Current News |
Tenants Wary of
Clustering of Homeless
By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: March 3, 2009
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/nyregion/04homeless.html?hp
G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times Henry
Perry, who has lived in the same
apartment building since 1963, says it
has changed, now that 21 of the 50 units
are temporary housing for the homeless.
Twenty-one of the 50 units in Mr.
Perry’s five-story brick building are
now occupied by homeless families as
part of a Bloomberg administration
program that has turned dozens of
apartment buildings throughout the city,
most of them in the Bronx, into de facto
homeless shelters. Known as cluster-site
housing, the program contracts with
nonprofit agencies to temporarily place
families in apartments; it has swelled
in two years to 1,503 apartments from
1,092, at an estimated cost of $59
million this year.
With the number of homeless families in
New York at near-record levels,
cluster-site has quietly replaced the
costly and controversial scatter-site
housing program that the Bloomberg
administration pledged in 2002 to wipe
out. Unlike the previous program, it
uses nonprofit agencies to provide
employment help and other social
services to the homeless families, who
spend an average of 284 days — about
nine months — in the apartments.
But while rent-paying tenants in the
buildings are not subject to the curfew
or sign-in requirements, many complain
that their landlords have been pushing
them out to make way for homeless
families because the cluster-site
program pays far more — an average of
$1,730 — for the units, many of which
are rent-stabilized (Mr. Perry pays
$248.68 a month). Many say they have
been intimidated with repeated notices
regarding rent or other matters, and
that they were never notified of the
impending changes in their buildings
(the city says it notifies residents
only if more than half the building will
be used).
At Mr. Perry’s building, on Mosholu
Parkway in the northwest Bronx, longtime
tenants were stunned on Sunday, Oct. 26,
2008, when several homeless families
arrived in vans, carrying their
belongings in shopping bags, and were
swiftly ushered into recently renovated
apartments.
“They’re going to bring in homeless
people, and then they’re going to make
us homeless,” said Deonarine Srikishun,
64, who pays $830 a month for the
two-bedroom apartment where he has lived
for 27 years.
Advocates for the homeless condemn the
cluster-site program for temporarily
solving one problem by creating another:
displacing low-income residents. Rather
than put homeless people in temporary
apartments, they say, the city should
give more of them the federal subsidized
housing vouchers known as Section 8.
“The city is shooting itself in the
foot,” said Steven Banks, the attorney
in chief for the Legal Aid Society. “It
is far more costly to house families in
apartments as shelter than to house them
in permanent housing.”
But Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, who
oversees homeless programs, said
cluster-site housing worked well because
it provided families with caseworkers
who develop independent living plans,
including target move-out dates and
employment goals. Families are expected
to abide by a curfew, keep their rooms
tidy — there are weekly inspections —
and search for jobs.
“Our strategies are focusing on helping
the families to become economically
independent,” Ms. Gibbs said.
The controversy over cluster-site
housing comes amid Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg’s years-long battle to reduce
the city’s homeless population. He
declared in 2004, when there were 38,000
homeless on the city’s rolls, that he
hoped to cut the number by two-thirds
within five years; instead, the city is
currently housing 35,000 people.
Putting homeless people into apartments
began during the Giuliani administration
as an emergency measure to relieve
overcrowded shelters. By 2002, it had
grown from 50 units to more than 2,000,
and was widely criticized as an
expensive failure costing $2,900 a month
per apartment. After a public outcry,
Mayor Bloomberg and Ms. Gibbs, then the
commissioner of homeless services, vowed
to shut down the program.
Technically, they did. According to the
Department of Homeless Services, there
were 723 scatter-site units in December
2006; by January 2007, there were zero.
But in a new column of data, labeled
“cluster sites,” there were 1,092 units,
a number that slowly crept up throughout
2007.
Unlike the scatter-site program, in
which the city paid rent directly to
landlords and provided little else for
the families, the Department of Homeless
Services works with five nonprofit
agencies that seek out landlords,
negotiate rents and offer support
services to tenants in the 127
cluster-site buildings. Before the
agencies establish longer-term contracts
with the city, they are paid $90 per
diem, about $2,700 per month, per
family.
Robert V. Hess, the homeless services
commissioner, said each apartment was
inspected before a homeless family moved
in to make sure it was suitable.
But at 3001 Briggs Avenue, a 26-unit
building in Bedford Park in the Bronx
that has been largely taken over by the
cluster-site program in recent months,
there are 315 open housing-code
violations, according to city records,
including complaints of broken windows,
peeling lead paint, mice, roaches and
bedbugs.
Outside the quiet, run-down building on
Sunday afternoon, a security guard in a
dark blue jacket patrolled the front
door while a group of children played in
the lobby.
Dominique Gee, 15, who was carrying a
bag of laundry, paused outside the
entrance of the building, where she
moved with her mother, stepfather and
sister three days earlier. “It’s not too
bad, except we’re not allowed to have
visitors,” she said. “So if we want to
see somebody, we have to come outside.”
The cluster-site program at the building
is run by Aguila Inc., an organization
that began working with the city in 2000
with 55 scatter-site units; it now
operates more than 300 cluster-site
units in the Bronx as well as standalone
shelters for single adults.
According to public records, Aguila
received $9.2 million from the
Department of Homeless Services in 2006.
Peter Rivera, the executive director of
Aguila and the son of the Bronx state
assemblyman of the same name, did not
return calls seeking comment.
Fernando Tirado, the district manager
for Community Board 7 in the Bronx, said
he had been bombarded with calls from
residents on Briggs Avenue. (Howard
Miller, the manager of the building, did
not return repeated telephone messages.)
“It has become apparent to us that
landlords have been forcing tenants out,
either through coercion or through other
means,” said Mr. Tirado, who called the
cluster-site program “despicable.”
Geraldine Salvatorelli, whose
91-year-old father is among the few
remaining rent-paying tenants there,
said: “It was easy to get most of them
out — they owed back rent.”
Mr. Hess, of the homeless services
department, says the city investigates
thoroughly when it receives information
that tenants have been intimidated, and
had confirmed two such cases over the
last three years.
“We’re not going to allow anything to
happen where other tenants are going to
feel that they’ve been pushed out so we
can occupy more,” he said.
At the building on Mosholu Parkway, Mr.
Srikishun, 64, said his landlord had
wrongly accused him of owing more than
$8,000 in back rent, slipping notices
under his third-floor apartment door.
“He’s torturing me with these papers
under the door, every month,” Mr.
Srikishun said, his voice rising in
anger. “All these things are
fabricated.” He says he has always paid
his rent and owes nothing. The property
managers, Lev Management, did not return
calls.
Despite the opposition, the number of
cluster-site apartments appears likely
to keep increasing, given the deepening
recession and state budget cuts to
homelessness-prevention programs.
“We certainly understand the pressure
they’re under,” said John Reilly, the
executive director of the Fordham
Bedford Housing Corporation. “But to
take existing affordable housing off the
market, it just seems like it’s an
agency solving its own problem, but not
solving the city’s problem.”
Catherine Barbosa, an elementary school
teacher who pays $1,050 a month for a
two-bedroom apartment in one of the
cluster-site buildings, said she
sympathized with the problem — but not
the solution.
“I understand that homeless people, they
need a place to live, they don’t need to
be out on the street,” she said. “I
don’t pay rent to live in a homeless
shelter, that’s how I feel.”
|
|
|
|