To the residents of Park Slope, being named the #1 neighborhood in the city may not have come as any big surprise. What may surprise many is knowing that there are homeless people living in the Slope every day.
I met a couple of gentlemen recently who are active members of Old First Reformed Church, but have no stable home to sleep in each night. They’ve been waiting for Section 8 housing to come through for over a year now, and their efforts to connect to city services (with lots of loving help from the Old First pastor Meeter and other members) have so far been unsuccessful. I spoke with them, talked to them about some of the options they may not have considered, like public housing, so they put in a public housing application, but that could also be many years of waiting, even for two homeless gentlemen.
Part of the problem is the city policy of distinguishing between “street homeless” and people like these two fellows I met, who manage to keep off the streets each night but have no permanent place to stay. For example, one fellow in the Slope raises enough money each day panhandling so he can buy a bed night by night in a rooming house. It’s not his apartment. He can’t stay there during the day or keep things. He just has a place to sleep at night. If he’s not found on the street, city “outreach teams” won’t assist him. His only other option is to take himself to central intake in mid-town Manhattan, to enter the “Wheel” of the city shelter system.
Many homeless persons fear the shelter system (not unreasonably) for safety concerns. It’s also an exhausting process, requiring them to shuttle around the city from central intake to a remote shelter placement and back, often in the wee hours of the morning.
This week, Reverend Meeter, Brian Steadman, members of Old First, and I met with city council members Brad Lander and Steve Levin to talk about our concerns for the needs of the homeless in general, and for the two homeless gentlemen attending Old First in particular. The council members were kind and empathetic, and promised to look into our concerns. Stay tuned…
~Sandhya