No way!”
One of the homeless organizations focusing on tunnel people is the BRC, Bowery Residents Committee. For twenty-five years they have been firmly established in the Bowery, New York’s traditional neighborhood of vagrants and the homeless. BRC doesn’t need to publicize their program. “Through word of mouth, people hear about our programs. They come themselves out of the tunnels, knocking on our door for help,” says a proud Eric Roth, the director of the BRC.
“They know that at our place, they won’t get arrested, abused or drugged till they are out cold. And contrary to what most people think, homeless are not that transient. They are geographically a pretty stable group. Most of the time, they forage only in a radius of a few city blocks. Outreach is a neighborhood-based endeavor.”
The BRC offers a wide variety of programs: rehab for heavy alcoholics, education courses, work programs, a few drop-in centers for emergency cases, apartment buildings for assisted to semi-independent living, re-socialization programs, recreation evenings, and the nearly superfluous outreach program called ‘Project Rescue.’ Traditionally, the BRC focused on alcoholics, but now the target group is slowly changing to consist mainly of MICA’s: a euphemistic but practical acronym for Mentally Ill Chemical Abusers. The newest category is HIV-positive MICA’s. “The most difficult group,” Roth sighs. “You just don’t know which problem to tackle first.”
Roth, a big guy with an even bigger beard, is a no-nonsense type. After twenty years’ experience he knows what he is talking about and is not sensitive to the newest fads and trends in outreach and social work. Without his cooperation, the classic study Old Men of the Bowery would never have been made. Roth receives me in his office, which features a huge aquarium with tropical fish and an enormous mural of the galaxy. On a wall hangs an interesting sculpture of Yin and Yang symbols, Volkswagen hubcaps, and peace signs that would not be out of place in Marcus’ cave.
“Outreach is the easiest part of the whole process,” Roth says. “Find a homeless person, have a talk with him, give him a sandwich, no problem. Everybody can do that. The question is, what next? Basically, there are two approaches to outreach. At one end of the continuum you see organizations that focus on housing. Everything a homeless person is offered besides housing is considered a bandage and seen as disrespectful.” Housing Works and organizations like Pathways represent this line of thought, Roth explains.
“In our philosophy, permanent housing is also the final goal, but we see it as the last stage after a set of programs that have to be run through. These steps can be stopping by our drop-in center and sleeping in our emergency shelter, it also can mean a temporary stay in a half-open institution. If all goes well, the client can move on to a more independent form of living.”
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DHS: Department of Homeless Services; BRC: Bowery Residents Committee; HUD: Department of Housing and Urban Development; HHC: Health and Hospital Corporation; BID: Business Improvement District; HPD: Housing, Preservation and Development.