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Homelessness, step by step

From the windows of a seven-story building on East 151st Street in the Bronx, Manhattan rises like Oz in the distance, a glittering reminder of why so many people want to live in New York City.

Their parents are bogged down by backpacks, suitcases, strollers and worries — the burdens carried by many people, unemployed and underemployed, who cannot afford to live in New York.

New York City must, by court order, provide temporary shelter to any eligible person, and to comply, the city spends about $1.8 billion a year on shelters, apartments, hotel rooms and programs.

It is a vital service for people in need, and it is a costly one. The city does not make it easy to qualify for shelter, and the housing market does not make it easy to emerge from the system. The arduous process can stretch over more than a year and has many phases — the stages of homelessness.

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They begin in the building on East 151st Street, the city intake center known as PATH, or Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing, with the application and the gauntlet of interviews. Then, temporary placement in shelter for up to 10 days while the city determines whether an applicant is indeed homeless. Next, placement in a long-term shelter.

Families stayed in shelter for an average 414 days, according the mayor’s annual management report for fiscal 2017.

Moving out is a struggle in itself. Applications for rental assistance. The search for an affordable apartment. And for the fortunate ones, the move.

The city’s surge in homelessness can be traced to 2011 when the state cut funding to a key rental assistance program. By 2012, the overall homeless population had jumped by 11 percent to about 57,000 people, and by 2013, the number was about 64,000, according to an annual count overseen by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, the number has continued to creep up to a current estimate of 77,000 people. The record number has come even as the city has diverted tens of thousands of people from homelessness by pouring millions of dollars into new rental assistance programs and legal assistance to fight evictions.

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The programs cannot keep pace with runaway rents, stagnant wages and vanishing affordable housing. About 100 families go to PATH each day.

In hopes of ending the use of private apartments and hotel rooms as stopgaps, the Department of Homeless Services is expanding its shelter system under a plan to open 90 facilities over five years.

The New York Times looked at homelessness step-by-step through the eyes of several families, over the final months of last year.

The desperation and embarrassment of having nowhere else to turn and the daily frustration of living with little privacy and curfews were immeasurable. The joy of families moving into their own homes was palpable.

— PATH

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The first stop was PATH.

On a Thursday in October, Brittany Jackson and her 6-year-old son Preston arrived there between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. Jackson carried a duffel bag and backpack. Preston had his own backpack and a stuffed penguin.

Jackson’s face was worn by a bad morning’s sleep. “My mom and I had gotten into it really bad. I couldn’t take it anymore so I just left,” said Jackson, now 25.

The city placed them in a shelter nearby to get some rest so that they could return by 9 a.m. to be the first family in line at the start of the work day. With their birth certificates in hand, Jackson went from one floor to the next and one cubicle and kiosk after another. In all, she met eight homeless services employees and two employees from the Department of Education.

Jackson was an on-again, off-again student at Kingsborough Community College majoring in criminal justice. She was working for Instacart, a grocery delivery company, until September when she had to quit because she depended on a friend with a car who could no longer take her from place to place for deliveries.

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Unemployed and frustrated, Jackson said she began arguing with her mother and began wondering where she and Preston could fit since her two younger sisters were returning to live in the family’s two-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Jackson buried her face into her hands. “Are you OK?” asked Edison Joseph, her second caseworker of the day.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m tired,” Jackson said.

Hours later, Jackson and her son stepped into a black van. Preston played with Legos that he dug out of his backpack, which included a frayed copy of “Green Eggs and Ham.” Preston sang along with a McDonald’s commercial that came on the radio: “Ba da ba ba ba. I’m lovin’ it.” When they crossed the East River into Brooklyn, he shouted, “Mommy! The ocean!”

Using the penguin as a pillow, Jackson fell asleep with Preston nestled next to her.

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They awakened in front of Kingston Family Residence, an unmarked building in Crown Heights where 46 families, including about 70 children, live. Jackson met three more people, including Monica Lozado, a case manager who asked many of the same questions she had answered at PATH.

“Would you just hurry up?” Preston asked jokingly but impatiently.

Restless, he drew a picture of a house with a bright yellow circle. “The sunny sky is going through your window,” he told his mother.

It was rainy that Thursday, and little light shone through the window of the studio unit where Jackson and her son were placed. The shelter was worn, but it was clean. The room smelled like Ajax, and they received a care package of toiletries, peanut butter, jelly and a box of instant macaroni and cheese. Preston leapt like Superman onto one of two twin beds. “I’ll take it!” he shouted.

It had taken 15 hours to get through PATH, and Jackson had 10 days to prove that she had nowhere else to stay.

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Waiting

In October, Shantae Young, now 35, and her three children were found ineligible for shelter. Young had nowhere to go. The family stood in the rain in a park near PATH, and she called the city Administration for Children’s Services because she thought the agency could help her.

With help from a social worker and further intervention by the Legal Aid Society, Young and her children were allowed to return to the private apartment that the city was using as shelter and where the family had stayed since August. The third-floor apartment in a decrepit walk-up in the Bronx had mice and roaches, no heat, a stove that didn’t work and a closet with a leak that ruined their clothes. “We went a month without hot water,” Young said as she entered the sparsely furnished apartment. The alternative, she said, could have been a bench in the playground near PATH. “It’s not much, but it’s better.”

Still, Young was in limbo, trying to convince social workers that she and her children — Julian, now 15; Shaira, 12; and Shayla, 10, comfortable in school in the Bronx and making friends — could not return to Orlando, Florida, where they had lived before moving to New York early last year.

“Every 10 days I have to bring my kids. That’s every 10 days my kids miss school,” said Young. Under a policy instituted in late 2016, children do not have to accompany their parents to reapplications, but Young said no one explained the policy until her fifth visit.

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Young grew up in foster care in Florida but lived with her biological mother in New York as a teenager. After living in Florida for several years, she said she returned to the city to reunite with Julian’s father, but their apartment fell through. Then she tried staying with the children with a family friend, but the small space led to tension and arguments with the friend, Young said.

She said she just needed a few months to get on her feet. “I’m not trying to work the system. I just want the system to work for me,” she said.

Young sat on a bench next to a hot plate and browned ground beef for a taco dinner. Shayla set the table.

The family had four red plastic cups and four black plastic bowls that Shayla treated like fine china, gingerly centering them in front of each seat. “Perfect,” she said.

The table had only two chairs, and Young carried the bench from the kitchen so they could sit together.

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“Who’s going to pray?” Young asked.

“I will,” Shayla said, raising her hand as if in a classroom. She put her hands together with her fingers upright, closed her eyes and bowed her head. “God is great. God is good,” she said, pausing and opening her eyes. “What is it again?”

Young opened her eyes. She smiled. “I’ll finish it,” she said. “Let us thank him for this food. Amen.”

Long-term Shelter

Pedro Cordero has lived in shelter for most of his life, an experience that fires his dreams. “I want an apartment with three bedrooms and a pool in the back,” he said, walking with his father through a shelter in East New York, Brooklyn.

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Pedro, 8, athletic with a toothy smile, sometimes hung on the back of his father’s motorized chair, releasing himself and leaping in attempts to hit doorway tops. His father, also named Pedro, began using the motorized chair in February 2016 after suffering an injury on the job. A wound from a poke in the back with a nail became infected and rendered him immobile. He was working off the books at a construction site and had no insurance. It had been another setback in the quest to make enough money to finally get out of shelter for good.

Cordero, now 44, who has struggled with addiction and regretted not being in the lives of his three older children, said he was determined to raise Pedro. The family had initially entered shelter after tripling up in a two-bedroom railroad apartment with seven other people, including Pedro’s mother who was pregnant with him. Cordero said he was raising their son on his own because Pedro’s mother was in drug rehabilitation.

Pedro was always getting into trouble, mostly, his father said, because shelter life limited his ability to play. Win, the nonprofit that operated the shelter where they lived, held a camp for children during the summer on the shelter’s campus in East New York where children could participate in games and tag a concrete wall with their names in chalk. Pedro loved playing basketball at the camp, but he had few outlets for his energy during the school year. Children were not permitted to play in the hallways.

Looking down at a sheet of paper that a social worker had handed him, Cordero asked Pedro, “What is this violation? It says you were playing in the hallway.”

“That wasn’t me!” Pedro said with conviction, later saying, “I don’t like this place. They give you write-ups.”

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The junior Pedro could recall living in four different shelters. His favorite was one located near Madison Square Garden, where they encountered a professional wrestler on a nearby street. “We saw John Cena,” he said. “I want to see a basketball player.”

About 40 percent of the people living in the city’s primary shelter system are children younger than 18, making them the single largest population within the system.

— Looking for a Way Out

Desiree Rivera’s powder-blue purse had two fuzzy key chains attached with no keys.

She cradled the purse in her lap while she sat with Angela Huggins in the Clean Rite Center Laundromat as washing machines hummed and the buttons and zippers of clothes in dryers tapped out a sort of percussion on a Tuesday afternoon in August.

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Rivera, a 38-year-old mother of seven children, had been homeless since July — the second time she had been homeless in 11 years.

Huggins’ job was to coordinate housing for dozens of homeless families living in Win shelters. Win, formerly known as Women in Need, is the largest nonprofit provider of shelters for families with children in the city, housing about 1,400 families on any given day or about 9,000 adults and children annually.

Huggins, recruited from another nonprofit, was known for her charmingly persistent approach to brokers in her daily quest to move families out of homelessness and into apartments. When brokers get more apartments, she said, “they say, ‘Let me call Ms. Huggins.’ I’m greedy for apartments. I’m always on it.”

The laundromat provided some relief from a rainy day. A real estate broker was running late. But they would wait as long as they had to. The broker was going to show them a rarity — a three-bedroom apartment for $1,956 a month.

The broker led them up three flights of creaky stairs into a freshly painted apartment with dark, glistening hardwood floors and a faux fireplace and radiators spray-painted silver.

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Housing coordinators serve as matchmakers. They have to persuade landlords to take a chance on tenants who have low or no incomes and have often been evicted before. Many landlords shun homeless people who have the city’s new rental assistance vouchers because they were left in a lurch after the state abandoned its rental assistance program, called Advantage, in 2011. Rivera was one of thousands of New Yorkers who became homeless after the Advantage program crumbled.

The housing coordinators also have to find the right apartments for homeless families who, while desperate to get out of shelter, have been there so long that they will wait until they find the right apartment.

“There’s no closets,” Rivera fretted.

“That’s a small thing. You can put a closet here,” Huggins told her.

— Moving Day

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Five days before Christmas, Madelyn Brito giddily signed out of the Kingston Family Residence for the last time. All of her belongings, including a new crib the shelter gave her for her 1-year-old son, were packed and ready to go.

Brito was petite, smiley and 26. She worked full time as an assistant to an optometrist and was moving into her first apartment with the help of a rental assistance voucher worth $1,268 a month. To sweeten the pot for the landlord, the city paid 11 1/2 months of the rent in advance, a $1,000 bonus and a little extra for holding the one-bedroom basement apartment while the city conducted an inspection to ensure it was adequate.

A mover who arrived in a Santa hat, a custodian and Lozado, the same case manager who had checked in Brittany Jackson in October, showered Brito with congratulations.

A 3-year-old girl with pigtails, accompanying her mother who was signing into the shelter, observed all of the jubilation in the hallway. “She’s so happy,” she told her mother. “I’m so happy.”

She entered an elevator with her mother who looked down at her and said, “Yeah, that’s going to happen to us.”

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Brito, who was rejected for shelter three times before convincing the city that she had nowhere to go, had been in shelter for 10 months.

The mother, a victim of domestic violence, had been in shelter for four years.

— Epilogue

Every story was different, and yet there was a common thread of uncertainty, even when families left shelter.

On the 10th day in conditional shelter, Brittany Jackson returned to PATH, where social workers diverted her from going back into the shelter system by promising to help with her mother’s rent. She returned to live with her mother. She would share a bed with Preston. In a recent interview, Jackson said the assistance only covered one month. Though the city also gave her a rental assistance voucher worth $1,268 a month to find her own apartment, she has not been able to find one.

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Shantae Young began a job as a housekeeper at a hotel in November, around the same time the city notified her that she and her children were eligible for permanent shelter. She had applied five times and had gone through two hearings.

Pedro Cordero and his son remain in shelter.

Desiree Rivera and her children moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

Madelyn Brito and her son celebrated Christmas in her new apartment.

During the last fiscal year, 12,595 families with children entered shelter; 8,571 families left.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

NIKITA STEWART © 2018 The New York Times

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