What Happened to the 50,000 Homeless in NYC During Hurricane Sandy?

Advocate
Sunny Bjerk

With the mess of Hurricane Sandy in New York City over the last few days, we have been hearing a lot about mandatory evacuations for people in Zone A: areas in Staten Island, lower Manhattan, and eastern Brooklyn (Red Hook and Greenpoint especially). To meet the needs of these Sandy evacuees, Bloomberg opened 65 additional shelters across the five boroughs, stocking these makeshift shelters—high schools, middle schools, etc.—with food, water, blankets, and pet food.

The strongest part of this evacuation plan is that it’s a piece of a larger puzzle, and that these shelters are only a detour until these people can return to their homes. But for the 50,000 people in New York City who are homeless and need shelter every night, they simply are not given the same thought-out consideration or planning, at least not outside of weather emergencies. Certainly, we must commend those who were on the front line of the storm over the last few nights, reaching out to the homeless across New York City and even into New Jersey (well done, Cory Booker) and encouraging them to seek shelter, but where’s the same outreach and energy on an average NYC night? Where is the long-term solution for the population that is the same as Hempstead, NY?

Think about it. Like the Sandy evacuees, the ever-increasing homeless population in the city was met with the same solution: open more shelters. And that’s exactly what Bloomberg and Co. did, opening roughly 10 in the last few months. But where’s the same long-term consideration or planning for the city’s homeless? Expanding the city’s emergency shelter system, which typically have limits on stays and that homeless people avoid due to sexual assaults and drug use, without a long-term plan for the homeless population is like putting a Band-Aid on a growing wound. It may hide the problem for a little while, but it certainly doesn’t address the severity of the wound. And unless the city is thinking of pushing FEPSapplications a little faster, or reinstating the Advantage Subsidy program, the city, Bloomberg, and social service organizations can expect a steady increase in the rise of the homeless across the city.

Insert your own scoff here.

While we must be thankful that our city was able to provide shelter to those made vulnerable by Hurricane Sandy, but we must also remember that 50,000 people, regardless of weather, seek shelter every night in the city, without any long-term plan in sight, and whose vulnerability is made apparent day-in and day-out.

We cannot let the city’s homeless population continue to remain politically or socially invisible.

Criminalizing poverty: During economic crisis, new laws crack down on America's poor, homeless

Deseret News

The number of laws criminalizing poverty increased during the recession as the housing and homelessness crisis in America worsened.

Since 2006, there's been a 7 percent increase in laws prohibiting camping out in public places, an 11 percent increase in laws prohibiting loitering, a 6 percent increase in laws prohibiting begging and a 5 percent increase in laws prohibiting aggressive panhandling, according to a recent report by The National Coalition for the Homeless.

At the same time, after a double-digit jump in 2008, homelessness increased by an average of 2 percent from 2009 to 2010, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness. Among families with children, homelessness increased by 9 percent. An average of 27 percent of homeless persons did not receive assistance last year because there weren't enough beds or shelters would not accept children.

"In this economy, cities are facing really tight budgets, so they may not be able to build up or fund housing to meet the need," Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights director for the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, told USA Today. "Many people are being forced to live out on the streets."

In an essay published this week in The Guardian, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the New York Times bestselling book "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," tells the story of a 62-year-old disabled veteran who was dragged from a homeless shelter to jail because he had an outstanding warrant for "criminal trespassing," which is how Washington, D.C., defines sleeping on the streets.

In some areas of the country, Ehrenreich wrote, cities are even beginning to crack down on do-gooders who want to hand out free food to the homeless. Las Vegas passed an ordinance forbidding the sharing of food with any "person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive" public assistance. In Florida, Gainesville law limits the number of people soup kitchens may serve daily. In Phoenix, zoning officials have stopped a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.

The phenomenon of criminalizing poverty isn't limited to the homeless, though. Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School compared applying for welfare, which may entail mug shots, fingerprinting and lengthy interrogations about child paternity, to "being booked by the police."