Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Homeless struggle to access entitled stimulus payments
NEW YORK — For most Americans, the third stimulus payment, like the first two, arrived as if by magic, landing unprompted in the bank or in the mail.
Imagine not having a bank account or a mailing address. Or a phone. Or identification.
Charlie Velez, sitting on a milk crate outside the Grand Street subway station on the Lower East Side of Manhattan last month clinking 65 cents in a paper cup, is 0 for 3 on stimulus checks.
“I didn’t know the process,” he said. Velez, born in Brooklyn 58 years ago, appears to qualify and could still collect all three payments, totaling $3,200, if he filed a 2020 tax return.
But he has not filed taxes in years. The closest he comes to the banking system is when he sleeps in an ATM vestibule. Velez said that although outreach workers occasionally approached him to offer help, when it came to the stimulus, “No one has mentioned it to me.”
Just about anyone with a Social Security number who is not someone else’s dependent and who earns less than $75,000 is entitled to the stimulus. Some of the people who would benefit most from the money are having the hardest time getting their hands on it.
“There’s this great intention to lift people out of poverty more and give them support, and all of that’s wonderful,” said Beth Hofmeister, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project. “But the way people have to access it doesn’t really fit with how most really low-income people are interacting with the government.”
Interviews with homeless people in New York City over the past couple of weeks found that some mistakenly assumed they were ineligible for the stimulus. Others said that bureaucratic hurdles, complicated by limited phone or internet access, were insurmountable.
“It’s like a scavenger hunt,” said Josiah Haken, chief program officer for New York City Relief, a nonprofit that helps connect homeless people to resources.
James Keyes, 50, sitting outside a Starbucks in Brooklyn one recent evening, did not think he qualified.
“I don’t even have a phone,” he said. “I don’t have any identification at all.”
Paradoxically, the very poor are probably the most likely people to pump stimulus money right back into devastated local economies, rather than sock it away in the bank or use it to play the stock market.
“I’d find a permanent place to stay, some food, clothing, a nice shower, a nice bed,” said Richard Rodriguez, 43, waiting for lunch outside the Bowery Mission last month. “I haven’t had a nice bed for a year.”
Rodriguez said he had made several attempts to file taxes — a necessary step for those not yet in the system — but had given up.
“I went to H&R Block and I told them I was homeless,” he said. “They said they couldn’t help me.”
The free market has offered a harsh solution to those mystified by the system.
Steven Todd, 53, who lives at the Mainchance shelter in Manhattan, said that “educated guys who work in finance” had approached homeless people and offered to get them their stimulus money — for a commission of several hundred dollars.
“People were happy to get anything,” he said. “It wasn’t fair.”