“You just cannot put someone who has lived five years on the streets in an apartment,” Roth says. “They’ll screw up. Some people go crazy if they are suddenly between four walls. Others don’t flush the toilets and start to make fires. Rats take over, and in no time it’s a mess and they will be kicked out. That’s why we start with accompanied living and we give household courses to teach people the simple things of life again.”
“The flipside,” Roth continues, “Is that this is seen by some as a humiliation. But everybody needs structure. If someone doesn’t have a clue about cooking and only lives off of Chinese take-out and pizzas, you have to teach him to cook. You have to explain that at the Chinese restaurant a meal costs five bucks and that for that same money you can get a whole chicken, a pound of vegetables and kilo of rice with which you can prepare a week’s worth of food. Then you have to explain that you have to put the chicken in the fridge, if you have already explained how the fridge works, you have to show how to cut the chicken in pieces and fry it. Yes, I can understand that this might be perceived as infantilizing. But they don’t know it and they need to learn it somehow.”
Roth sighs. “It is unavoidable that outreach workers make a selection of who can be helped on the basis of their intuition and prejudice. If that leads to the creaming of an elite, that’s wrong, but let’s face it. We don’t want people who assault our staff, who threaten others with firearms, who burn things down.”
“The three keys to good outreach are endurance, patience, and continuity,” Roth says solemnly. “It is not about handing out a sandwich once. It is about giving a sandwich three years in a row, three times a week. We use bait. AC in the summer, central heating in the winter. Food, clothing, and showers to lure them out of the tunnels. You just cannot go down there and say: ‘Hey guys, you want housing?’ You have to break down a wall of suspicion. And that takes time. There are people that don’t accept food, they think you are trying to poison them. Don’t force anything. After a year they will notice their fellow homeless are still not poisoned and they will take one. Others refuse to talk to you. Also fine. Maybe at sandwich number one hundred they will say thank you.”
I ask if it is possible to join a team to enter the tunnels. Roth has to disappoint me. Because their clients come up themselves, his teams don’t have to go down. I cannot get a tour of the Broadway Lafayette station, the most notorious piece of tunnel with the saddest cases.
“If you would have talked in our first conversation about mole people, I would not even have talked to you,” Roth says sternly. “It is sad how the media treat the homeless. Or they are sensationalized, or they are romanticized.” Roth mentions some of the photo essays that have appeared about the picturesque encampments in the East Village and under the Manhattan Bridge. In the meantime, these camps have been bulldozed away.[67]
“You are cold, you are wet and hungry, you are forced to live in a shack of plywood, you use drugs and alcohol to kill the pain and then you see these aesthetic photos that imply ‘This guy is okay.’ But these are not okay people. They didn’t choose to live down there. They should have jobs, a family. Some of these camps were plagued by fires, fights, murders, terrorized by crack dealers and tuberculosis bacteria. I don’t know if that is okay.”
Roth is riled up. “You know, at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge you had that big Teepee. I thought it was cute as hell! It was represented as an anarchistic symbol of resistance, a testimony of resilience. But you should have been inside. Democracy, no way. Hierarchy and survival of the fittest, like all over. A stranger just couldn’t walk in there and say: ‘Hi, folks, I’m homeless, can I live here?’ He would be robbed and molested on the spot.”
Roth stands in front of his window and looks over Chrystie Street, a backstreet of the Bowery. “If you see how hard some homeless are working… yesterday I saw some of them sawing a fridge in pieces in the smoldering heat, just to earn some money from scrap metal. And it always surprises me how sophisticatedly they have built up their canning business… already sufficient proof that these people don’t need to be homeless.”
Professor Terry Williams likes to see homelessness in a global perspective. He receives me in his office just after his very busy weekly open hour for students. His course titled Sex in the City has become the hottest at the New School of Social Research. Williams takes his students on field research to dark and kinky S&M clubs like The Vault, and makes them observe transvestites and prostitutes in the Meat Market district just below Chelsea. There is a coming and going of students with wild research plans. A blond exchange student with thick glasses and a baby face—his sweater says Heidelberger Universität—will define homosexuality in The Village, conceptually as well as geographically. Last week during field research someone actually pinched his ass, he complains to Williams. “Should I be concerned, professor?”
“Don’t worry,” Williams says and gives me a wink. “By the way, looks like you have a fantastic entrance.” At the hour’s end, Williams closes his agenda and gives his time to me.
His tunnel book was finished two years ago, but still isn’t out due to contractual complications with the publisher. In his book, Williams presents his thesis of a new underclass, the disposable class. “Every capitalistic system needs a large pool of unemployed people who can be tapped quick and easy,” Williams says. “But America did not expect that the surplus would be this big.” The tunnel people illustrate this point in a very poignant way, according to Williams. “They are dejected by society and are pushed away to the point where they have become literally invisible. On the other side, these disposable people have not given up the fight. They create in a very inventive way, with the rare resources they have access to, their own environment and sources of income.”
Williams goes on. “Society makes it looks like most homeless have themselves to blame for their fate. The concept of individual responsibility is of course fundamental for this country. Imagine, if only 15 percent believed in the American Dream. This country would come to a standstill.”
“Some say homelessness is a conscious decision because there are so many programs that can get you off the street. Indeed, you could talk about a series of bad choices, a choice to lose your job, a choice to divorce, to start doing drugs that eventually lead to homelessness. But a civilized society should provide a safety net. And the reluctance to accept help is a cultural and gender dynamic phenomenon. There is a reason there are many more men than women homeless. A man doesn’t want help because he might appear vulnerable, weak, and dependent. It’s a macho thing.”
About thirty organizations and a few federal and city bodies are involved with the problem of homelessness. “It’s a multi-million dollar industry,” Bernard always says. He is not exaggerating. In New York City alone, the homeless industry has a budget of six hundred million and provides jobs for three thousand people. And these are conservative estimates.[68]
Most of the money is devoured by the DHS, Department of Homeless Services, the New York City agency that, with a budget of half a billion dollars, is responsible for operating all city shelters and welfare hotels. The DHS manages around thirty thousand beds with this money, which means a cost of eighteen thousand dollars a year to shelter any shelter homeless person.[69]
This is a huge amount, and is often quoted by other homeless organizations to advertise their own efficiency. Project Renewal says it will cost them only ten thousand dollars a year to get a homeless person back on track; the Coalition says they only need five thousand dollars to admit a homeless person into one of their drop-in centers.
67
In 1990 and 1991 most of these encampments were destroyed. The authorities said it was because of drugs spilling over into the neighborhood; homeless advocacy groups pointed to the planned visit of South African President Nelson Mandela who was not supposed to see shanty towns in New York.
The forced evacuation of hundreds of homeless people camping in the East Village’s Tompkins Square turned into a battle between police, squatters and left wing activists. Squatters saw the clean-up operation as the beginning of the gentrification of their neighborhood. See the
68
In 1995, the DHS had a budget of half a billion dollars, and employed 2,500 people, DHS spokesperson Olga Escobar told me in an interview. On top of that, the dozen or so homeless advocacy groups each have a budget of a few million, and employ hundreds of people. (For example, in 1995 the Coalition had a budget of four million, Project Renewal ten million, MTA/Connections one million.)
Not included are the federal programs of the HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development) whose section eight voucher program costs nine million dollars, for example, and all subsidies and contributions of New York city bodies such as HPD (Housing, Preservation and Development), and the HRA (Human Resources Agency).
69
According to the Coalition, it costs the city thirty-six thousand dollars a year for each homeless family staying in a welfare hotel.