For homeless, private spaces save lives
When a man with a gun walked around the city in March shooting at people sleeping on the street, it was more than just a news alert to us. As homeless outreach workers in downtown Manhattan, our offices are just blocks from where one of the victims, Abdoulaye Coulibaly, lived and was killed. We had connected with him and offered services.
The alleged gunman, Gerald Brevard, also had a history of homelessness and had attempted to seek shelter and mental health resources. He is believed to have shot five unhoused men in New York City and D.C., killing two.
The day of the murders, we had no time to process the tragedy. With danger looming for our clients, we threw ourselves into our outreach shifts. We informed everyone with whom we engaged of the attacks and offered them the limited options we had for housing and shelter. We wanted to get as many people as we could off the streets and inside for the night. While some people accepted and were placed in beds, an overwhelming number refused, saying that they would rather take their chances outside than stay in a shared or dorm-style room.
If you have never stepped foot inside a city shelter yourself, it may be difficult to understand why someone would make the choice to sleep outside at all, especially when an active shooter is at large and targeting them specifically. There is a pervasive narrative that people who sleep on the street are refusing the city’s assistance and simply don’t want to come inside. This narrative is reductive at best, dangerous at worst, and is often used to excuse inaction. While a few of our clients may refuse all forms of assistance, the vast majority would accept transitional housing that met just one criterion: that they have their own room. But of the beds we offer, a tiny fraction are single rooms. The vast majority are in shared rooms or dorm-style settings.
Consider for a moment the prospect of falling asleep in a room with one or more people who you do not know. Our clients are likely to have experienced childhood abuse often manifesting as PTSD in adulthood, making it impossible for them to trust that they will be safe and respected in shared settings with strangers. A large amount of our time is spent transferring clients because they don’t feel safe where they are first placed. This is time that would be better spent working on the long and complicated process of getting clients into permanent housing.
Single spaces don’t just keep people experiencing homelessness safe — they keep everyone safe. While our clients are more often victims of violence than perpetrators, we do have some who have engaged in violence. We’ve observed that they’re much less likely to do so, and do better overall, when given the safety and privacy of a single room. On the street, they tell us that all they want is to be left alone. Once provided with a single room in transitional housing, they often begin to engage with psychiatric and medical providers. Witnessing how much a person changes when they are able to simply sleep and eat consistently for the first time in years is one of the most rewarding aspects of our job.
New Yorkers want humane solutions to homelessness. Our clients want apartments. We believe strongly that providing more single transitional beds is an effective step towards the goal of keeping clients off the streets until they get those apartments. Hotels have been used in the past but don’t have the same level of services that Safe Havens and supportive housing provide, such as case management, medical care, and mental health treatment for those who want it.
The Adams administration has publicized encampment clean-ups and increased policing via the Subway Safety Plan. We feel this displaces clients without providing the options they need and want. However, on June 14, the administration announced funding for 4,000 new transitional beds. We encourage new beds, but the needle must move more: we need specifically single beds — single Safe Haven beds and single apartments.
Lastly, outreach workers need more support. Our teams are chronically understaffed and underpaid, with oversized caseloads. We often face housing insecurity ourselves due to low wages. This creates a high turnover rate which undermines our work and the trust clients put in us.
It is natural to feel mixed emotions seeing another human being sleep outside — sadness, discomfort, anger — but we beg you not to embrace the first reaction you have, and to instead investigate what lies under those feelings. Please ask yourself, are the unhoused people on the streets of your neighborhood not also part of your community? We constantly use the mantra, housing is a human right, but we must take it a step further and say that dignified housing is a human right. New York should lead the charge.