The Vanishing of New York's Homeless

by KAREN MCCARTHY
Aug 6, 2004

Word Count: 1430

N ew Yorkers are already speculating about the fate of the homeless during the upcoming midtown 'sweep' for the Republican National Convention. Rumor has it they'll be vanished by surreptitious means, or perhaps given bus tickets and sent to D.C. But where will they really go? What's more, since their notable absence in the late 90s, where have they really been?

"MOVE ON!"

The flashing siren and authoritative bellow of those dreaded words startled Susanne Kaplan from a sleepless huddle in a secluded midtown doorway. This soft-spoken, 54-year old woman with a few suitcases of 'nice things' that she has managed to hold onto during her four years on the streets of New York could move - but not too quickly.

"I was dragging a suitcase up the block and I didn't have the strength to keep going," she says, remembering how she fled the withering eye of the New York Police Department in the middle of winter. "I fell to my knees and I prayed, 'God please don't make me stand outside tonight' and I broke down crying." She is always fearful of not having a safe place to go after dark. "Big trouble," she calls it. "That's the biggest trouble - not having a place."

This 'big trouble' that reportedly plagues as many New Yorkers now as during the Great Depression, began in the 1950s when the State deinstitutionalized thousands of mentally ill patients without providing supportive housing.

But far away from this expulsion, Susanne Kaplan was growing up in a middle-class family in Sheepshead Bay. The younger of two, she was a sweet and simple child who relied heavily on her grandmother and mother's decisions, as well as kindness from others.

Her mother owned a women's clothing store that had been a gift from her brother-in-law. Her father was a poor, uneducated musician who was prone to violent outbreaks until the late sixties when he died on the operating table after a triple bypass. After his death, Mrs. Kaplan, unable to handle the memories Brooklyn evoked, sold their house on Avenue U and moved herself and her two daughters to a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. Eighteen year-old Susanne left her typing and stenography classes at Brooklyn College for temporary secretarial work in the city.

For the next two decades while City Hall's tax abatement policy was causing the demolition or conversion of Single Room Occupancies - the last housing resort of the poor - into higher-rent cooperatives, Kaplan's mother expanded her business and moved her youngest daughter, who had never heard of an SRO, into a studio apartment on Grand St. But by the mid-80s when City policy was pushing the poor out of the housing market altogether, Mrs. Kaplan's revenue was steadily falling and soon her stores were closed and auctioned off.

"When she died she had no assets except what was in that apartment," recalls Kaplan.

They did not remain there for long. Her sister, with a volatile manner like her father, arrived to take everything of value. Kaplan begged her to stop, but she left for Connecticut with her new husband and a loaded up car and never contacted her younger sister again. "I was punished for being the weak one," Kaplan laments.

When her beloved grandmother died the following year, her aunt left Brooklyn for Orangeburg to be near her own children. Never invited to visit, Kaplan suddenly found herself abandoned by the last of her living relatives, and deprived of the people on whose strength and wisdom she'd always relied.

She took temping jobs by day and worked at the public market at Essex St. at night.

"In New York, you have to have the dollar in your pocket," she says nervously shuffling some bags. "You know what happens if you don't."

As her life was getting harder, life for the homeless was getting a little easier with the introduction of Mayor Koch's low-cost housing initiatives in the late 80s. By the early 90s his policies had dramatically reduced the number New Yorkers in shelters and visibly reduced the number of homeless in the streets.

It did not last. The Giuliani Administration's cutbacks resulted in persistently high homelessness throughout the 1990s, and by 2001, scenes from the 80s homeless debacle were being recreated in the streets. The number of homeless in New York reached record highs.

Twenty-five years of undulating homeless policy suddenly crashed into Kaplan's life when she was evicted from her apartment and her possessions seized for non-payment of rent. With the help of an auctioneer from the Essex St. market, she moved into an SRO on E. 1 St., where she remained for the next four years until building inspectors declared it in imminent danger of collapse - so imminent in fact, that she and 35 other families were given 24 hours to vacate.

Her tailspin into a dysfunctional homeless shelter system had begun.

They were huddled off to temporary shelter on Malcolm X Blvd, which se says was 'like being in a crypt' and later moved to a facility "like something out of a horror movie, women had feces on their legs, men had no clothes on. It was terrible." She pauses. "There was real sickness there. I stayed two minutes and walked out."

She turned to Social Services for help but like thousands of others, was overwhelmed by bureaucracy. "Homeless applications are denied because of bureaucratic error," explains Patrick Markee from the Coalition for the Homeless. "Forty percent of families in need of shelter are forced to reapply two times."

Sitting on crowded floors with exhausted mothers and sick and hungry children, waiting to be bussed in the middle of the night to a shelter in some part of the city, to sleep for a few hours before having to vacate again, Kaplan finally broke down. "I was afraid of it, I couldn't hold up to the stress of the compliance, the bureaucracy," she admits. "We all have ways we break down. I would start to cry."

She began scouring dumpsters in city alleyways behind the kind of stores her mother owned during their years in Brooklyn, taking what discarded inventory she could find and selling it for a 'dollar or two.' She saved up $75 to buy a membership to the Carmine Recreation Center on Varick Street in order to use their showers.

"I'm a proud lady. The first thing I do every morning is wash," she says. "I try to keep my hair short," she adds, her eyes twinkling, "because I have to do these quick getaways sometimes."

Sometimes she's not quick enough.

On her last birthday, the Time Square Church brought her cake and new outfits, but she was robbed on Sixth Ave later that night. "He took everything the church gave me. The whole joy bag was taken away," she says sadly. "It's gotten more rotten out here. The streets are real bad."

She doesn't want to leave New York so she's waiting, but is not too optimistic about getting low-income housing. She may be right. While Mayor Bloomberg's 'New Marketplace' housing plan may be "the most significant commitment to affordable housing that the City has made in a decade," according to the Coalition for the Homeless, "only four percent of all apartments produced are targeted to homeless New Yorkers." That is far less than those assigned by the Koch administration.

With few options available to her, Kaplan is considering an 18-month rehabilitation program for homeless women in New Jersey where she would have room, board, job training, bible classes, and eventually support in getting her own job and apartment. "I love my mother, that's where she would want me to be. She wouldn't want me sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant."

But she should not expect the City to buy her bus ticket.

Taking the mystery out of the impending August vanishing Markee insists the City will not be supplying bus tickets to send the homeless anywhere. "They will be pushed out to other parts of the city," he says. "The City won't make an effort to find housing for them. If anything they'll be offered extra services, which will likely consist of temporary stays at municipal shelters where they've already been. That doesn't work for them."

And if they don't move on?

"There are eyewitness accounts of cops taking their belongings and throwing them in dumpsters to make them move on," admits Markee. "One thing's for sure - the sweep won't be clinically sensitive." Perhaps this is a good time for Kaplan to flee with the little she still has, before Outreach teams advance to utter those words she dreads to hear.

"Move on! The police are coming."