2005: FROM CRAP TO HSP

Housing Stability Plus was the temporary rental subsidy program that required recipients have open welfare cases, excluding working folks, seniors, and folks on disability. Low wage workers in shelter were told to quit their jobs and go on public assistance to quality for HSP because they needed an open case.

PTH shelter campaign members immediately identified problems with HSP. The value of this subsidy was less than the value of Section 8 or market rent. Landlords were refusing to take the voucher because they could get more money from market rent, or they charged illegal “side deals” telling homeless applicants with HSP that they had to pay additional money to get approved for the apartment.

Shelter campaign members began documenting the substandard conditions of the apartments that homeless families had to choose from. HSP was administered through the Human Resource Administration (HRA), yet HRA and DHS weren’t in coordination and homeless folks fell through the cracks.

Nikita Price: There were civil rights meetings and then there was a shelter meeting, and that happened to fit because I was in a shelter!

Folks that were homeless, were like, “This is the shit that's happening where I’m at. It's fucked up. Or I can't get a place. I've been in the shelter for a while.”

Lewis: What were some of the issues at the shelter campaign was working on?

Price: Housing! And that's what I think made me look at the shelter that I was in, because I would hear all of these horrible stories about shelters. And then, I would go to a shelter that was, like I said, on a 103rd and Broadway, and it wasn't like the shelters that I was hearing about.

We had a security person on the first floor. The area in which people’s visitors could come to see you on the first floor was nice and clean. The elevator always worked... I don't even know if it was an old hotel… I don't know what it was. There was no A/C, so it was hot as hell in the summer, but the building was nice.

Then I heard all of these fucking horror stories about other people's shelters. So, we were doing a lot of work at the time on the City not having a means by which to get people out of shelters,intopermanenthousing , which made me start paying attention to a lot of the folks that were actually in the shelter.

I remember on the second floor, there was a woman who had three children, two teenagers and a little girl. And the little girl I think was four or five? Maybe even six, but she was born in the shelter.

So, that meant that that woman had been in the shelter system for like four or five years. That's what made me say, “Oh shit I'm not trying to do that.” So that made me really latch onto

Picture the Homeless, because I saw how long it took for me to realize that there was an organization that was dealing with homeless people, whether they were sheltered or not. And a lot of folks did not know about Picture the Homeless, and I looked at this woman's plight and it's like four years? Five years? That kid was born in the shelter? I'm like, “I got to get out of here!”

So, I kind of snapped out of it, and said, “Okay, what am I going to be able to do to get my fourteen daughter and myself out of the shelter. And that's why I really started becoming engaged in what Picture the Homeless was doing, because now I was more aware of my surroundings now, in the shelter. And I started seeing now, even though the building structure was decent, it wasn't the best but the people were suffering inside .

And people were caught up in a sense of… What’s the word I want to use? Some were complacent and then some were just… They were very despondent. They were just like, “Ugh, I'm over this. I don't see a way out of this.”

I've always been like, you make the best out of whatever the hell it is anyway, you know? So, rather than complaining, it was always, “what are you going to do to make it better?” I think that's what attracted me to the work that Tyletha was doing, because it was like these people are really fucked up, and this city is saying one thing and we're witnessing a totally different thing.