At 1 a.m. on Saturday, May 10th, the temperature dropped to a low of 34 degrees. Despite the Code Blue conditions, the NYPD forced hundreds of homeless New Yorkers out of the subway system, and encouraged them to accept transport to crowded intake shelters.
While those New Yorkers were shuttled out into the freezing rain, tens of thousands of hotel rooms, where our clients could socially distance safely, sat vacant. As homeless outreach workers who value our clients’ lives and want them to be safe, we cannot stand for more inaction: The city must aggressively begin opening hotel rooms for our clients, and they must do it now.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have called the subway shutdown a success, often citing misleading figures that undercount how many people were removed from the trains and overcount how many people truly “accepted services.” Meanwhile, outreach teams like ours are only deployed at the end-of-the-line stations, so those who fell asleep on train platforms are unlikely to even see an outreach team. Many of our clients have had traumatic experiences in shelters as well as with police and city workers. Deploying NYPD officers to sweep our clients into crowded shelters in the middle of the night with the assistance of outreach workers damages the trust we hope to build.
Our clients have been asking for hotel rooms since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and we had to keep telling them that we couldn’t make it happen. At the same time, doctors have been calling for the city to provide single spaces for all homeless New Yorkers, and specifically note that “new clients coming into shelter should also be placed directly in private rooms, without first spending time in congregate settings where they may be exposed.”
Unfortunately for our clients, Mayor de Blasio has been clear that he does not feel people should be moved from the streets and subways into hotels. While a very small number of clients have been placed in double hotel rooms during train sweeps, there is still no way for clients to request a hotel placement through their case managers, and it’s virtually impossible for someone who doesn’t sleep on the trains to receive such an offer.
This means that while the city has moved 8,000 people from shelters into hotels, our clients, who live on the streets or subways, are faced with a choice between two unsafe options.
Shelters are places where people sleep near to one another, making social distancing impossible. Most of our clients have underlying health risks like lung disease, diabetes, and heart disease, which put them at a higher risk for death from the virus. We have met plenty of people in recent weeks who say they can’t go to shelters because they fear they’ll catch the virus, and rightfully so: As of May 17, DHS was tracking 817 confirmed positive cases of COVID-19 across approximately 179 shelters. There are a few Safe Havens with single rooms, but even these have shared bathrooms and lunchrooms. Further, despite the city’s efforts to expand the safe haven system, the demand still far exceeds the supply—our clients often have to wait weeks or even months for single Safe Haven rooms.
The City Council has introduced a bill—Intro 1927—to provide a single space to every single homeless New Yorker through the duration of the crisis. FEMA has agreed to cover most of the costs associated with them. So why are clients still being kicked out of trains and placed in shelters?
A spokesperson from City Hall called Intro 1927 “ham-fisted and reckless,” saying it would be “forcing the involuntary rushed transfer of another more-than 10,000 people into hotels without appropriate services to match, putting individuals with higher needs, including substance use challenges, at risk in the process.” As outreach workers, we all work with individuals who use substances. It seems like an underlying concern voiced in the statement is that people who use substances or have mental or physical disabilities may overdose or harm themselves if given single spaces.
However, substantial research in Housing First philosophy has shown that simply providing housing to homeless individuals who use substances can increase safety and stability over time. This is exactly why the city funds supportive housing sites, where people get their own rooms and bathrooms. Intro 1927 requires mental health and substance use services be provided to those who need it. Furthermore, shelter and outreach workers, ACT teams, home health aides, and other professionals could be mobilized to meet the needs of clients with disabilities in hotel rooms who want more assistance. The city could also invest more in harm reduction resources and safe injection sites to reduce risk of overdose now and in the future.
People who use substances and/or have mental or physical disabilities deserve a good night’s sleep safe from coronavirus just as much as everyone else. Deciding that single hotel rooms would be too much for them to handle is paternalistic and denies their right to self-determination. Many people without shelter don’t use substances or have any disabilities, so to deny safe shelter in hotel rooms to everyone on that basis is overly simplistic.
Hotel rooms are a short-term solution to a long-term problem of New Yorkers not being able to afford homes where they could shelter in place. While the city council should absolutely vote yes on Intro 1927, the work should not stop there. The long-term vision should be a serious retooling of our housing system to provide safe and affordable housing for all. We have already met people on the street who lost their housing situation because of COVID-19, and there will be more in the coming months unless the city takes action. Evictions have been frozen but rent has not, meaning that millions of the renters in NYC could come out of this crisis with debt. The national unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, and the economy will take time to recover. New York, like most cities around the country, has seen unaffordable rents in recent years even before the COVID-19 crisis.
The good news is that there are more empty apartments than homeless New Yorkers, and this is one of the richest cities in the world. Housing for all is possible if we choose to invest in it. City Hall would rather put our clients out into the freezing rain than consider the possibility of that investment.
The authors of this piece asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly without jeopardizing their jobs as outreach workers. Gothamist has confirmed their identities.
