How Long Do I Have To Stay In A Shelter To Get Housing

Credit... Photographs by Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Homelessness, Pace by Stride

New York Metropolis makes it difficult to enter shelters, and the housing market place makes it hard to get out them. The process has many phases — the stages of homelessness.

Credit... Photographs by Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Feb. xviii, 2018

From the windows of a seven-story building on Eastward 151st Street in the Bronx, Manhattan rises like Oz in the distance, a glittering reminder of why so many people want to alive in New York City.

Inside the building, children sense something is wrong. Their parents are bogged downwardly by backpacks, suitcases, strollers and worries — the burdens carried by many people, unemployed and underemployed, who cannot afford to alive in New York.

New York City must, by court order, provide temporary shelter to whatsoever eligible person, and to comply, the metropolis spends nigh $one.8 billion a year on shelters, apartments, hotel rooms and programs.

It is a vital service for people in need, and it is a plush 1. The city does non arrive like shooting fish in a barrel to qualify for shelter, and the housing marketplace does not brand it easy to emerge from the system. The arduous process tin can stretch over more than a year and has many phases — the stages of homelessness.

They begin in the building on East 151st Street, the city intake heart known as P.A.T.H., or Prevention Help and Temporary Housing, with the application and the gauntlet of interviews. Then, temporary placement in shelter for up to 10 days while the city determines whether an applicant is indeed homeless. Next, placement in a long-term shelter.

Families stayed in shelter for an boilerplate 414 days, according the mayor's annual management written report for fiscal 2017.

Moving out is a struggle in itself. Applications for rental aid. The search for an affordable apartment. And for the fortunate ones, the move.

The metropolis'southward surge in homelessness tin be traced to 2011, when the state cut funding to a key rental assistance program. By 2012, the overall homeless population had jumped by eleven percentage to about 57,000 people, and past 2013, the number was almost 64,000, according to an annual count overseen by the Section of Housing and Urban Development.

Since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office in 2014, the number has continued to pitter-patter up to a current estimate of 77,000 people. The record number has come even every bit the city has diverted tens of thousands of people from homelessness by pouring millions of dollars into new rental assistance programs and legal assistance to fight evictions. The programs cannot keep step with runaway rents, brackish wages and vanishing affordable housing. About 100 families go to P.A.T.H. each mean solar day.

In hopes of catastrophe the apply of private apartments and hotel rooms as stopgaps, the Section of Homeless Services is expanding its shelter system under a plan to open 90 facilities over v years.

The New York Times looked at homelessness step by step through the eyes of several families, over the final months of last yr.

The desperation and embarrassment of having nowhere else to turn and the daily frustration of living with footling privacy and curfews were immeasurable. The joy of families moving into their ain homes was palpable.

P.A.T.H.

The first cease was P.A.T.H.

On a Thursday in October, Brittany Jackson and her six-year-quondam son Preston arrived there betwixt 1 a.m. and ii a.m. Ms. Jackson carried a duffel bag and backpack. Preston had his own backpack and a stuffed penguin.

Ms. Jackson'due south face was worn by a bad morning'southward sleep. "My mom and I had gotten into it really bad. I couldn't take information technology anymore then I simply left," said Ms. Jackson, now 25.

The city placed them in a shelter nearby to get some rest and so that they could return past ix a.m. to be the first family unit in line at the start of the work day. With their birth certificates in mitt, Ms. Jackson went from one floor to the next and 1 cubicle and kiosk after another. In all, she met eight homeless services employees and two employees from the Department of Education.

Ms. Jackson was an on-once again, off-again student at Kingsborough Community College majoring in criminal justice. She was working for Instacart, a grocery delivery visitor, until September when she had to quit because she depended on a friend with a car who could no longer take her from place to place for deliveries.

Unemployed and frustrated, Ms. Jackson said she began arguing with her mother and began wondering where she and Preston could fit since her two younger sisters were returning to alive in the family's two-bedchamber apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Ms. Jackson buried her face into her hands. "Are yous O.K.?" asked Edison Joseph, her second caseworker of the day.

"Yes, I'thousand pitiful. I'1000 tired," Ms Jackson said.

Hours later on, Ms. Jackson and her son stepped into a black van. Preston played with Legos that he dug out of his haversack, which included a frayed copy of "Green Eggs and Ham." Preston sang along with a McDonald's commercial that came on the radio: "Ba da ba ba ba. I'm lovin' it." When they crossed the East River into Brooklyn, he shouted, "Mommy! The ocean!"

Using the penguin as a pillow, Ms. Jackson fell asleep with Preston nestled next to her.

They awakened in front of Kingston Family Residence, an unmarked building in Crown Heights where 46 families, including nearly 70 children, live. Ms. Jackson met three more people, including Monica Lozado, a instance director who asked many of the same questions she had answered at P.A.T.H.

"Would you just bustle upward?" Preston asked jokingly but impatiently.

Restless, he drew a motion picture of a house with a bright yellow circle. "The sunny sky is going through your window," he told his female parent.

Information technology was rainy that Thursday, and little low-cal shone through the window of the studio unit where Ms. Jackson and her son were placed. The shelter was worn, but it was clean. The room smelled like Ajax, and they received a intendance bundle of toiletries, peanut butter, jelly and a box of instant macaroni and cheese. Preston leapt similar Superman onto i of two twin beds. "I'll take it!" he shouted.

It had taken 15 hours to get through P.A.T.H., and Ms. Jackson had ten days to evidence that she had nowhere else to stay.

Waiting

In October, Shantae Young, now 35, and her iii children were constitute ineligible for shelter. Ms. Immature had nowhere to go. The family stood in the rain in a park near P.A.T.H., and she called the city Administration for Children's Services because she thought the agency could assist her.

With help from a social worker and further intervention by the Legal Aid Society, Ms. Immature and her children were allowed to render to the private flat that the metropolis was using equally shelter and where the family had stayed since Baronial. The third-floor apartment in a decrepit walk-upwards in the Bronx had mice and roaches, no heat, a stove that didn't work and a closet with a leak that ruined their clothes. "Nosotros went a calendar month without hot water," Ms. Young said as she entered the sparsely furnished flat. The alternative, she said, could have been a bench in the playground near P.A.T.H. "It's not much, just it's better."

Still, Ms. Young was in limbo, trying to convince social workers that she and her children — Julian, now 15; Shaira, 12; and Shayla, 10, comfy in school in the Bronx and making friends — could not return to Orlando, Fla., where they had lived before moving to New York early last year.

"Every x days I have to bring my kids. That'south every 10 days my kids miss school," said Ms. Young. Under a policy instituted in late 2016, children do not have to accompany their parents to reapplications, but Ms. Young said no one explained the policy until her 5th visit.

Ms. Immature grew up in foster care in Florida but lived with her biological mother in New York as a teenager. After living in Florida for several years, she said she returned to the metropolis to reunite with Julian's father, just their apartment fell through. And then she tried staying with the children with a family friend, but the small infinite led to tension and arguments with the friend, Ms. Immature said.

She said she just needed a few months to go on her feet. "I'thousand non trying to work the system. I just desire the system to piece of work for me," she said.

Ms. Young sat on a bench next to a hot plate and browned ground beef for a taco dinner. Shayla ready the tabular array.

The family had four scarlet plastic cups and 4 black plastic bowls that Shayla treated like fine china, gingerly centering them in front of each seat. "Perfect," she said.

The table had but two chairs, and Ms. Young carried the bench from the kitchen so they could sit together.

"Who's going to pray?" Ms. Young asked.

"I will," Shayla said, raising her hand as if in a classroom. She put her hands together with her fingers upright, airtight her optics and bowed her head. "God is cracking. God is skillful," she said, pausing and opening her eyes. "What is it again?"

Ms. Young opened her eyes. She smiled. "I'll stop it," she said. "Let us thank him for this food. Amen."

Long-term Shelter

Pedro Cordero has lived in shelter for most of his life, an experience that fires his dreams. "I want an apartment with three bedrooms and a puddle in the dorsum," he said, walking with his father through a shelter in Eastward New York, Brooklyn.

Pedro, viii, athletic with a toothy grin, sometimes hung on the back of his father'due south motorized chair, releasing himself and leaping in attempts to striking doorway tops. His begetter, besides named Pedro, began using the motorized chair in February 2016 after suffering an injury on the chore. A wound from a poke in the back with a nail became infected and rendered him immobile. He was working off the books at a construction site and had no insurance. It had been another setback in the quest to make enough money to finally get out of shelter for good.

Mr. Cordero, now 44, who has struggled with addiction and regretted not being in the lives of his iii older children, said he was adamant to heighten Pedro. The family unit had initially entered shelter afterwards tripling upwardly in a two-bedroom railroad apartment with seven other people, including Pedro's mother who was pregnant with him. Mr. Cordero said he was raising their son on his own because Pedro'due south mother was in drug rehabilitation.

Pedro was always getting into trouble, by and large, his father said, because shelter life limited his ability to play. Win, the nonprofit that operated the shelter where they lived, held a camp for children during the summer on the shelter's campus in East New York where children could participate in games and tag a concrete wall with their names in chalk. Pedro loved playing basketball at the camp, merely he had few outlets for his energy during the school year. Children were non permitted to play in the hallways.

Looking downwards at a sheet of paper that a social worker had handed him, Mr. Cordero asked Pedro, "What is this violation? Information technology says you were playing in the hallway."

"That wasn't me!" Pedro said with confidence, afterwards saying, "I don't like this place. They give you write-ups."

The junior Pedro could recollect living in four different shelters. His favorite was one located nigh Madison Foursquare Garden, where they encountered a professional wrestler on a nearby street. "Nosotros saw John Cena," he said. "I want to see a basketball player."

About 40 percent of the people living in the urban center's chief shelter organization are children under 18, making them the single largest population within the system.

Looking for a Style Out

Desiree Rivera's pulverisation-blue purse had ii fuzzy key chains attached with no keys.

She cradled the purse in her lap while she sabbatum with Angela Huggins in the Make clean Rite Center Laundromat every bit washing machines hummed and the buttons and zippers of clothes in dryers tapped out a sort of percussion on a Tuesday afternoon in August.

Ms. Rivera, a 38-yr-old mother of seven children, had been homeless since July — the second time she had been homeless in eleven years.

Ms. Huggins's job was to coordinate housing for dozens of homeless families living in Win shelters. Win, formerly known as Women in Need, is the largest nonprofit provider of shelters for families with children in the urban center, housing most 1,400 families on any given day or well-nigh 9,000 adults and children annually.

Ms. Huggins, recruited from another nonprofit grouping, was known for her charmingly persistent approach to brokers in her daily quest to move families out of homelessness and into apartments. When brokers go more apartments, she said, "they say, 'Let me phone call Ms. Huggins.' I'm greedy for apartments. I'm always on it."

The laundromat provided some relief from a rainy twenty-four hours. A real estate banker was running late. Simply they would await as long as they had to. The broker was going to prove them a rarity — a three-bedroom apartment for $one,956 a month.

The broker led them up three flights of creaky stairs into a freshly painted flat with dark, glistening hardwood floors and a faux fireplace and radiators spray-painted silver.

Housing coordinators serve as matchmakers. They have to persuade landlords to accept a chance on tenants who accept low or no incomes and take often been evicted before. Many landlords shun homeless people who have the urban center's new rental assist vouchers because they were left in a lurch after the state abased its rental assistance program, chosen Reward, in 2011. Ms. Rivera was one of thousands of New Yorkers who became homeless later the Advantage program crumbled.

The housing coordinators also accept to find the correct apartments for homeless families who, while desperate to get out of shelter, have been there then long that they will await until they discover the correct apartment.

"There'due south no closets," Ms. Rivera fretted.

"That's a pocket-size thing. Y'all can put a closet here," Ms. Huggins told her.

Moving Day

V days before Christmas, Madelyn Brito giddily signed out of the Kingston Family Residence for the last time. All of her holding, including a new crib the shelter gave her for her 1-year-one-time son, were packed and ready to get.

Ms. Brito was petite, smiley and 26. She worked total-fourth dimension as an assistant to an optometrist and was moving into her beginning flat with the help of a rental assistance voucher worth $ane,268 a month. To sweeten the pot for the landlord, the city paid 11 1/2 months of the rent in advance, a $1,000 bonus and a little actress for property the one-bedroom basement apartment while the urban center conducted an inspection to ensure it was acceptable.

A mover who arrived in a Santa lid; a custodian; and Ms. Lozado, the same case director who had checked in Brittany Jackson in Oct, showered Ms. Brito with congratulations.

A 3-year-former girl with pigtails, accompanying her female parent who was signing into the shelter, observed all of the jubilation in the hallway. "She's so happy," she told her mother. "I'm and so happy."

She entered an elevator with her female parent who looked downwards at her and said, "Yeah, that's going to happen to us."

Ms. Brito, who was rejected for shelter iii times before disarming the city that she had nowhere to become, had been in shelter for 10 months.

The mother, a victim of domestic violence, had been in shelter for four years.

Epilogue

Every story was unlike, and notwithstanding there was a common thread of uncertainty, even when families left shelter.

On the 10th mean solar day in provisional shelter, Brittany Jackson returned to P.A.T.H., where social workers diverted her from going back into the shelter system past promising to assist with her female parent's rent. She returned to live with her mother. She would share a bed with Preston. In a recent interview, Ms. Jackson said the assistance merely covered one month. Though the city likewise gave her a rental assistance voucher worth $1,268 a calendar month to find her ain flat, she has not been able to find one.

Shantae Young began a job every bit a housekeeper at a hotel in November, around the same time the urban center notified her that she and her children were eligible for permanent shelter. She had applied five times and had gone through two hearings.

Pedro Cordero and his son remain in shelter.

Desiree Rivera and her children moved into a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx.

Madelyn Brito and her son historic Christmas in her new apartment.

During the last financial year, 12,595 families with children entered shelter; 8,571 families left.