“I feel stuck,” said Ms. Manzueta, 37, who has a 2 ½-year-old daughter
and who, on a recent Wednesday, looked crisp in her security guard
uniform, waving traffic away from the curb at Kennedy International
Airport. “You try, you try and you try and you’re getting nowhere. I’m
still in the shelter.”
With New York City’s homeless population in shelters at a record high of
50,000, a growing number of New Yorkers punch out of work and then sign
in to a shelter, city officials and advocates for the homeless say.
More than one out of four families in shelters, 28 percent, include at
least one employed adult, city figures show, and 16 percent of single
adults in shelters hold jobs.
Mostly female, they are engaged in a variety of low-wage jobs as
security guards, bank tellers, sales clerks, computer instructors, home
health aides and office support staff members. At work they present an
image of adult responsibility, while in the shelter they must obey
curfews and show evidence that they are actively looking for housing and
saving part of their paycheck.
Advocates of affordable housing say that the employed homeless are proof
of the widening gap between wages and rents — which rose in the city
even during the latest recession — and, given the shortage of subsidized
housing, of just how difficult it is to escape the shelter system, even
for people with jobs.
“A one-bedroom in East New York or the South Bronx is still $1,000 a
month,” said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and housing services group. “The jobs aren’t enough to get people out of homelessness.”
David Garza, executive director of Henry Street Settlement, which runs
three family shelters and one shelter for single women with mental
illnesses, said that five years ago his shelters were placing 200
families a year into permanent housing. Last year, he said, they placed
50. “Without low-income housing, it’s a maze with no way out,” Mr. Garza said.The employed homeless are constantly juggling the demands of their two worlds.
In 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled an ambitious plan to reduce
the city’s homeless population — then 38,000 — by two-thirds in five
years. The plan envisioned shifting dollars away from the shelter system
to create low-income housing with social services. To make the shelter system less inviting, the city also stopped giving
homeless families priority for public housing, and made it harder for
those who left the system to return.
In 2011, when the state and federal support were withdrawn, the city
ended a program that gave rent subsidies for up to two years to help
families move out of shelters and into their own apartments.
Now the number of shelter residents
hovers around 50,000, according to the city’s Department of Homeless
Services. More than 9,000 are single adults and more than 40,000 other
residents are in families, including 21,600 children. The average
monthly cost for the government to shelter a family is more than $3,000;
the cost for a single person is more than $2,300.
Ms. Manzueta, the security guard, said she managed to hold on to her $8-an-hour positions and to take
courses to learn new skills. But with an eviction marring her credit
record and unable to afford more than $1,000 for rent, she has not been
able to land an apartment.
“New York City,” said Ms. Manzueta, a native, “is the hardest city to live in.”
Taken from here (NYT) by Mireya Navarro
"The hardest city to live in" - hard to measure, especially if you're one of the poor in Mumbai, Nairobi, San Paolo, Cairo, Athens or London. Millions - no, billions of in and out of work people, citizens of the world, live in dire straits because the global system of capitalism requires it. Socialism may not be a cure-all but it's the only viable alternative.
JS
We are in a phase where the housing bubble is in the bulge and there are few homes for sale and prices are just increasing every year.
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