Visits with the Homeless
Tucker, William
William Tucker
VISITS WITH THE HOMELESS
How some people live on $50,000 a year.
Help the Homeless," said a button pinned to the woman's beret. She was black, about 30, and standing in front of a...
...I had to go to North Carolina to take care of my mother...
...It's much easier to run a liquor store in Los Angeles, though...
...We're a rich society, we can afford it...
...Fred Griesbach is director of the Coalition for the Homeless...
...What've they got you in here for...
...If there are 40,000 homeless altogether, that's $50,000 a year per individual...
...He was thin and wiry, with a strung-out look...
...Wouldn't getting rid of rent control help, since New York City's housing regulations have driven every single private developer of rental housing out of business...
...What is the city supposed to do about the homeless...
...His office was decorated with political posters ("Help Angola Win Independence-Boycott Gulf...
...Here everybody just minds their own business...
...You never heard of a 'baby-mother' before...
...When New York City officials began forcing them to go to shelters on sub-freezing nights, however, the ACLU objected loudly that their "civil rights" were being violated...
...She finally died...
...The City was spending $14 million per year on the program...
...There's a little bit of overhead," admitted Fred Griesbach, director of the Coalition for the Homeless...
...After we finished talking, she urged me to come up and visit her, and wanted to give me her phone number...
...But don't get drunk...
...Even a lot of the staff started out as homeless...
...Can you imagine the vandalism...
...When it was over, nobody seen nothing...
...he said...
...And third, it fends off public opinion that is probably getting tired of dealing with "welfare families...
...They're the ones that are ruining New York...
...I sat down at the table for a while and tried to learn the game...
...recently spent two months trying to find an apartment...
...It emerged that he had had "a little fight" with his old lady a week ago, and was now banned from the hotel...
...They now claim 60,000...
...I visited the Men's Shelter, where I ended up posing as just another homeless resident...
...Four months ago we spent half-a-million dollars on five new elevators...
...I'm married with two kids," he said...
...They can't find jobs, they don't get adequate day care, there are no training programs available...
...In an upstairs pool room, two older guys spent fifteen minutes doing a clumsy Harlem Globetrotters imitation...
...They put you on a bus every week and take you around to show you apartments, and tell you you have to take something...
...I've been here about two months...
...1 he requirement for staying at the Men's Shelter is that you take a shower...
...I've got 1,500 kids in here...
...We've got to have more public housing...
...Almost every homeless person I had encountered so far was a black who had split up his or her family-or never bothered forming one-making it necessary to find two apartments instead of one...
...She said she wasn't particularly looking for another place to live...
...We don't get along...
...We were living together in the Bronx, but the Spanish moved in...
...Griesbach stared at me in disbelief...
...It means the mother of your baby," he explained patiently...
...You know, if she has your baby, that makes you the father, and she's the baby-mother...
...I came down here looking for an interview with the unfortunate homeless, and here I find three intelligent, grown men, all with jobs and families...
...The Coalition for the Homeless receives no city funds...
...What happened to her job and apartment...
...All we're talking about here is shelter...
...Just get out of here and try to get a job, I guess...
...No sir, not me...
...I sent my kids back to L.A...
...The inevitable accusation, of course, is that some mysterious "slumlords" are making millions off these welfare payments...
...On the other, a group of black transvestites carried on an endless melodrama about someone's borrowed shoes...
...He was paying her $3.00 an hour...
...John F. Kennedy, Jr...
...I came back here to settle the estate with my mother and stepfather," he said...
...What 1 encountered in several hours at the Martinique, for example, had little to do with "homelessness...
...Very few," he said...
...A lot of women beat their children...
...In the middle of the room, two men played a furious game of ping-pong...
...The private developers only build housing for the rich...
...You know what it's like for black people in this society, especially black women...
...Was he sure he wasn't having a little fight with his wife, and just telling this story as an excuse...
...Waiting periods were once two years, but for the last decade the city has given immediate priority to people whose apartments burned down...
...I asked...
...This used to be a beautiful place...
...About 300 men crowded into the Shelter's first-floor recreation and intake rooms, with perhaps another 300 scattered among the three upper floors...
...My partner and I went bankrupt...
...The numbers have grown in the past few years, although the phenomenon is not new...
...Housing...
...Carmen was the same way...
...The temple was putting up twelve homeless men, but eight of them had already retired to their cots when 1 arrived at nine o'clock...
...There was supposed to be some "counseling" going on, but the card players were having such a good time and the volunteers seemed so intimidated that the whole idea of "rehabilitation" seemed inappropriate...
...I visited the Coalition for the Homeless, headquarters of the legal attack for "homeless rights," and spent another afternoon talking with people in front of the Martinique, one of New York's largest "welfare hotels...
...In another room where garbage details were being handed out for $12 a week, one man fell down and had an epileptic seizure right in front of me...
...I asked...
...Get beat up all the time...
...I've only got $325 a month to live on...
...He told me all this without a trace of embarrassment...
...Even then, Carol Bellamy, President of the City Council and Mayor Koch's rival in this year's election, is berating Koch for not spending an additional "spare" $40 million on the homeless...
...New York City now has an estimated 50,000 "homeless" people...
...I came down here because we're telling the disability people we're separated...
...Carmen said the city pays $1,800 monthly in rent for her two-room suite in the Martinique...
...He was 23 years old...
...Consequently, there is a new category of "homeless...
...My wife and I live with her brother in Queens...
...She was not unattractive, intelligent, and spoke with a trace of an accent that she finally told me was Puerto Rican...
...I asked her...
...I'm just sleeping down here at night so we can get more money...
...So I had to come here...
...No," he replied...
...She got sick, and didn't have any insurance...
...I've been in here about four months," he said...
...All of them seemed at least a little disturbed...
...My wife and I are buying a five-room co-op in Brooklyn, and the total mortgage and maintenance payments come to less than $1,000 a month...
...I got some glass in my feet, and then it got all diseased...
...Gary had a teenage daughter, but was separated from his wife...
...The place was so busy, though, and everyone seemed so indifferent to my presence, that I finally just fell into the routine of acting like another homeless individual...
...She wore a red beret and sunglasses, and her two bottom front teeth were missing...
...They'll roll you in a minute...
...Are you kidding...
...We don't think they were murdered, but we're not sure...
...Shee-it, man, where you been...
...She had four children...
...He showed me the soles of his feet, which were damp and peeling, and indeed looked painfully infected...
...Otherwise, it must secure a city license, which requires an impossible amount of refurbishing and . paperwork...
...You've got to think of something to do on the outside...
...He doesn't think New York City is spending nearly enough...
...Cloyd was a 29-year-old black who paced back and forth in front of the hotel like a caged fox...
...Thomasina didn't seem terribly concerned about getting in or out of the Martinique...
...I start Monday...
...He looked like a candidate for sainthood...
...and 4) the people who are most emotionally involved in helping the homeless haven't the slightest idea what they're doing...
...A fresh two-inch scar ran down his left nostril, the stitch-marks still clearly visible...
...Originally a city-sponsored sleeping quarters for Bowery Bums, it has recently become the central clearing house for New York City's homeless I originally walked in looking for a supervisor to ask about some interviews...
...Tuccelli said he leased out the Martinique for ten years, and his leaseholder converted to welfare without telling him...
...New York City's complicated tenant-protection laws forbid any welfare hotel owner from evicting a tenant who has lived with him for more than 29 days...
...That was long before the city started processing welfare mothers and their children into the system as well...
...We've always been accountants in our family...
...An accountant by trade, he had just come back from six months in London...
...That's the way it goes sometimes, you know...
...I was staying with my sisters and brothers while the house is in probate, but things got too crowded, so I moved here...
...Her home was the Martinique, a beautiful old tourist hotel facing Herald Square that used to have three luxurious restaurants, and now teems with 2,000 welfare tenants-500 women and 1,500 children...
...It was a boisterous group...
...I was the first hotel owner in New York to win the Silver Award for Fine Restaurants...
...Then gradually, I started asking the players about themselves, telling them I was doing a newspaper story...
...When I finally looked up, his face was glowing with righteous indignation...
...Lumping the first three categories together as "the homeless" seems useful only to the fourth category, i.e., those who patronize the homeless...
...There's a hard core out there who just can't take care of themselves...
...She could have been 50...
...Within days there were rumors that Human Resources vans were dumping people off at Grand Central, rather than putting them into the city's overcrowded shelters...
...She actually seemed fairly responsible...
...I think they run the whole program all wrong down there," he concluded...
...I sublet my apartment and was living over there," he said...
...Instead, they're just trying to put everybody on welfare...
...We got burned out...
...You've got to make plans," he advised me...
...The only thing I don't like about it here at the hotel are the fights," she told me...
...Well, you know, they could give us a little more money...
...There's no end in sight...
...Even arson can't get you into a city housing project...
...What did it mean...
...It makes very little difference whether a family is quote-unquote intact...
...Even then he couldn't make it, so we had to take it back," he said...
...Some of them don't have a private bathroom...
...What was he doing among the homeless...
...She has five other kids...
...Well look, I said...
...The only way Tuccelli could empty his building now is if the hotel burned down...
...Vinnie was the youngest of the three, 24, Italian, and probably the least savvy of the group (he was also losing the card game...
...A survey of the men's shelters in 1983 found that a significant number of shelter residents were younger men who had come in for economic reasons, and 60 percent of the homeless had lived with close relatives or friends in their last three sleeping arrangements...
...It's the economy," Ken told me earlier...
...1 mean a father, mother, and children...
...It took me a while to realize there was an old drunk asleep under the ping-pong table...
...We've got to have the federal government come in here and build housing for us...
...One very kind black man in his forties, named Ken, said he had been running a small video parlor in the Bronx only a few months before...
...What do you think New York City ought to do for the homeless...
...Nationwide, the population of state mental hospitals has fallen from 559,000 to 132,000 over that period...
...Finally, as we lined up for a meal, I ended up next to an Irish-looking guy, graying, with pointy shoes, pegged pants, and a funny, cross-eyed look...
...They ignored my comment for a bit...
...Rodney was 38, black, and extremely pleasant...
...They won't let me in," he said...
...The people in these shelters don't even have a place to cook...
...Each year's peak of homelessness is next year's average," he said, sitting in his cramped office...
...In New York City, subletting a rent-controlled apartment at double or triple the rent allowable to the landlord is a major source of income for tens of thousands of people...
...I wasn't raised like that...
...No shelter can take more than nineteen people...
...I couldn't pay my rent, so I ended up here...
...Almost anything is attractive to a person who doesn't have a place to live," he said...
...First, it makes for a classification that is racially and ethnically neutral...
...The last one's mine...
...Grand Central officials started closing the station at one a.m...
...He was willing to talk about things that left the other two a little embarrassed...
...I thought he looked 27...
...I saw a guy get stabbed 39 times once just like that...
...After talking to people in the street, I can believe these numbers...
...As I jotted in my notes, I could feel his voice rising with emotion...
...I'm trying to get in to see my old lady...
...We're talking about things every human being is entitled to...
...After an hour-and-a-half of this, I finally had to admit I felt a little strange...
...Gary was 35, although I would have guessed 28...
...They had died under mysterious circumstances that he didn't want to elaborate...
...These bastards won't let me past the door...
...At the time there were 2,000 men in the Men's Shelter and 50 women in the Women's Shelter...
...Her name was Carmen...
...population of 50,000 homeless people...
...All those people are really institutionalized...
...They're always trying to send you to Camp LaGuar-dia...
...For years, getting into the projects-city-sponsored housing-has been one of the most coveted goals of New York's poor...
...Some residents of the men's shelter are opposed to bathing on principle...
...We collect a bigger check that way...
...New York City now spends an incredible $200 million annually on the homeless...
...This is another reason no one builds rental housing anymore...
...Indeed, during my interview, the social worker had immediately suggested I go to this large state-run compound in the Catskills...
...My mother was the first black woman CPA in this country," he said...
...Then they wrecked the building...
...Her room at the Martinique wasn't all that bad...
...So they put me in here...
...Many of these people are obviously irrational...
...It was an institutional setting, not unlike a jail or mental hospital...
...I haven't been able to land a job in six weeks, but I just got something with Bank of New York...
...How many of these families are intact...
...This winter, Grand Central Station began staying open all night to accommodate the homeless...
...We're talking about having a bed to lie on and a roof over your head to protect you from the rain...
...2) there is a down-and-out population of homeless men who could probably take care of themselves...
...He's a cop, about 38 years old...
...For the first time all afternoon, Cloyd's face dissolved in a smile...
...Well, probably not...
...Soon, Grand Central travelers were stepping over indigents to get to their trains...
...Where were the men in this world...
...William Tucker VISITS WITH THE HOMELESS How some people live on $50,000 a year...
...They think us black people are nothing, so they stole everything from us...
...again once the cold weather eased...
...She had worked as a store clerk, and was now tending one end of the trinket table for the elderly Oriental who was operating the sidewalk stand...
...One thing obviously marked the few white men in the crowd...
...3) the "homeless families" that are now surging into the system are really the familiar black-woman-and-her-illegitimate-children welfare families in a new guise...
...I was in Section 8 housing down on West Third Street," she told me...
...I did volunteer duty in a synagogue that has been temporarily converted into a makeshift shelter...
...I don't know-they're gone now...
...There were few places to sit...
...That figure is probably about right...
...No, mon, that's the baby-mother...
...When I asked him if he had grown up in New York, he said: "I'm from the USA, one nation under God-one, one, one, one...
...I used all my money to pay her hospital bills...
...He owns a liquor store in Los Angeles, where he lives with his common-law wife and five children...
...If you'd told me I'd end up like this ten years ago, I'd have thought you were crazy," he said...
...I was curious about that term "baby-mother...
...One kid was sitting on a bench selling individual cigarettes for ten cents apiece...
...I didn't like anything they showed me yet, so I'm staying right here...
...I feel like I'm sitting with a group of impostors here," I said...
...In jail, you've got to protect yourself all the time...
...Add this to a landlord's incentive to burn down his own building to rid himself of rent-controlled tenants, and you have the South Bronx...
...I came to visit my sister here, and while we were staying her apartment burned down...
...The cleanest, brightest, and most acceptable of the homeless are farmed out to the dozens and dozens of armories, churches, synagogues, and former mental hospitals that have been mobilized to deal with the state court settlement that created the "right to a place to sleep" for everyone in New York City...
...It was too crowded for me to live in here, so I'm staying at a hotel on East 23rd Street...
...One supposedly "harmless" vagrant attacked a Connecticut commuter and bit his finger off...
...A lot of them were standing right outside, their noses almost literally pressed against the glass...
...A he day before, I had been down to the Men's Shelter on West Third Street...
...She was black, about 30, and standing in front of a table of trinkets being sold by a sidewalk vendor on 33rd Street in Manhattan...
...Did he have any plans for the future...
...I admit it's hard to find a place to live in New York...
...This past January 9, 20,000 slept in city shelters...
...A lot of these guys in here have given up...
...Most of these people were dumped out of mental hospitals in the 1960s and '70s when another "civil rights" crusade decided they should be "free" to refuse treatment...
...In 1978, Kim Hopper and Ellen Baxter, of the Community Service Society, published a paper estimating there were 35,000 homeless in New York...
...That's a hand-painted ceiling out there...
...They ought to be telling people to find jobs and take care of themselves...
...I was living in Columbus, Ohio...
...In very cold weather, the pickup van from the Department of Human Resources now carries two psychiatrists who make on-the-spot diagnoses designed to stand up in court...
...The guy just ahead of me, a jazz musician, had claimed to have a Ph.D...
...You don't have so many regulations out there...
...I spent two weeks in early March floating among New York City's William Tucker is a contributing editor of Harper's...
...We had an off-Broadway theater in here...
...They'll stay here as long as the city lets them...
...I've never heard that term, 'baby-mother,' before," I said...
...I asked Fred Griesbach, after he told me that homeless families represented "the biggest growth area...
...He's retiring and moving to Florida in the spring, though, so we'll have the whole house to ourselves...
...My mother and father were the only liquor store owners in our neighborhood to survive the New York liquor strike in the 1970s...
...A black woman, age 28, she had been living in two rooms at the Martinique for the last three months with her six children...
...As a result, tenants often burned down their buildings in order to move to the top of the list...
...Card games occupied one whole side of the large recreation room...
...Then he marched off again...
...Griesbach was bearded and young, a nice-looking guy...
...A few nights later, I spent an evening at the Congregation Rodef Shalom on West 86th Street...
...Even to my untutored eye, he had "jail" written all over him...
...Thousands of these "bag ladies" and "vent people" now live in railway and bus stations, in bank lobbies, on sidewalks, under bridges, and in makeshift "tent cities...
...The landlord took it over again, and when I got back I didn't have anyplace to live...
...Second, it obscures the fact that we are only dealing with problems that liberal programs have created...
...What do you mean, 'intact...
...He was a schoolteacher before becoming involved in the homeless...
...His eldest daughter is attending the University of Southern California...
...My wife and I aren't legally married, but we've been together for 18 years...
...It is difficult to sum up except perhaps to say four things: 1) There is a hard core of homeless people, most of them refugees from mental hospitals, who are incapable of taking care of themselves...
...Oh, no," he said, "I go out there every day...
...Now all of them have been destroyed...
...But didn't he think that people had to provide something for themselves...
...I've got my four kids to feed, and it's hard to do...
...The two other volunteers-a middle-aged man and woman from the neighborhood-were watching television...
...We're waiting until something opens up in the projects...
...Cloyd had drifted back, and was listening intently to our conversation...
...It was simply the sociological debris from the catastrophic upheaval that has occurred in the black family over the last twenty years...
...Then Gary finally pursed his lips and formulated a response...
...Thomasina was typical...
...They are almost all minorities...
...My baby-mother lives in here," he told me...
...They're just living day to day...
...I'm a construction worker...
...He was extraordinarily sensitive to the nuances of the situation...
...In 1979, Robert Hayes, a young Wall Street attorney, brought a class-action suit that eventually determined every person in New York City had a "legal right" to shelter at city expense...
...We didn't have any insurance...
...By going to court and trying to force the city to spend hundreds of millions or more dollars in building shelters, wasn't he just making the whole system more attractive...
...He laughed, and told me all about his days in prison...
...I'd sell this place in a minute, but there isn't a person on earth who would buy it...
...It's almost impossible to look for an apartment and a job at the same time in New York...
...I had my own apartment and my own job six months ago," she said...
...The shirts are color-coded to make sure everyone washes every day...
...Can New York City afford it...
...The real change seems to have been that the issue has become politicized...
...I'm trying to scrape a little money together so 1 can get started again...
...I'm collecting disability and unemployment for a while...
...But my sub-tenant moved out and didn't even tell me...
...Had she ever had a husband...
...Gary, Rodney, and Vinnie, three homeless men, were sitting at a card table playing a wicked game of pinochle...
...But this hard core of shamefully abandoned drunks and incompetents has only served as a wedge to drag thousands of other people into the social services network...
...I think you have to differentiate us from those people down at the Men's Shelter," he said...
...After you're through, the shelter gives you a clean T-shirt...
...I make about $10 a day...
...Now, however, the waiting periods have swelled to ten years...
...In fact, many of these people undoubtedly would have been in mental hospitals twenty years ago...
...You know, they get mad at 'em and whip 'em or lock 'em outside...
...They were cautious at first, but eventually opened up...
...Then when I came back, some kids had broken into the game parlor and wrecked everything...
...In New York, once you've accepted a tenant, you're stuck with him for life...
...When I told him I had spent a year in college, he didn't blink an eye...
...If I had to characterize the majority of men I talked to, I would say they were "down on their luck...
...I had the feeling his old lady wasn't terribly anxious to see him...
...Or else they spend their welfare money on a nickel bag instead of feeding their kids...
...but he was 34...
...I went through intake, told a social worker I had left my wife and children, and was issued a 30-day meal card...
...The numbers just keep going up...
...I do it because I'm not the kind of person who'll rob or steal from people...
...I'm 39, she's 38...
...The city is paying my rent...
...He lived in Queens with a relative and spent his days "doing nothing...
...All they think about is getting you on some kind of social-services program...
...He was black, had a small mustache, and a well-educated manner...
...But when I talked with Sal Tuccelli, the owner of the Martinique, sitting in his mezzazine offices overlooking the lobby, he didn't seem like a man getting rich...
...The guy 1 slept next to last night said he was a surgeon...
...He jabbed his arms and legs out in a fair imitation of a swastika...
...One wild-haired Jewish-looking guy in his thirties, who looked like a shipwreck from the 1960s, marched up and down the room spouting loudly about Marx and revolution...
...I got hurt on the job a month ago," he said...
...The crowd was mostly black and Spanish, probably a little older than younger...
...But didn't that make her your girlfriend, or your common-law wife or something...
...You've got a much tougher bunch of guys in there," he said...
...A six-year-old got raped in there a couple of weeks ago, too...
...Studies have shown that about 25-30 percent of the homeless are mentally ill," he said...
...There's just no place for anyone to live...
...I asked...
...He's a real bastard...
...Cloyd was nervous and didn't want to talk, so I struck up another conversation with Carlton, an older, much more respectable-looking man with a Jamaican lilt in his voice...
Vol. 18 • May 1985 • No. 5
