HARD WORKERS EXIT THE SHELTER SYSTEM – THEN COME BACK

(Article published in HWW Oct 2008)

Renee, a 32-year-old with three sons and three daughters, lost her home not once but twice.

In September 2002, Renee came to NY from Atlanta when plans for her restaurant business fell on hard times, and moved in with her sister. There wasn’t room to stay long. After applying for shelter, she and the kids were placed in a scatter site apartment for three years, moved to Ruth Fernandez Family Residence for a month and finally into their own apartment with a city rent subsidy. (That subsidy called HSP for Housing Stability Plus has since been discontinued.)

“We had two bedrooms on the Grand Concourse,” she recalls. “It was huge, even for six kids. The rent was $1,176. Four or five months out of the system, I was working – a temp job.”

Her problem began in her second year when she was expected to pay a portion of her rent – and did. “Then Public Assistance sanctioned me for noncompliance. They said I was supposed to go to the BEGIN program and go to work. I told them I was already working and showed them my pay stubs. They were supposed to rebudget me but they didn’t. They sanctioned me. They punished me for noncompliance cause I didn’t go to the BEGIN program cause I already had a job. So p.a. stopped paying my rent. I was back and forth from housing court to p.a. for four months till I got evicted on July 26, 2007. The court said I had to find a third party to help pay the rent. I gave them a name and they said that person’s income wasn’t enough. Then I went to PATH on September 30, 2007.  They said ok and sent me to a shelter,”

So Renee is back in the system again. She’s working as a cashier and has applied for Section 8.

Selma, age 27, is another unwilling veteran of the shelter system.  In 2003 after repeated overnight stays at the EAU she and her husband and their two toddlers were sent to Carlton House in Queens where they stayed just five months.  “The worker told me ‘Get the apartment first and then go to work’ and that’s what we did,” she says.  “We turned in our pay stubs as we were told to, but they didn’t rebudget us. They sanctioned us and three months later I got a certified letter from Housing Court saying I owed $5,000 in back rent. For months the landlord wasn’t being paid and we didn’t know it.”

So now, they are back in the system, too.

Could anyone or anything have helped to prevent Renee’s or Selma’s second bout of homelessness? Renee says now, “I could have used help with my HRA (Human Resources Administration) problems.”  After she lost the Grand Concourse apartment last summer, she did go to a HomeBase office and ask for help. “The lady I spoke to went to her supervisor who said I didn’t qualify. It was the HomeBase in the Bronx, on the Grand Concourse, right next to Housing Court.”

Could Renee and Selma have been helped by Single Stop? [Click to read our article on Single Stop at our Welfare page.]