New York’s Homeless Population Gets a Seat at the Table During a Global Pandemic
Maintaining proper hygiene and following stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic means something entirely different for the homeless population.
Congregate settings, including shelters, student housing, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes, have been flashpoints for coronavirus infections. Having residents follow COVID-19 guidelines while living in shelters is a difficult task, causing the virus to spread at higher rates.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people wear masks whenever they are in congregate settings. However, not everyone living in shelters might be willing to wear a mask at all times when they feel like they are in their home, according to Valerie Chamberlain, the assistant vice president of the Family Service League, a nonprofit organization providing housing rehabilitation for homeless individuals and families on Long Island.
“Are they going to wear their mask when they’re sleeping, too?” Chamberlain asked on behalf of some of the people living in her shelters. “We mandate them to wear the mask when they’re in common spaces and some do, but some don’t. But we can’t kick anyone out. We have no leverage to say, ‘you have to wear a mask or else.’”
In addition to being unable to isolate, unsheltered homeless have to cope with the stigma that they are super spreaders of the virus, making the public more apprehensive than they already were.
Raphael Ramirez has spent over a decade living under a bridge near Atlantic Avenue. He’s said he’s always been relatively happy with his situation, getting everything he needs from friends and strangers. Now, he can’t talk to people the way that he used to.
“Everyone is scared of me. I didn’t like people to begin with, but now they curse at me and yell at me to not get close to them, so I talk to them even less,” Ramirez said.
“People stay away from me, so now I stay away from them.” — Raphael Ramirez
Federal, state, and local governments, as well as non-profit organizations, have been working to allocate and distribute resources at much higher levels than pre-COVID to help prevent homeless people from spreading the virus during the pandemic since they face such unique risks.
“In November, things started to get bad,” Chamberlain said about one of the four shelters she runs on Long Island. “We had a lot of families that tested positive and it seemed like it was everywhere… It seemed unmanageable.”
The New York State Department of Health worked with the nonprofit to run a testing center at the shelter — undisclosed for privacy reasons, Chamberlain said — specifically for the residents shortly after their November spike. Every resident and staff member was tested.
“We were just trying to get a handle on it. The [testing] site was very helpful because then there was no guessing of who needed to quarantine or so until it was too close to do so,” she said.
The Suffolk County Department of Social Services also stepped up efforts to house people living on the street to help prevent the spread of the virus. In March, at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak in New York, people were given emergency housing.
“Even if somebody usually wouldn’t qualify, they would just be housing them, no questions asked,” Steven Brazeau, the director of the Pax Christi Hospitality Center in Port Jefferson, said. “They were basically saying, ‘let’s get people off the street; let’s get people in settings where they can be safe.’”
Data shows unsheltered homeless have lower rates of COVID-19, in part, by having avoided congregate settings. The New York City Department of Homeless Services reported at least 2,925 cases among sheltered New Yorkers, as of March 2021, while they found just over 170 confirmed cases among those who were unsheltered. Housing services agree that unsheltered people are less vulnerable to coronavirus than those in shelters, acknowledging that testing of unsheltered homeless for the virus lags because of its difficulty.
“The homeless people who are, you know, kind of bouncing from place to place, or maybe living in the woods, they’re not going to a party with 100 different people in the room,” Brazeau said.
However, their lack of stable access to hygiene makes them more susceptible to other diseases, which puts them at higher risk of hospitalization if they do get COVID-19.
“It may be easier for someone living on the street to ‘isolate’ but they are also at greater risk for other health problems on top of contracting COVID-19,” said Tanh Pham, the community outreach and support specialist of the Long Island Coalition for the Homeless. “Due to COVID-19, we have shifted our focus to also prioritize clients based off of their vulnerability to getting it and dying.”
The city is experiencing the highest homeless rate since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the New York City Coalition for the Homeless. The average number of people staying in city shelters each night reached at least 61,654 in 2020, according to the nonprofit’s annual report on the state of homelessness.
The Pros and Cons of Temporary Protections
To keep up with the demand for shelter, organizations have sought assistance from federal and state coronavirus relief packages. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided $331 million for New York City and $400 million for the state in CARES Act funding.
The goal is to “provide shelter, essential services, and rapid re-housing to prevent homelessness,” according to the New York City Continuum of Care.
Increased funding for shelters, free housing in certain hotels, and a freeze on evictions for those on the brink of losing their housing have made things easier, but they likely won’t be available much longer after the pandemic ends, according to housing advocates.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a temporary freeze on evictions due in March 2020 until the end of the public health emergency to prevent landlords from evicting residents who were unable to pay rent. As of right now, the moratorium is expected to be lifted in June 2021.
Looking to the future, nonprofits and homeless organizations are concerned about what happens when this eviction freeze ends.
“I think there’s gonna be huge problems,” said Brazeau with Pax Christi. “Houses will be skyrocketing in price, and if it’s more expensive to buy house rents are going to rise and then the poor are going to be displaced.
On Long Island, the Family Service League is already putting a plan in place for the end of the moratorium with the help of government funding. The plan is to create resources for those unable to pay rent, so they can either help them find more affordable housing or provide them with necessary funding if it seems likely that it will help them be able to once again afford their current rent.
“Unfortunately, with homeless prevention services, we can’t pay more than six months of rental arrears,” Chamberlain said.” So I would say, most of those families, or households because it’s individual or family will probably need to be relocated, because we are not going to pay six months of arrears and then have them be stuck once that time is over.”
How New York City Coped
The city’s efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19 among the homeless population has also come in the form of temporary sheltering in more than 20% of its hotels. The city has said 67 commercial hotels have been used specifically for sheltering the homeless during the pandemic. However, they are intended to return to normal when the pandemic winds down.
While some hotels are very openly functioning to serve the homeless, some are still serving regular guests, so they are not informing the public about their homeless residents. Individual accounts from paying customers have made up most of the data on where these hotels are located.
“The emergency relocation hotels were always intended to be temporary and were not intended to be used in this way on an ongoing basis,” a city spokesperson said.
The Lucerne hotel has been one of the most public instances of these hotel shelters. Located on West 79th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, the hotel began housing homeless people in July 2020. This came three months after a plan by Mayor Bill de Blasio to house 6,000 of the city’s homeless in hotels.
Backlash in Oyster Bay
On Long Island, when the Town of Oyster Bay attempted to carry out a similar plan with what was formerly a Hampton Inn hotel, officials were met with harsh opposition.
Jericho residents and lawmakers have been protesting this proposed homeless shelter since August 2020. For many protestors, the focus is not on keeping the homeless out of their community, but say that it is not an efficient use of funding.
“Nassau County has been given a couple million dollars to deal with a limited number of homeless, and where does that go? To the owners of the homeless shelters,” Jason Guo, a Jericho resident who attended a protest in April 2021, said. “If we divide this money between each individual homeless person instead, they would enjoy a very decent home of their own.”
Guo said he believes homeless people do not want to be placed in shelters anyway. “The conditions are bad, and it’s just not the lifestyle they’re used to. It’s not what they really need,” he said.
In a homeless community in nearby Eisenhower Park, Chris A., who wants to keep his identity private for fear of retribution, has decided he is better off not living in a shelter. He said he has struggled from this lack of direct financial support for homeless people. While stimulus checks have been provided to over 120 million Americans, he has barely been able to collect his usual unemployment.
“All these people are getting all this money from the government, but they owe me thousands of dollars in back pay,” Chris said. “I paid taxes my whole life and now I can’t even get enough to live on.”
He receives essential items from the Long Island Coalition for the Homeless, getting regular care packages with masks, toothbrushes, and other personal items. But any other type of help is extraordinarily slow, he said.
“I’ve already been approved for food stamps and section 8 housing. I’ve been in the system since last April, but they’ve had me waiting since then,” Chris said. “The way the government has been running during the pandemic is terrible and something needs to be done about it.”
What Dallas Did: A Case Study
Abraham Benavides, a researcher from the University of North Texas who studies homelessness, is concerned that elected officials will no longer focus on the homelessness crisis once the pandemic is over. He said they might just move on to the next pressing issue.
“When there’s an emergency, they stand up and they throw money at the emergency to try to plug little holes. But then when there isn’t an emergency, they kind of back off and go to the next new thing,” Benavides said. “They’re scared to commit because then if they make a commitment, they’ll be tied to something, but they’re looking towards the next election.”
Benavides did a case study on Dallas’ response to the homelessness crisis during the pandemic. Rather than temporarily house the homeless in hotels, as New York City has done, Dallas used federal funding to buy hotels to be permanently used as a resource for those who are temporarily or permanently homeless.
“It is a wise investment because even though COVID will one day finish, you know, we’ll get it under control, you’re going to have a city that still owns four hotels that they’ll be able to use for those transitioning from a bad experience,” he said. “You’ve got some communities that chose not to go that route, and instead use the money for a temporary fix, and then move on. And they’ll still have that problem.”
Political Candidates Give the Homeless a Voice
The future of the homeless crisis in New York post-pandemic has steered debate for the upcoming mayoral election in November. Organizations like Coalition for the Homeless have released a statement asking de Blasio to speed up the production of supportive housing units.
Another nonprofit, USW Open Hearts, held a forum on Feb. 5, 2021, to allow a rare opportunity for homeless people to speak directly to mayoral candidates.
One of the candidates, Laurie Cumbo, proposed continuing the use of hotels and excess real estate to be permanently used as a resource for homelessness.
“There’s opportunities, there’s distressed properties… Let’s invest in properties, in buildings. Let’s take advantage of the excess hotel and real estate space,” she said. “There’s all kinds of things we can do that can lead to permanent housing.”
Still, people experiencing homelessness have been hopeful, since they have been given more of a voice.
“Nothing like this has ever been done before,” said Shams DaBaron, a.k.a. The Homeless Hero, at the end of the Mayoral Candidate Forum. DaBaron is an activist being sheltered in the Lucerne hotel who has become one of the faces of the New York City homelessness crisis on social media.
“Usually we’re voiceless and choiceless. Today, we have a seat at the table,” he said.
