Rachel and Her Children

DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE
FREE SCHOOLS
THE NIGHT IS DARK AND I AM FAR FROM HOME
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
ON BEING A TEACHER
ILLITERATE
AMERICA
SAVAGE INEQUALITIES
AMAZING GRACE
ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS
THE SHAME OF THE NATION

TO THE READER

ORDINARY PEOPLE

OVERVIEW:
   A CAPTIVE STATE

PART ONE:
   
CHRISTMAS AT THE MARTINIQUE HOTEL

PART TWO:
   
FAILURE TO THRIVE

PART THREE:
 
THE NATURAL RESULTS

EPILOGUE:
     ECONOMIES OF SCALE

NOTES

BOOKS AND DOCUMENTS OF SPECIAL RELEVANCE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Homeless people in this book are not identified by their real names. This decision is dictated in part by the wishes of the people interviewed. It is commonly believed by residents of homeless shelters, including hotels, that they render themselves subject to retaliation or eviction by authorities if they speak with candor to a writer or reporter. For this and other reasons, many have asked me to disguise sufficient details (time, date, place of interview, hotel room, floor number, physical features, exact ages of children in a family, and other identifying details) to assure their anonymity.

In some instances, conversations are condensed and events told to me out of order are resequenced. Dialogue is reconstructed from notes or edited from tapes. Apparent inconsistencies or contradictions that occur from time to time, especially in stories told by children, are allowed to stand. Corrective information is provided in the notes.

All events described to me within this book took place in the locations indicated. All events that I describe firsthand took place in my presence. All words spoken by shelter residents of New York City in this book were spoken by residents of the shelters I describe.

H
e was a carpenter. She was a woman many people nowadays would call old-fashioned. She kept house and cared for their five children while he did construction work in New York City housing projects. Their home was an apartment in a row of neat brick buildings. She was very pretty then, and even now, worn down by months of suffering, she has a lovely, wistful look. She wears blue jeans, a yellow jersey, and a bright red ribbon in her hair—“for luck,” she says. But luck has not been with this family for some time.

They were a happy and chaotic family then. He was proud of his acquired skills. “I did carpentry. I painted. I could do wallpapering. I earned a living. We spent Sundays walking with our children at the beach.” They lived near Coney Island. That is where this story will begin.

“We were at the boardwalk. We were up some. We had been at Nathan’s. We were eating hot dogs.”

He’s cheerful when he recollects that afternoon. The children have long, unruly hair. They range in age from two to ten. They crawl all over him—exuberant and wild.

Peter says that they were wearing summer clothes: “Shorts and sneakers. Everybody was in shorts.”

When they were told about the fire, they grabbed the children and ran home. Everything they owned had been destroyed.

“My grandmother’s china,” she says. “Everything.” She adds: “I had that book of gourmet cooking …”

What did the children lose?

“My doggy,” says one child. Her kitten, born three days before, had also died.

Peter has not had a real job since. “Not since the fire. I had tools. I can’t replace those tools. It took me years of work.” He explains he had accumulated tools for different jobs, one tool at a time. Each job would enable him to add another tool to his collection. “Everything I had was in that fire.”

They had never turned to welfare in the twelve years since they’d met and married. A social worker helped to place them in a homeless shelter called the Martinique Hotel. When we meet, Peter is thirty. Megan is twenty-eight. They have been in this hotel two years.

She explains why they cannot get out: “Welfare tells you how much you can spend for an apartment. The limit for our family is $366. You’re from Boston. Try to find a place for seven people for $366 in New York City. You can’t do it. I’ve been looking for two years.”

The city pays $3,000 monthly for the two connected rooms in which they live. She shows me the bathroom. Crumbling walls. Broken tiles. The toilet doesn’t work. There is a pan to catch something that’s dripping from the plaster. The smell is overpowering.

“I don’t see any way out,” he says. “I want to go home. Where can I go?”

A year later I’m in New York. In front of a Park Avenue hotel I’m facing two panhandlers. It takes a moment before I can recall their names.

They look quite different now. The panic I saw in them a year ago is gone. All five children have been taken from them. Having nothing left to lose has drained them of their desperation.

The children have been scattered—placed in various foster homes. “White children,” Peter says, “are in demand by the adoption agencies.”

Standing here before a beautiful hotel as evening settles in over New York, I’m reminded of the time before the fire when they had their children and she had her cookbooks and their children had a dog and cat. I remember the words that Peter used: “We were up some. We had been at Nathan’s.” Although I am not a New Yorker, I know by now what Nathan’s is: a glorified hot-dog stand. The other phrase has never left my mind.

Peter laughs. “Up some?”

The laughter stops. Beneath his street-wise manner he is not a hardened man at all. “It means,” he says, “that we were happy.”

By the time these words are printed there will be almost 500,000 homeless children in America. If all of them were gathered in one city, they would represent a larger population than that of Atlanta, Denver, or St. Louis. Because they are scattered in a thousand cities, they are easily unseen. And because so many die in infancy or lose the strength to struggle and prevail in early years, some will never live to tell their stories.

Not all homeless children will be lost to early death or taken from their parents by the state. Some of their parents will do better than Peter and Megan. Some will be able to keep their children, their stability, their sense of worth. Some will get back their vanished dreams. A few will find jobs again and some may even find a home they can afford. Many will not.

Why are so many people homeless in our nation? What has driven them to the streets? What hope have they to reconstruct their former lives?

The answers will be told in their own words.

S
ince 1980 homelessness has changed its character. What was once a theater of the grotesque (bag ladies in Grand Central Station, winos sleeping in the dusty sun outside the Greyhound station in El Paso) has grown into the common misery of millions.

“This is a new population,” said a homeless advocate in Massachusetts. “Many are people who were working all their lives. When they lose their jobs they lose their homes. When they lose their homes they start to lose their families too.”

Even in New York City, with its permanent population of the long-term unemployed, 50 percent of individuals served at city shelters during 1984 were there for the first time. The same percentage holds throughout the nation.

The chilling fact, from any point of view, is that small children have become the fastest-growing sector of the homeless. At the time of writing there are 28,000 homeless
people in emergency shelters in the city of New York. An additional 40,000 are believed to be unsheltered citywide. Of those who are sheltered, about 10,000 are homeless individuals. The remaining 18,000 are parents and children in almost 5,000 families. The average homeless family includes a parent with two or three children. The average child is six years old, the average parent twenty-seven.

In Massachusetts, three fourths of all homeless people are now children and their parents. In certain parts of Massachusetts (Plymouth, Attleboro, and Northampton) 90 to 95 percent of those who have no homes are families with children.

Homeless people are poor people. Four out of ten poor people in America are children, though children make up only one fourth of our population. The number of children living in poverty has grown to 14 million—an increase of 3 million over 1968—while welfare benefits to families with children have declined one third.

Seven hundred thousand poor children, of whom 100,000 have no health insurance, live in New York City. Approximately 20 percent of New York City’s children lived in poverty in 1970, 33 percent in 1980, over 40 percent by 1982.

We have seen that they are in midtown Manhattan. They are also in the streets of Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Miami, and St. Paul. They are in the Steel Belt. They are in the Sun Belt. They are in Kansas City and Seattle. They are in the heartland of America.

In Denver, where evictions rose 800 percent in 1982, hundreds of families were locked on waiting lists for public housing. Many were forced to live in shelters or the streets.
In Cleveland, in one classic situation, the loss of a home precipitated by the layoffs in a nearby plant led to the dissolution of a family: the adolescent daughter put in foster care, the wife and younger children ending up on welfare, the husband landing in a public shelter when he wasn’t sleeping underneath a bridge. Cleveland was obliged to open shelters and soup kitchens in blue-collar neighborhoods that housed traditional white ethnic populations.

The
Milwaukee Journal
wrote: “The homeless in our midst are no longer mainly urban hobos and bag ladies. In recent months, joblessness has pushed heretofore self-reliant families into this subculture.” In Michigan, in 1982, the loss of jobs in heavy industry forced Governor Milliken to declare “a state of human emergency”—a declaration other governors may be forced to contemplate by 1988.

As an easterner, I had at first assumed that most of these families must be urban, nonwhite, unemployable—perhaps a great deal like the ghetto families I have worked with for much of my life. In 1985, however, I was given an opportunity to visit in over 50 cities and in almost every region of the nation. My hosts were governors and other local politicians, leaders of industry, organizers of the working poor, leaders and advocates of those who recently had joined the unemployed, teachers, school board members, farmers, bankers, owners of local stores. Often they were people who had never met each other and had never even been in the same room with one another, even though they lived in the same towns and cities. They had come together now out of their shared concern over the growth of poverty, the transformation of the labor market, and the rising numbers of those people who no longer could find work at all.