Homeless, sheltered but not truly free

Six nights a week, I live in the dorms at Columbia University. One night a week, I live at a homeless shelter. In New York City, in order for a homeless shelter to operate, a volunteer with a permanent address must stay the night. Once a week, I am one of these volunteers.

Each night, around 60,000 New Yorkers — some of them families, some of them single adults — sleep in homeless shelters throughout the city.

The two shelters where I have volunteered for the last six months or so are relatively small; one, located in the basement of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on W. 68th St., serves around 10 men each night, and the other, in the basement of the New York Society for Ethical Culture on W. 64th St., serves about the same number of women.

What has struck me most about the nights I have spent at these shelters is the utter lack of freedom shelter residents live with. In fact, almost every aspect of their lives is dictated by the system they have turned to for a warm bed.

Each night they must be in by 7 p.m.; they cannot leave or go outside after that point. Second, they must be out by 6 a.m. each morning. Third, they cannot stay somewhere other than the shelter more than one night in a row.

If they break any of these rules, they will lose their bed and end up at a different shelter or on the streets.

Not surprisingly, these conditions greatly affect the lives of shelter residents. Think about all of the things that happen after 7 p.m. in New York City. They can enjoy none of those things.

Moreover, they are afforded absolutely no privacy. They are constantly surrounded by strangers, and this forced proximity to others naturally causes disagreements that frequently boil over into verbal confrontations and cultivate a stressful and tense living environment.

This tension is not eased by the fact that the rules make it very difficult to get a full night’s sleep. Who can get enough sleep when you have to be awake by 5:30 every morning?

This causes many homeless individuals to do what I do after a night at the shelter: find somewhere else to sleep a few extra hours. Of course, for me, this is quite easy: I go back to my dorm. But for them, it means finding a bench or a subway car or some other public place that is neither comfortable nor private.

Unfortunately, the shelter system inherently offers very few opportunities to escape its oppressive rules. If you miss a few nights in a row, your bed is given to someone else, because, especially at the nicer shelters, there is always somebody else who can use it.

This is something that is often talked about among shelter residents. They contemplate whether or not it is a good idea to go to a family gathering or even simply go out at all in fear of losing the bed they have waited so long to secure.

In other words, for people living in New York City homeless shelters, the choice is between having the freedom to do what they want or having a warm and dry place to get a few hours of sleep each night.

I don’t mean to suggest the mere existence of strict rules is cruel or arbitrary. Rules exist for a reason: to ensure the safety and property of shelters owners and the shelter residents themselves, and to help make the logistical nightmare of coordinating beds for 60,000 people solvable.

Some rules — absolutely no drugs on the premises, for example — are perfectly logical.

But rules as restrictive as the ones currently in place seem overly rigid, especially when the average homeless New Yorker will spend over a year in the shelter system.

While shelters give people a warm bed in which to sleep, they do not take the place of a home, because a home is so much more than roof and a bed. It is a place to call your own and a place you can go whenever you need and stay as long as you like. It is the center of your world.

Without a home, you can never truly be free.

That is why we must continue to push for more affordable housing. Its scarcity is the No. 1 cause of homelessness in New York City. We can and must work to give the 60,000 people living in New York City homeless shelters places they can call their own; that is what they deserve as New Yorkers and more importantly, that is their right as our fellow human beings.

Until then, let’s rethink exactly what we ask of them when they’re living in the beds the public provides.