By Esperanza Urbaez, The WJI Times Observer, July 16, 2009
New York, NY—Late last year thirty-two year old Linda Cortes and her husband, Chris, a construction worker, owned a house in Florida. However, due to the national foreclosure crisis, the sudden halt in construction projects and an unexpected bout with cervical cancer, the Cortes’ declined on their mortgage and lost their home.
Since there are no shelter systems in Florida and her husband is originally from New York, they decided to pack up everything they could and move to New York. Linda, who is now five months pregnant, and her husband have been in the New York City shelter system since August 2008.
“Family homelessness is an issue that has gotten worse and worse over the last few years,” says Tim Campbell, Director of Crisis Services for Coalition for the Homeless. Established in 1981, Coalition for the Homeless is the nation’s oldest advocacy and direct service organization helping homeless men, women, and children.
According to their most recent report over the past decades families of mostly mothers and children make up over two-thirds of those seeking refuge in the New York City shelter system. In November 2008 more than 36,600 homeless men, women, and children were sleeping each night in New York City municipal shelters, including 15,800 children, 14,100 adult family members, and 6,700 single adults. Most families stay in the shelter system an average of ten months.
Entering the shelter system was no small feat for Cortes. It took her three months of going to court to prove that she was in fact homeless and that there was no way for her to return to her home in Florida, to be eligible. Once in the system Cortes explains that conditions are not great. She now lives in the Grand Concourse hotel and says that, “it’s very small and you have no cooking facilities.”
“You share a bathroom with like thirty other people (when they work). It’s disgusting. The hotel that we are in they used to call a ‘crack motel’. That’s what they put you in.”
The ‘they’ Cortes refers to is the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), the independent Mayoral agency put in place to “over come homelessness in New York City.” The agency has recently been under fire for suddenly enforcing a decade-long program that charges rent to homeless people who have income and live in city shelters. Beginning this week this program has been temporarily suspended.
Although DHS reports say that street homelessness has declined 30 percent since last year, this number does not reflect the increase in the homeless population as a whole, which increasingly consists of families and individuals who are working.
“People have the wrong perception,” says Cortes. “They think homeless people are lazy, they don’t wanna do nothing, they just wanna live off the system and that’s not true. I would say seventy-five percent of the homeless is working homeless.”
Cortes, works for the organization, Picture the Homeless. Founded in 1999 by two homeless men, it is directed and run by homeless people by “building an infrastructure that keeps organizational decision-making in the hands of homeless people.”
Through leadership development among homeless people they work to impact policies and systems that affect their lives. One of the systems Cortes has been affected by and has been working on is the housing system. As she does street outreach to help others who cannot afford housing, she herself is finding that the shelter system makes it difficult for her to leave.
Almost a year later she is just now able to receive rental subsidies in order to move but is confronted by more obstacles. The vouchers DHS provides those ready to move on from the shelter system are $962. It is difficult to find a decent apartment at that rate in New York City where the average rent for a one-bedroom is $1500. Most landlords will not accept her voucher and when they do they offer unlivable spaces according to Cortes.
“That’s not fair,” says Cortes. “Just because a cardboard box becomes available we have to leave the shelter and run into it. More or less that’s what they’re saying,” she adds.
The Doubled-Up Homeless
Many families either end up back in the shelter system or are unwilling to live within it because of discrepancies like this. One of these individuals is Monica Ortega, 52. She has been living in a friend’s co-op apartment with her seven-year old granddaughter, Keishla and twenty-one year old grandson, Jason, for the past eighteen years.
Her friend, who owns the co-op, is being pressured by his daughter to evict Ortega and her family. Ortega, who receives $695 per month through Supplemental Security Income (SSI), has been asking every month for the past four years to no avail on the status of her application to live in a project apartment. They say that in order to be eligible she has to wait for someone to move out or die.
Unable to work due to nerve and anxiety problems that stem from being abused by a stranger as a child in her hometown of Santurce, Puerto Rico, Ortega struggles to keep her apartment and hardly goes out.
Although, she has not found many organizations to help her, she has found solace and community in a small faith-based organization. A pastor named Dariana every Wednesday and Saturday drives up in a beige van to the park on 7th Street and Avenue A in the Lower East Side, and sets up an amp, guitar and microphone as passerby’s and regulars form a circle around and sit in the benches. Ortega volunteers to help give out groceries to men, women and children who line up every week. She then joins the group and sings along to songs like My God is an awesome God. She says it helps to distract her from her problems.
Another small organization that helps lift the burden off her shoulders is the Campo Misionero Sarepta, Inc., founded and run by life –long Lower East Side native, Rocky Stella. For almost a decade, Stella has fed thousands of families, through his soup kitchen run out of the basement of the Pentecostal Church El Divino Maestro on Third Street between Avenue B and Avenue C. Ortega says that she appreciates Stella’s efforts.
“To know that there are people like Rocky out there who really care and are really trying to take steps to reach out to them and help, can be more powerful sometimes than what an established agency can do,” mentions Campbell.
The Abandoned Homeless
A tall and large black woman wearing all black and a tightly wrapped green scarf around her head and neck stands in front of a busy McDonald’s restaurant on 95 Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Rocking from side to side, she holds her cupped hand out in front of her as she tries to make eye contact with passersby with her tired and weary eyes and asks for change when they cross her path.
Her name is Ramona Fikes and she is forty years old. Eight years ago, after confessing to her family that she had contracted AIDS, she was rejected by them and left on her own. With two children to care for, Briana, 2, and Dayshia, 18, she must beg in the street for money to buy food for each day.
“Sometimes its about choice. Sometimes it about what people put you through. You become homeless,” says Fikes in a low raspy voice. “It’s all over the world. Its something that is gonna go on to the next generation; homelessness.”
Fikes, usually has friends take care of her daughter while she begs in the street in the day. At night she sleeps in over-night shelters when she can. A few blocks away from the McDonalds where Fikes stands is a small Women’s Shelter in the basement of the Central Baptist Church on 96 Street.
Although, only capable of serving ten homeless women at a time the church tries its best to make the women feel loved and taken care of as opposed to the more crowded and sometimes more violent city over night shelters. “You’re only a check or two away from being homeless your self,” says Tisa Henry, 27, volunteer staff worker at the Central Baptist Church shelter. “Especially in this economy it doesn’t take much to be where they are. You count your blessings and do what you gotta do. Hopefully you won’t end up there.
http://www.wjitimesobserver.com/convergent-project/urbaez-and-medrano
