Affordable Housing Institute : US

What to do with the homeless?  Can we just wish them away?

 

Just say yes, and an anonymous person vanishes

 

A moral-philosophy question rattling through cyberspace asks, If you were offered $1,000,000 to make someone disappear, would you?

 

Happy to make the stain of homelessness vanish?

 

Actually, as documented in this New York Times article, the cost is much less than that:

 

They are flown to Paris ($6,332), Orlando ($858), Johannesburg ($2,550), or most frequently, San Juan ($484).

 

Outward bound: from NYC to somewhere else

 

They are not executives on business trips or couples on honeymoons. Rather, all are families who have ended up homeless, and all the plane tickets are courtesy of the city of New York (one-way).

 

Have a nice trip!

 

The Bloomberg administration, which has struggled with a seemingly intractable problem of homelessness for years, has paid for more than 550 families to leave the city since 2007 –

 

Although this rate is a modest one every two days, something about this smacks of human trafficking … or does it?

 

– as a way of keeping them out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family.  

 

National and state borders are more than merely economic gradients, they are also judicial ones.  A poor person in New York City represents a municipal liability much greater than the cost of that same person back home.  So it’s well worth New York’s while to expel those it can – provided it’s done voluntarily..

 

All it takes is for a relative elsewhere to agree to take the family in.

 

Faced with a civic obligation to deal with epidemic severe poverty, municipalities try two strategies.  The first is overcrowding, used two centuries ago in eighteenth-century London, as I’ve previously posted, when English packed the poor like sardines into hulks:

 

Back in the late eighteenth century, when it was easier to maintain the comforting notion that people with more money were intrinsically better than those without, the hopeful theory arose that ‘those people’ were genetically different — predisposed to failure, crime, and squalor — so if we could just isolate them from the rest of us, society would be cured.  (Much talk of “ridding the body of society from disease” and so on.)  And back then, although being poor was by itself not a crime, taking such steps as stealing a loaf of bread (thanks, Victor Hugo!) were enough to land you in prison indefinitely, so there was an explosion in the prison population that happened also to coincide with a huge growth in the urban poor.

 

The only known photograph of a hulk: HMS Defense

 

With so many of the urban poor finding their way to prison, London started running out of places to put them.   Enter the hulks:

 

William Eden, the Home Office secretary to whose lot it fell to deal with the resulting crisis, estimated that alternative accommodations would be needed each year for about a thousand convicts, far more than could be crammed into the already overcrowded gaols and bridewells of England.  A decision was taken to retain in English waters certain of the ships engaged in the convict transportation, and to utilize them there as places of confinement. 

 

HMS Discovery, home to 500 convicts

 

The arrangement was viewed as a temporary expedient, and thus it was first authorized by Parliament for only two years.

 

By the way, note now a ‘temporary expedient’ gets extended, and extended.  Such things happen to governments (see rent control), even when they are indefensible (see rent control):

 

It was an arrangement that had no defenders. Conservatives condemned it because of the likelihood of its exacerbating the criminality of offenders. Liberals agreed and furthermore deplored its inhumanity. But in spite of these constantly renewed expressions of chagrin from all quarters, it was an arrangement that endured for eighty years.

 

When overcrowding fails – lack of space, lack of health, endless cost – cities often try the second strategy – transportation.  England’s use of hulks overlapped with transportation to America (ended 1776) and Australia (begun 1788):

 

Transportation punished both major and petty crimes in Great Britain and Ireland from the 17th century until well into the 19th century.  A sentence could be for life or a specific period.  Exile was an essential component and thought a major deterrent. Transportation was also seen as a humane and productive alternative to execution, which would most likely have been the sentence to many if transportation had not been introduced.

 

Do you know the way/ to Botany Bay wo wo wo

 

Today’s transportation, unlike the eighteenth century’s, is voluntary for the transportees, and hence welcome.  It’s also in reverse, sending people back from the dark side of the economic moon they have found themselves.

 

Many of them are longtime New Yorkers who have come upon hard times, arrive at the shelter’s doorstep and jump at the offer to move at no cost. Others are recent arrivals who are happy to return home after becoming discouraged by the city’s noise, the mazelike subway, the difficult job market or the high cost of housing.

 

“I didn’t expect the city to be the way it is,” said Hector Correa, who was in a homeless shelter last week and flew home to Puerto Rico on Tuesday.

 

Nothing but ggreen?

 

“I was expecting something different, something better.”

 

“You think we’re made of money?”

 

Mr. Correa and his companion, Elisabeth Mojica, and their two young sons, both also named Hector, arrived in New York in May to live with his mother.

 

Social liberals out there, take note: the profiled family is unwed, both parents are unemployed, and they came to New York to stay with the children’s grandmother.

 

But after they failed to find jobs and the bills began to mount, his mother threatened to kick them out.

 

I wonder why.

 

Out of cash, they checked into the city intake center for homeless families in the Bronx.

 

Social-support networks are predicated on the Pelagian principle that all of us are born innocent.  Work long enough in a social-service agency and you may convert to Augustinian skepticism about the observant herd.  Do not romanticize the poor.

 

“The person I spoke to in the shelter informed me that if I have a person I could stay with in Puerto Rico, that I could get help to go,” said Mr. Correa.  They will stay with Ms. Mojica’s father.

 

Hector Correa and Elisabeth Mojica were at Kennedy Airport on Tuesday to fly home to Puerto Rico, to stay with her father (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times).

 

The promise of a better job draws many a rural immigrant to the bright lights and big city.  But sometimes the jobs are back home, and so should be the family.

 

[Mr. Correa had] worked as a mechanic in Carolina, on the north shore of the island. 

 

“I feel very happy because I’m going to be able to get back to do the things that I know how to do,” he said.

 

Moving Mr. Correa back home not only lightens the city’s economic burdens, it should make Mr. Correa economically more productive.  A win for everyone, especially when cities have only so many economic lifeboats, and we’ve seen the powerful correlation between a fixed address and gaining a toehold into the job market.

 

I emphasize again, all this is voluntary:

 

At the intake center, social workers ask families about their housing options in other places. If a family says that they have relatives who might be willing to take them in, and social workers confirm their report, the family could be on a plane, bus or train within hours, although the city will sometimes wait a few days to avoid the expense of last-minute fares. The Correas flew to San Juan for less than $1,000.

 

City officials said there were no limits on where a family can be sent, and families can reject the offer and stay in city shelters.

 

Here’s your alternative

 

Those transported to Australia had no say in the matter.  A critical difference between then and now.

 

 “We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance,” said Vida Chavez-Downes, the director of the Resource Room, a city office with 11 social workers, two managers and an administrative assistant who help relocate families. “We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go.” 

 

Odd how the morality of something swings based on optionality and choice.  Glowing through Ms. Chavez-Downes’ words is the genuine desire to help.  She sees them not as miscreants or paupers but as customers.

 

“Anyone who comes through our door.”

 

Indeed, those who have relocated their whole families can be seen, like the Depression’s great Dust Bowl migrants, as economic dislocation’s unlucky victims.

 

Dust poor and getting by

 

Immigrant homelessness can even be seen as an extended form of family stranding:

 

In the past, the city contracted with the Salvation Army for a now-defunct program called Homeward Bound, but only for single adults and couples, not families with children. Both versions followed the example of Travelers Aid, a 150-year-old nonprofit organization that provides stranded and homeless people emergency aid so they could return to their homes, and which still exists today. Other cities have experimented with similar programs, but they are largely focused on adults without children.

 

Nor does New York see this as simply dumping its garbage over its neighbor’s fence.  Like outplacement or prisoner reorientation, the service requires pre-service counseling and post-service followup.

 

Once a family leaves New York, homeless services officials say they follow up with a phone call to make sure they arrive safely, then make a few more calls over the next two to three weeks. In rare cases, they will advance the family up to four months’ rent, a one-month security deposit, a furniture allowance and a broker’s fee.

 

For a program like this to be defensible, it must reduce recidivism. 

 

City officials said that none of the families that have been relocated have returned to city shelters.

 

Is that enough?  At least one of those invested in seeing this problem thinks they do not:

 

The program fails to address the underlying problems that brought the families here in the first place, said Arnold S. Cohen, the president and chief executive of the Partnership for the Homeless, an advocacy group in New York.

 

It is neither New York City’s task to improve Puerto Rico’s economy, nor within its power to do so.  Lifting our lamp beside the golden door means an entry to opportunity, not dependency.

 

A gateway to jobs, not to welfare

 

“The city is engaged in cosmetics,” Mr. Cohen said. “What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless.”

 

Except that they are not.  Mr. Correa and his family are returning to their familial support network, and to a job he left.  So too is this family:

 

Sometimes the journey to and from New York is quick. Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, both 20, owed back rent on their apartment in Fayetteville, N.C., so they came to New York on Saturday with their 5-month-old, Inez.

 

Fleeing one’s debts for a fresh start is, if not entirely honorable, entirely understandable.

 

If we left behind our debts, we also left behind our shame

 

Like those Dust Bowl Okies, Mr. Little and Ms. Martin immediately sought work:

 

They planned to stay in shelters while they looked for jobs, and went straight to the intake center.

 

Unlike rural environments, where one can pitch a roadside tent, urban migrants are either sheltered or homeless.

 

That wouldn’t work in Midtown Manhattan

 

Then relatives of Mr. Little, who worked at a telephone center serving insurance customers, scraped up enough money to pay their back rent, and homeless services workers confirmed that his mother would be around to help. By Monday night, they were waiting outside Gate 73 at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to board their 7:15 p.m. Greyhound to Greensboro.

 

Does this sound like ‘engaged in cosmetics’?

 

Are these people mournful?

 

“We were going to come here and then find work, you know, because there’s always work in New York,” Ms. Martin said, as Inez bounced on her knee.

 

Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, with Inez, returned to North Carolina after only a few days when relatives paid their back rent (Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times).

 

Mr. Little said, “Once we found out we could keep our apartment, there was no point in staying here, because I can go back to my job in North Carolina.”

 

When it comes to employment, there’s no place like home.

 

“There’s no place like home.”

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