THE SYSTEM CREAT ES HOMELESSNESS

Jean Rice: When you do the research, the housing crisis started in the eighties. Prior to the eighties we had unemployment problems, but the unemployed had housing. Prior to the eighties, we had substance abuse problems, but the substance abusers had housing. So, there's something far more profound, not as simplistic as substance abuse, not as simplistic as dysfunctional families. There's something at the crux, at the root of why—even as we devote more taxpayer dollars to the homeless situation, homelessness continues to escalate. Something is wrong at the policy making level.

Kay Samuels: Homelessness is created by the city itself! So, you have people who get put out by the city, paying maybe five, six-hundred-dollar rent, to put you somewhere where you’re in a room with four other people and they’re willing to pay two thousand dollars a month for you. So that whoever’s running that boarding house or whatever, gets paid eight thousand dollars.

Why would you create homelessness? I mean, this is the craziest thing to me. Why would you pay all this money, when you can just keep people wherever they are for six hundred dollars a month? Who are you making this money for?

And all the agony and pain that goes along with that. They’re telling people, “Oh, you just go into the shelters, and you’ll be there only a few months, and you’ll have housing.” People are in there for four years! Or more! No housing! How can this happen? This does not make sense.

Anthony Williams: I knew guys that went in prison with a lot of money. But when they came out they were probated to the shelter. They were told they could not go back to the old neighborhood.

When a guy told me that, I was like, “Damn. The system just can make you homeless. When you got released out of jail you could have went home with your family and all. But no! The system is telling you to go to a shelter and be homeless and get an HA number and sign for a bed.

DeBoRah Dickerson: People of color are one of the main ones that happen to be homeless. There’s all kinds of statistical information that says that. I can’t exactly give you the percentage—and sometimes I don’t like giving out percentages because we get caught up in the number game, and the number game makes me mad. I’m going to do, what I do. I got two eyes, and I see.

A CRITIQUE OF “HOMELESS VOUCHERS”

In 2000, PTH began testifying at hearings of the NYC Continuum of Care. With NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAN), PTH co-chaired the new “consumer committee” and trained hundreds of homeless New Yorkers on the process of how HUD homeless funding is distributed.

At the same time, PTH continued to critique the approach of supportive housing and voucher programs that were based on narrow eligibility criteria instead of addressing the root causes of the housing crisis that produced homelessness.

Anthony Williams: New York City AIDS Housing Network seemed all right, but they had different fights going on because of the AIDS epidemic and the crisis with AIDS, and that’s when we had to come to some conclusion in our Wednesday meetings. We invited Joe Capestany to talk to our folks, because our folks were very adamant about people with AIDS getting the upper hand, or getting housing before, because they’re sick.