North Brooklyn Shelters and Outreach Programs
By Joseph Wendelken
The early morning winds on January 15th cut up off the East River through the remains of the Greenpoint Piers – biting, 40 mile-per-hour rejoinders to the otherwise strangely mild winter.
A half-mile east, English sheltered his loose, hand-rolled cigarette from the sleet knifing down past the streetlight high above. He took a quick look left and right – the surrounding metal shops and light warehouses had long been closed – before moving through a drawn back section of the fence surrounding a vacated lot at the corner of Calyer and Moultrie Streets.
Moments later, after moving through the wasteland campsite’s mounds of jacked concrete, sewage piping, and long wooden rail ties, he found the vagrants he knew to be drinking inside earlier. He kicked them awake, dispiritedly recalling a week later, “I told them to move on. I told them they couldn’t stay the night out here in the cold, but they says they’d stay…and they just went back to sleep.”
Over 12 hours later, just before 5 p.m. that evening, police from Meserole Avenue’s 94th Precinct responded to a call reporting two unconscious males in the lot around the corner. Officers arrived to find the two deceased hypothermia victims – Jan Huraz, age 60, and Zygmunt Kilcki, age 52 – beneath a blue plastic tarp.
While it has yet to be determined whether either has ever assumed North Brooklyn postal addresses, it is known that the two were not mere transients that happened upon the abandoned lot that evening. Anthony Hernandez, a security guard at a nearby lighting store, was cited in a Daily News article in the immediate wake of the discoveries, noting, “I see them all the time, they’re always drinking.”
William Hampton, a distributor with Williamsburg’s Accord Enterprises, passes Huraz and Kilcki’s lot on his route three days a week. “They were more likely to come out here at night,” he recalls. “That’s when I’d see them…picking up cans and drinking in there. They came out at night ‘cause they had nowhere else to go.”
Since soaring in 2003, city-wide homelessness figures have slowly fallen in the last two years. The New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) believes this trend will continue into 2006, despite the acknowledged challenges presented by street homelessness and a shelter system still in need of further reform.
On February 27th the agency conducted its annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) - a project in which volunteers canvas streets, parks, and subways from midnight to 4 a.m. to get a count of otherwise undocumented homelessness cases. The DHS makes public its HOPE findings, placing 13 percent of the previous 2005 city count in Brooklyn. The DHS does not, however, detail the way in which that 13 percent was dispersed through the borough, so it is not known exactly how many of Brooklyn’s 592 official unsheltered homeless people (of the city’s 4,395) resided on the streets of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Bushwick.
Vera Institute of Justice released a report on New York City homelessness in September of 2005, revealing that 17 percent of all homelessness instances were centered in relatively small districts in the Bronx, northern Manhattan, and central Brooklyn. The disproportionate number of homeless children throughout the city had the Institute’s study look more closely at families, finding that between 50 and 249 homeless families, before becoming homeless, last lived in Williamsburg and Greenpoint and between 500 and 999 homeless families had their last homes in Bushwick. These figures are still below Bedford Stuyvesant and Brownsville, each of which claimed between 1,000 and 1,360 homeless families.
While homelessness figures in Greenpoint – the district in which Huraz and Kilcki were found – were relatively low, these figures are apt to change in the very near future.
Real estate moguls and city planners are currently at work fixing their grips on the coveted waterfront property for the area’s imminent “revitalization.” Many community members began pressing city officials on issues of affordable housing and displacement with the very discussion of rezoning years ago.
Laura Hoffman, long-time Greenpoint resident and member of the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Planning and Parks, believes that, “a lot of the homelessness in the neighborhood now and the homelessness that will be here in the future is a direct result of community members just being priced out of where they’ve been for years and years.” Recently, Hoffman befriended an elderly woman who had been paying a local landlord to sleep in a back hallway after being evicted from her apartment. Hoffman also cites the bands of homeless living out at the end of Java St. on the East River, people who she has regularly seen, “barbequing pigeons and living on mattresses up against the factory walls there.”
Such “service resistants,” as are termed those who do not seek public aid, necessitate programs like HOPE so that the DHS can better serve the homeless community. In addition to HOPE, seasonal disparities in shelter populations measure levels of service resistants – NYC shelter populations nearly doubled during January, February, and March of 2004, one of the coldest winters in memory.
A fear of nighttime assault and robbery has many service resistants, such as Hoffman’s acquaintance, on the streets instead of in institutions. Although almost 80 percent of the city’s shelters are now operated by private, nonprofit agencies, many are familiar with the horror stories of experiences inside some of the most infamous, city-run shelters, such as The Bedford-Atlantic Men’s shelter, a place English described as an “indoor crack house.”
While drug use may be a problem in some of the larger, “warehouse” facilities, strict substance abuse policies have others avoiding shelters. Oak Hill, a homeless shelter and rehabilitation center just south of Williamsburg in Fort Greene, clearly states as one of its eligibility requirements that residents must show no detectable signs of substance abuse. The shelter only suspends such eligibility requirements when the temperature falls below freezing and it calls a Winter Alert.
At their 400-bed East Williamsburg shelter, the Doe Fund serves local single, adult, homeless men, the categories into which an overwhelming number of service resistants fit. Elizabeth Lion, the Fund’s public relations coordinator, describing those referred by the DHS, says “They’re predominately drug involved cases. Many are released after having been convicted and incarcerated under the state’s Rockefeller Drug laws. They serve long sentences and then have serious difficulty reintegrating into society.”
In addition to working with philanthropic groups like the Doe Fund, DHS sponsors nine 24/7 Drop-In Centers where it provides hot meals, showers, laundry facilities, clothing, and medical care. Brooklyn’s two Drop-In Centers, where substance abusers need not make commitments to life style changes, are in South Brooklyn (39-41 Bond Street) and Brownsville (2402 Atlantic Avenue).
As the first line in the city’s battle against homelessness, the Drop-In Centers then funnel those who seek further aid to the appropriate facility in its huge network. Angela Allen, DHS’s Deputy Press Secretary says, “The department goes to great lengths to place people in shelters in the communities where they were once residents and where they have existing networks and ties.” However, other placement considerations are made. Many shelters, such as Help USA’s Brownsville Women’s Center, provide specialized care for particular factions within the homeless community. Help USA’s philosophy mirrors that of most city shelters - simultaneously treating the immediate symptoms of the homelessness epidemic and its underlying causes, such as HIV, substance abuse, domestic violence, and unemployment.
Another example is the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing, and Able program, described by their spokespeople as “a work and job skills training program which empowers, employs and supports homeless individuals in their efforts to become self-sufficient, contributing members of society.”
Such programs often empower the homeless through combating what are essentially self-imposed sentences of hopelessness. David Pagan, 30-year community member and the Executive Director of Los Sures, a Williamsburg-based organization committed to housing low income and homeless community members, refuses to label the families he works with as ‘homeless’ after finding them one of Los Sures’ 1,500 apartment units. “There’s no family under the BQE connection to the Williamsburg Bridge,” Pagan notes. “To keep these people out of the cold it’s about thinking positive, doing good each day.”
In addition to Los Sures (213 South 4th St.) and the Doe Fund (89-111 Porter St.), other local institutions providing services to the homeless include Bushwick Community Center (1151 Bushwick Ave.), Greenpoint Outreach Project (960 Manhattan Ave.), Stockholm Family Residence (570 Fulton St.), St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corp. (11-29 Catherine St.), and The Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, Inc. (217 Wyckoff Avenue).
If either you or someone that you see on the street is in need of help or service, the Department of Homeless Services urges you to dial 311 and reach their 24-Hour Mobile Street Outreach and Emergency Shelter Hotline.
