Out of Sight, Out of Mind

...There are 400,000 eligible families on waiting lists for housing subsidies, most living in severely overcrowded and unstable conditions...

...At present, the city is actually narrowing the housing options available to its homeless...

...Investigators now routinely force families back to the overcrowded apartments of relatives where they had been sleeping on the floor...

...Of course, the former approach requires considerably more long-term planning and political and financial commitment than the latter...

...And even as the mayor refuses to commit money to long-term housing solutions, he continues to spend millions on temporary, emergency programs that simply keep homeless families out of sight...

...If they could speed up the system it would be beneficial to many, many families...

...Currently, 2,700 vouchers set aside for those deemed officially homeless remain unused...

...So, in a way, Brown was lucky even to make it into a shelter...

...I have a house to rent to EARP - an entire house,” he says...

...On the other hand, says Ralph Nunez, president of Homes for the Homeless, “Who cares about it...

...The mayor’s decision has almost nothing to do with economics - and almost everything to do with politics...

...The way they’ve tightened the system is not helpful to anybody,” says McDonald, who has worked with homeless families for eight years...

...1, Brown was at day 282, and still waiting on the city to produce a piece of paper proving she is pregnant with the child she gave birth to months ago...

...The average shelter stay: 298 days...

...No one told her where they were being driven...

...Eight months later, having been shuffled from Flatlands to a privately run shelter called St...

...That’s been a fact of life for four years...

...In many of these cities, including New York, the government’s solution has been to narrow eligibility requirements to keep families from flooding shelters...

...At long last, the (still nameless) man had ordered her into the van without explanation...

...But no real solutions are likely to emerge in the Big Apple as long as the mayor refuses to acknowledge that his current policy only superficially addresses (and essentially avoids) the problem...

...In the 1980s, New York City invested heavily in the construction of affordable housing...

...He considers housing subsidies a scary, uncontrollable pyramid scheme in which people who get vouchers hold on to them for their entire lives, and more and more are needed...

...in Phoenix, 52 percent...

...Single family homes now line Charlotte Street in the South Bronx - a former wasteland of rubble and burned-out buildings - as a monument to urban renewal...

...In cities across the country, the Reagan-era debacle is resurfacing as rents go up, federal funding dwindles, and the working poor see a greater percentage of their income going to rent - in New York City, a quarter of the population spends 75 percent of their income on housing...

...We’ve played it out,” he says matter-of-factly...

...The public...

...These kinds of hassles make landlords understandably less than eager to deal with voucher tenants...

...The mayor’s concerns about the long-term dependence on housing subsidies is a legitimate one, but this situation too is in part the result of poor policy planning...

...This year, it plans to supply only 220...

...Now it must wait for existing vouchers to be freed up when a recipient dies or moves on...

...John’s, Brown is still waiting for a Section 8 voucher from the city’s housing department that will subsidize her family’s move out...

...But tight finances cannot explain away all of the problem...

...They rarely call back...

...It was a sweltering June evening, near midnight, and Ariel was hungry...

...Now, the public is fed up - they don’t care because they never see them on the street...

...A Policy of Neglect Ironically, Mayor Giuliani has himself to thank for many of the housing problems his administration now faces...

...For instance, an additional $1.2 million was allocated in the past two years for the city’s new Rental Assistance Program (RAP), but no vouchers have been administered yet...

...But even staff members working in the best of the shelters complain that families today are getting stuck there far longer than they need to as the housing bureaucracy lumbers along...

...The city no longer develops,” said Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer at a recent public forum...

...Calls in November to just the first five ostensibly available listings, however, yielded two disconnected lines, a fax machine, and a frustrated broker, Roger Watson...

...The department official quoted in this article took three weeks to return calls...

...In hostile and unfamiliar surroundings, she had been too scared to eat, too scared even to go to the washroom...

...The assumption, which mirrors the federal Housing Department’s “Continuum of Care” initiative, is that the homeless need more than just an affordable apartment . This arrangement is admittedly a significant improvement over the days when the homeless were crammed into school gymnasiums or the lobbies of office buildings...

...The most devastating cut was HUD’s decision three years ago to stop issuing new Section 8 rental subsidies...

...And that’s just the way Mayor Rudy likes it...

...Out of Sight, Out of Mind New York City's new homeless policy BY EVAN HALPER AND STEPHANIE McCRUMMEN THE VAN MOVED SWIFTLY ACROSS New York City as Princess Brown looked out of the window into darkness, clutching her two-year-old daughter, Ariel...

...Billions were spent rebuilding once-blighted areas...

...She simply wants help obtaining a modest apartment for herself, her daughter, and the new baby who arrived in January - seven months into her shelter stay...

...Five thousand families are currently doing time in this system...

...But just because the city’s voters and tourists don’t have to watch children begging on Madison Avenue doesn’t mean officials should dismiss the very real failures of the housing system - the nightmare of the EAU, the rats in city-run shelters, the overcrowded and dangerous living conditions for the thousands on Section 8 waiting lists...

...There’s a feeling out there that people are taking advantage of the system,” says an official at the city’s Department of Homeless Services...

...Although HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo recently upped his budget request, years of cuts in federal funding for housing subsidies have exacerbated the crunch...

...When pressed on the dismal state of homeless services or the lack of a coherent affordable housing plan, the administration’s pat response is that you never see a homeless family on the streets in New York...

...Shelter residents seeking EARP get a weekly listing from the city of apartments to call...

...The Giuliani administration, however, doesn’t seem particularly troubled...

...A broker for All Glory Real Estate, Watson works to match homeless families in the voucher program with landlords who accept vouchers...

...The tier I1 system doesn’t have enough space to house even 2 percent of the 300,000 poor New York City families who lack their own living space...

...month in rent to keep her sequestered within the shelter system...

...This is something the government could provide at easily a third of the cost of putting her up at St...

...Princess Brown, of course, desires nothing so regal...

...Diversion efforts have become so overzealous that many women and children are being returned to abusive situations, prompting a damning report last spring by the Public Advocate’s office...

...For starters, obtaining eligibility for housing assistance is no mean feat...

...But in the new New York City, Mayor Rudolph W Giuliani prefers that Princess Brown wait months or even years in a transitional shelter before she is even considered for permanent housing subsidies...

...This same amount could fetch a chic Fifth Avenue sublet or a three-bedroom apartment in one of New York‘s outer boroughs...

...Since Giuliani took office in ‘92, spending on fraud investigation has tripled and the number of families turned away from the shelter system has jumped from three to nearly 8,000...

...But here’s the best part: While Princess Brown waits, the city is paying an average of $2,400 a EVAN HALPER AND STEPHANIE McCRUMMEN are graduste students at the Columbia University School of Journalism...

...Even obtaining a simple budget can be a monumental task...

...Keep Out Transitional shelters are intended to be a step up from makeshift shelters of the past, providing social services and rooms for those awaiting public housing...

...The department’s commissioner, Gordon Campbell, has claimed the supposed surplus was spoken for by creditors, but the budget office says its figures account for outstanding checks...

...As hard as it is to move out of the shelters, getting into them is almost as tough...

...When a court decision forced the city to ease crowding at the Bronx Emergency Assistance Unit - where families sleep on benches while the city decides whether they are legitimately homeless - the administration responded by beefing up anti-fraud and “diversion” efforts...

...The ordeal Princess Brown underwent at the EAU is just step one...

...But now that she’s in, she’ll have to wait - in part because the city mandates a minimum three-month stay in tier I1 shelters, and in part because the process of obtaining a subsidized apartment is unavoidably slow...

...Mayor Giuliani has balked at using discretionary federal dollars to fill the funding gap with local initiatives...

...The current wave of homelessness and overcrowding in New York is in part the result of a consistent pattern of housing cuts at both the federal and municipal level...

...Until 1995, New York City had been getting up to 5,000 new vouchers annually...

...Money, of course, is part of the problem...

...He has a point: With only a 5 percent turnover rate, people are continually applying to the Section 8 voucher program for the homeless - known as the Emergency Assistance Rehousing Program (EARP) - while practically no one is leaving it...

...Perhaps as well as anyone, Watson knows what a cumbersome process prying vouchers loose from the city machinery can be...

...But the list is essentially worthless...

...At the current turnover rate, it would take approximately 56 years to empty the waiting lists...

...There, Brown had been interrogated multiple times about her personal life, where she came from, her nearest relatives, and why she was there...

...The letter further promised that “phone calls were made to landlords of all apartments to determine whether the apartment was still available...

...Fulton Avenue has been gone for a year and a half and yet it is still on the list,” he reported...

...As the money burns, Giuliani seems paralyzed by a fear of the conventional solutions...

...We took the homeless in the 1980’s and turned them into idols...

...John’s caseworker Elaine Young, one woman, Akeeba Allen, has been rejected by the EAU 55 times...

...The people signed up and accepted the house over seven weeks ago, and we’re still waiting on a registration number...

...The very welfare hotels that Giuliani declared the scourge of previous administrations remain in full operation under the guise of “specialized residences...

...Instead of searching for new solutions, however, the mayor’s strategy has been simply to erect barriers to the existing system, making it as difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming to access as possible...

...Brown and her daughter were the last, and the driver finally told her where she was: Flatlands, a decrepit city-run shelter in outermost Brooklyn...

...In a city where 25 percent of residents spend a stunning three-fourths of their income on rent, an administration concerned with something other than its short-term political fortunes should be expending at least an equal effort to address its affordable housing crisis as to shuffle its undesirables out of the public eye...

...The Nov...

...Moreover, the Giuliani administration has been spear-heading initiatives to sell city-owned buildings to private companies...

...There was no food that first night, but more than anything, Brown remembers the smell of her room - a wretched stench unlike anything she ever experienced...

...What’s more, budget analysts and city council members have raised questions about millions of local dollars budgeted for Department of Homeless Services that have gone unspent...

...They send us the same list month after month with little changes,” says Walston Bobb-Semple, a housing counselor at St...

...That’s why people on EARP are not getting a place to live - because [landlords] are not going to waste time dealing with this situation,” he says, adding that he won’t deal with the program any more either...

...The daily cost to the city: $60,000...

...Reporters who direct questions to staff at the Department of Homeless Services get a perfunctory response: Call the press office...

...But under the Giuliani administration, municipal press officers are reluctant to give even a prefabricated schpiel to reporters...

...In the fiscal years since Giuliani took office, over $170 million has gone unaccounted for, according to the Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan monitoring agency...

...The librarian there noted that, since Giuliani took over, documents just haven’t been coming in...

...17 list from the city looked promising enough, with 657 apartments to choose from, along with a cover letter from the Housing Authority assuring prospective renters that all but the 257 units marked were still available...

...Recalling scenes from local news expos& of the 1980s, each night a van full of homeless families from the EAU are dropped at hotels such as the IOng’s Inn next to La Guardia Airport, which charges the city $75 a night per room...

...The last one on file at the municipal library - the clearinghouse for city information - is from 1993...

...I’m getting calls even this month for that apartment...

...No amount of cleaning could get rid of it, she says, and no amount of cleaning could ward off the rats that scurried across the floors and countertops...

...Next, before someone can even apply for one of the city’s housing programs, he or she must go on public assistance, whether they need it or not...

...According to the mayor’s own statistics, 848 homeless families go to these hotels every day, typically for a period of 10 days...

...In 1996, the department supplied 1,219 apartments for that purpose...

...You guys...

...Typically consisting of converted hotel rooms, 82 of these “tier I1 shelters” make up the New York City shelter system for homeless families...

...While his predecessor spent $2.4 billion on housing in the four-year budget period ending in 1993, Giuliani’s budget for the fouryear period ending in 2000 calls for only $1.27 billion...

...In Los Angeles, 90 percent of those requests have gone unmet...

...A nameless man had woken them earlier from a fitful sleep on hard plastic benches of a South Bronx warehouse ironically known as the Emergency Assistance Unit, the registration center for the city’s family shelter system...

...What’s more, even the housing that remains available is often impossible to access, thanks to bureaucratic roadblocks...

...A 15city survey by the U.S...

...Nor is attempting to make the system so difficult to navigate that the homeless will simply give up and go away an appropriate response to fears about vouchers becoming an ever-expanding welfare entitlement...

...The hotels are meant as a way station between the EAU and the transitional shelters, while homeless families are under investigation...

...John’s...

...Conference of Mayors in December reported a 64 percent increase in emergency shelter requests by families...

...According to St...

...An hour passed as others in the van were dropped off one by one...

...Giuliani’s orchestrated attempt to keep the housing bureaucracy running as poorly as possible has gone largely unreported by New York City media...

...Sadly, New York is not alone...

...Government subsidies used to be attractive to landlords, says Watson, but no more...

...But even as the national media celebrated this success, Giuliani quietly cut funding for new housing construction almost in half...

...Nunez, who was a commissioner of homeless services under former Mayor Edward Koch, believes the issue of homelessness is dead...

...As of Feb...

...One traditional venue for the system has been units owned by the department of Housing Preservation and Development...

...John’s, recalls that one woman who earned $30,000 a year spent months at the shelter waiting to become eligible for public assistance just so she could apply for subsidized housing...

...The worst part is becoming eligible...

...Nl we’re trying to say to people is we’ve sorted it out, we’ve put everybody on equal footing...

...The mayor, who has all but handcuffed reporters trying to cover him, seems to have a policy against discussing this particular issue...

...Most are run by nonprofit agencies, such as the American Red Cross or Homes for the Homeless, and provide services like job training, parenting classes, and day care...

...John’s...

...Carla McDonald, director of social services at St...

...But even for those who make it through the eligibility gauntlet, locating actual housing is equally daunting...

...The addition of a hotplate is usually sufficient to earn the redesignation...