Say It Out Loud!
Starting at noon, former NYCLU Director and Public Advocate candidate Norman Siegel will lead his annual reading of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights at Strawberry Fields near the W. 72nd St. entrance to Central Park. The Granny Peace Brigade will be on hand as well…If you only have time to savor one constitutional amendment, Siegel will join Green Party mayoral candidate Reverend Billy Talen and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir for a First Amend-a-thon at 4 p.m. at the North Plaza of Union Square. The event will feature a drum circle gospel salsa sing–along of the guarantee of our freedom in the US Constitution. Times Up will lead a “Know Your Rights Ride” afterward.

Overthrowing a Modern-Day Tyranny
Tired of living under they tyranny of the private health insurance industry? Physicians for a National Healthcare Plan, ACT-UP, Private Healthcare Insurance Must Go Coalition and Healthcare-Now would like for the people of the United States to gain their independence from the private interests that control their access to healthcare once and for all by creating a single payer national healthcare plan. They will be leafleting the new, pedestrian friendly Times Square from 2-4 p.m. Around 4 p.m., they will head west looking for a good site near the Hudson River where they can watch this year’s fireworks show. For recent coverage of the single payer healthcare movement in The Indypendent, click here.

Free the Animals
July 4th is no holiday for the animals that are imprisoned and experimented on by Huntingdon Life Sciences. Animal rights activists will be holding a potluck picnic at 2 p.m. Near the Columbus Circle entrance to Central Park. Later, there will be a demonstration outside the Whole Foods store housed inside the Time Warner Building.

Afro-Punk Festival
BAM’s annual Afro Punk Festival started Friday and continues through July 10. Four movies will be screened on July 4: The Anderson Platoon with Fred Hampton Interviews (2 p.m.), Crips and Bloods: Made in America (4:30 p.m.), Afro-Saxons ( 6:50 p.m.) and Attica (9:15). Based on eyewitness accounts, this Emmy award-winning documentary is a riveting, realistic recreation of 1971’s prison revolt at New York’s Attica correctional facility in which inmates demanding better food and living conditions took 38 guards hostage. BAM is located at 30 Lafayette St. in Fort Greene. For directions, click here.

4th on Fire!
4th on Fire: A fundraiser at Surreal Estate Presented by Left Turn Magazine, the Brecht Forum, and Surreal Estate Concert!
Look for some great music at this cookout/dance party featuring Rebel Diaz, Earth Driver, Mahina Movement, Young Lady Koba and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. There will also be fun and games with an Uncle Sam Pinata, a ‘not dog’ eating contest and a make your flag arts and crafts table. The party will be held at the Surreal Estate space at 15 Thames in Bushwick near the Morgan St. L stop. Doors open at 6 p.m.

Happy July 5th!

The 4th of July will be celebrated a day late at the Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. There will be a lecture on Black emancipation in New York at 4 p.m. followed by a performance by BLK JKS, a South African rock band will perform Sunday at 6 p.m.  There’s a suggested donation of $5. To find out more about the historic Black community of Weeksville and why it celebrates the 4th of July a day late, see this article in The Indypendent by Jessica Lee.

But I wanted to know because before he was “Wacko Jacko” he was simply Michael. He achieved a first name intimacy with the world. Everyone loved him and because he came from us his stardom meant that we to could be known. He was this skinny kid and like us was coy. And he moon-walked. He glided over glowing sidewalks, spun and never fell and that’s what I loved about him. I was seven but I knew that color meant weight. We lived in the projects, an adult word that came later. I didn’t have the language of race only the feeling of pressure. Eyes watched me and I watched myself. I was told to lock the door because junkies might break in and close window-shades so people don’t see what we have and don’t talk our business in the street. The pressure of danger, some real some imagined, surrounded us. But at night we watched TV and my Mom pointed over my shoulder at Michael in the “Billie Jean” video, dancing through trash strewn streets as if free from the weight. “He’s the first black man on MTV,” she said and I saw the city glow beneath his feet.

Michael also taught me how to be ugly. At school we divided the play ground into Good Clothes/Bad Clothes. The Good Clothes kids had name brand sneakers, pressed hair, sport-team shirts and laughed at us with knock off Velcro shoes, thread-bare pants and checkered shirts. They laughed and laughed until Thriller hit and we were pushing each other out of the way to do the Zombie dance but the Good Clothes were too careful, trying not to scrape shoes or stain pants and gave up as the Bad Clothes kids took it. We already looked like zombies, gaunt, tattered, and exuberant. We rolled and kicked our feet, thrust arms around our heads because we had nothing left to lose. No one was worried about wrecking store bought status. Our ugliness was power and we never let them forget it.

Michael was left behind when we jumped into adolescence. We had to act grown, which may be the rite of passage of teenage; the constant try to go from child to adult instantly and the lessons learned from failing. In high school, music was currency from the adult world and we traded it like cigarettes in prison. “You got Motley Crue?” We look around. “Yeah, you got NWA - No but I got Ice-T - Alright hit me.” The louder, angrier, funkier, obscure the music the higher one’s reputation. No one traded Michael. He was too falsetto, too boyish for those of us trying to look like the tough asses on Yo! MTV Raps. By the time his 1987 Bad record came out he was a target of our scorn. We scrawled on the album posters in the subway, Bad Nose Job, Bad Skin Cream, Bad Music. Somehow we sensed that as eager we were too leave childhood, Michael was content to stay in it.

Over the years he flashed his glove on TV and it seemed his shades, military jacket, boots were a sarcophagus. He bought a fantasy world called Neverland. He bought llamas and monkeys. He bought whiteness. He brought children into his bed. Each new headline was a police do not cross tape across the memories where wonder danced free and the city could glow under our feet.

He was a joke, an embarrassment until I saw the movie Three Kings. In it a trio of greedy U.S. soldiers stole gold and one, played by Mark Walberg, caught by Iraqi soldiers was taken into a basement to be tortured. Tied to a chair, he nervously eyed the electric wires clamped to his head. The Iraqi officer asked coolly, “What is the problem with Michael Jackson?”

Walberg blinks through sweat, says he doesn’t know. The Iraqi holds up his hand as if it’s the Glittering Glove, “He come to Egypt I see picture of his in his hotel. Hello I’m Michael Jackson with my chop up face. Your country make him chop up his face.”

“That’s bullshit he did it to himself,” Walberg says but the Iraqi officer slams him. “You are the blind bullshit my main man,” the officer circles him. “I think you’re sick fucking country made the black man hate himself just like you hate the Arab and the children you bomb over here.” I paused the scene and thought yeah Michael is a symptom of America. He’s not a joke but a lesson and a warning. I pulled Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk off the shelf to read his definition of Double-Consciousness, to know how the man who sang Soul and Neo-Soul could destroy his own. His classic line gushed from that split we all straddle, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

By this time, I’d started teaching at a state college and each class I fiddled with lesson plans to jolt the students. First day of the semester, I walked in to my African-American Literature course. Faces took my measure as I handed out papers. “Please flip them over.” They did and saw photocopies of Michael’s face spanning from beautiful brown to ghostly white and Lil Kim from sullen pout to bulb-cheeked mannequin.

“We assume,” I intoned. “Ideas are immaterial but hopefully these images show that ideas are real and can determine our actions and our lives.”

They gawked at the photos.

“How many of us have been called too fat, too thin, too dark or too nappy and stood in front of a mirror wanting to be different.”

Everyone raised their hand including me. “So did they; except their self-hate had a budget. Part of the goal of Black literature is to shift the questioning from our self-worth to question the worth of the ideas we believe in. Ideas of beauty. Ideas of power.”

We read Du Bois and began to see the invisible eye that floats above us, watching us watch ourselves. A young man sitting mid-row shook his head, “They called me Zulu, shadow and remember that Dave Chapelle skit.” I rolled my eyes, pissed at the comedian for making color a joke again. “Darkness. Darkness. They were on me with that. Darkness.” People nodded, hummed yes as his words flowed over shame like a stream.

Class ended. As I stacked the papers I stared at Michael. “You’re not going to last long,” I muttered. When the news of his death hit, I was sad but not shocked. He looked dead already, a waif spirit looking for an exit out of the world. The eulogies began and have yet to end but I remember when he was killing himself slowly in public and most of us, me included, made jokes about it. Although his music is the gift most celebrated, it’s the lesson he couldn’t learn that I keep. At some point, to survive, we have to take off the mask we wear for others and demand to be loved without it.

Got links? Send them to anna@indypendent.org.

A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge ruled today in favor of striking Stella D’oro workers ordering their employer to reinstate the workers to their former jobs under the terms of their old contract, pay back wages with interest and be willing to return to the collective bargaining table.

The 136 workers at the Stella D’oro Biscuit Co. in the Bronx went on strike in August after Brynwood Partners, the private equity firm that owns Stella D’oro, demanded wage cuts  of as much as 26 percent as well as reductions in sick days and vacation time. Brynwood claimed it had lost $1.567 million in 2007 and needed to “restructure” its labor costs to stay in business. However, management refused to provide representatives from Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International Union Local 50 with full access to its audited books.

Brynwood’s refusal to open its books prompted the union to file an unfair labor practice complaint which NLRB Administrative Law Judge Steven Davis concurred with Tuesday. Davis also found that Brynwood had engaged in additional unfair labor practices by declaring an impasse two weeks after the strike began and unilaterally implementing its own contract terms and then later refusing the strikers offer to unconditionally return to work under the terms of their old contract.

Under NLRB rules, Brynwood can appeal the ruling to the Board for a final agency determination. The final determination is subject to review in the Federal courts.

For the full text of the NLRB decision click here. For previous coverage of the Stella D’oro strike in The Indypendent click here.

Got links? Send them to anna@indypendent.org.

“It was a different time, the passions of people were far greater in a way. It was different, you had more stake in the time and in what was going on then,” said artist Suzanne Poli.

The Chair and the Maiden Art Gallery, on Christopher street just feet from the Stonewall Inn, displayed the work of Poli last week. Poli’s collection displayed pictures taken from the very riots themselves, and other events following including protests, pride parades and demonstrations that occurred over the last 40 years.

Poli’s vast collection of images, both filled with bright colors and in classic black and white, displayed a history and a legacy that the LGBT community celebrated globally on the exact date June 28. The collection portrayed images from the original riots in black and white, and progressed through time with colors and parades and was filled with celebration and exuberant color.

Marion Cooper, a friend of the artist, said after viewing the images, “I saw the pictures here and even though they’re stationary pictures, to me they look like the people are running and moving.”

A diversity of people filled the streets in each image, some carry banners with solemn faces, and some carry glitter with smiles of celebration. The range of emotions Poli captures is truly stunning. “They really capture the essence of what was happening in New York City,” said neighborhood resident Melinda Holm.

Poli enjoyed the display of her work and the reactions of viewers to it. “I felt like I had to make change, I was there to change things, change is what it was all about,” Poli said.

Owners of the gallery and curators of the exhibit David Zelikovsky and John Dabu were extremely excited to be hosting the show and displaying some of Poli’s work. “It’s amazing how she really has caught New York,” Dabu said. Zelikovsky was very excited to be hosting the special showing the week of the 40th anniversary of the riots and to look back on a different time period. “The idea is to always remember the roots and where its from and the progression,” Zelikovsky said.

Zelikovsky and Dabu founded the gallery two years ago outside of the Chelsea art gallery circuit and outside of the mold. Zelikovsky explained that the gallery has an open door policy, and that he will personally advise anyone who walks through their doors regardless of whether it turns into a shot or not. “The idea was to host emerging artists, and we’re kind of anti-establishment,” Zelikovsky said.

Zelikovsky spoke about the need for an exhibit to capture the original anger and rebellion of the Stonewall Riots to remind a community of its past. “Most of the corporations know it’s a celebration, but they don’t know why they’re celebrating, they don’t know where it comes from,” Zelikovsky said. “It came from fire and broken glasses, how many people you interview now would even have an idea, they think of it as a celebration and more of a pride thing than a history thing.”

Poli’s work will also be archived in the New York Public Library and will continue to remind and teach others of the history and inspire change in viewers. “They [the pictures] really are a snapshot of things that you may not have seen but you just think that you’re a part of it, you can always imagine that ‘I was there too,’” Dabu said.

Got links? Send them to anna@indypendent.org.

By Julia Dunn

This week has been filled with parades, art exhibitions, speeches, presentations and mostly celebrations to honor the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. As you walk down Christopher Street this week, there is an immediate assault of bright colors, pride flags, celebratory people and signs reminding everyone of the historic event they are celebrating. The pride parade itself fell on the exact day, which 40 years ago sparked an entire gay rights movement.

Richard Wandel, archivist for the LGBT community center, presented his personal reflections on the past and how the gay rights movement has grown from the Stonewall Riots to where it stands today. Thursday June 25 Wandel spoke to a group of more than 30 people in the Chelsea Recreation Center.

Wandel has worked for the LGBT community center archives for 20 years, since it was co-founded by him and others on a special committee. Wandel was also the second president of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) that was established in December in 1969. The group branched off of the Gay Liberation Front to form a more specific and non-violent organization.

The first pride-focused event the Arts, Culture and Fun series for the parks in Manhattan threw attracted a very diverse audience as well as other archivists. Fellow volunteer archivist Nick Kaluk with the LGBT community Center said, “I feel like I don’t know much about Stonewall history, certainly not as much as Rich does.” Wandel provided a very detailed account of the night of the Stonewall raid as well as many events for gay rights that followed after that he personally was involved in.

Wandel began, “Once upon a time in a city by the sea,” and continued to describe every event of the night and how this particular raid differed from others including a raid of Stonewall on a Tuesday night of that same week. Wandel described every detail that made this night different including the 200 people in the bar, the police call for back-up continuously being revoked by another voice on the line but most importantly, the resistance and actions of the crowd against the police officers.

Following the retelling of the night, Wandel went on to detail his actions with the GAA and noted their mission, “The most important thing was to get people to come out,” said Wandel. “The way to do that was to be loud, active and to be nonviolent but extremely militant.” On top of that Wandel talked about how they held demonstrations and the types of protests GAA would stage saying, “We’re gay men and women, we don’t just shout and hold banners, we have to have a little flare!”

“Richard is known as a storyteller,” said Denise Alicea, a deputy chief of recreation for Parks and Recreation in Manhattan. Wandel did a great job of taking all the people in the room back to the time period and engaged the audience with his own experiences.

The Arts, Culture and Fun series is a branch of the Parks and Recreation division of the City of New York and was run by Alicea and Richard Sedlisky for the past year through nearly 15 diverse events.

Program attendance has ranged from 300 to a mere 15, but Sedlisky said he does not worry about low attendance, “We shouldn’t fear turn out or lack of because it’s not about the number but it’s about what people get from it.”

The group gathered on Thursday evening was very diverse and really drew many friends of Wandel as long as curious community members. “A lot of things we do gathers a cross section of people and I think it erases stereotypes,” Sedlisky said.

You can find more information about the Arts, Culture and Fun series’ next event by emailing them at artsculturefun@parks.nyc.gov.

Franceska Dillella and her three children are attracting a lot of attention. The other passengers on a crowded train on the M line wear tight smiles as two-year-old Eden hollers and swings around the car’s center pole. Her brother Nick, 4, is pushing a toy truck around. Six-year-old Zach, meanwhile, keeps asking his mother if he can have a dollar to get an ice cream cone after school. Yes, Franceska says, taking the opportunity to cleanse his hands with sanitizer wipes.

It is another typical weekday morning as the family endures its two-hour commute from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to Astoria, Queens, where the children attend school. This routine, forced upon them by the City Department of Homeless Services (DHS), leaves Franceska exhausted when the day has hardly begun. But she is often tired these days. Since October, she and her children have been homeless. Her marriage has collapsed. And navigating “the system” has proved to be an impossible task, even for a self-described “extroverted, happy 30-year-old.”

“I feel like I’ve aged ten years,” says Franceska. “I feel so numbed out by the whole experience, I don’t even feel like it’s me.”

LIVING ON THE BRINK

It was only two years ago that Franceska and her husband Joe decided to move back to New York City. The Astoria natives had been living in Springfield, Mass., for a little more than a year when a great deal fell into their laps: a three-bedroom house for $1,000 a month rent in the Queens College Point neighborhood. The couple agreed that the arrangement would help them realize their long-term goals. Franceska would go back to work, she and Joe would save, and eventually they would have enough money to buy their own place. In May 2007, the family returned to Queens.

But their great deal wasn’t so sweet. The house, old and run-down, came with a moldy bathroom and walls that required repainting. Their biggest problem was an antiquated furnace that burned a hole in their finances with energy bills that averaged $800 a month during the winter.

In December 2007 Joe lost his job as a store manager at Au Bon Pain in Queens. The best opportunity he could find in a sinking economy was a part-time position at a staffing agency in downtown Manhattan. He supplemented this income with gigs as a freelance photographer. The money, however, was less than his previous job. At the same time, the cost of utilities started to rise. The couple, which had never struggled to pay their bills before, began to fall behind on rent.

The family applied for food stamps and medical aid in May 2008. “We were holding out,” Franceska says, “hoping that we could catch up on the rent.” She made repeated trips to the Human Resources Administration (HRA), the city department in charge of administering Public Assistance, in an attempt to obtain rental assistance. Her efforts resulted in a one-time payment of their gas-and-electric bill.

DARK TIMES

In October 2008, Con Edison cut off their electricity. The family lived without power for two weeks. Realizing they had exhausted all their options, Franceska and Joe packed a couple of suitcases. The evening of Oct. 17, the couple and their three children traveled to the Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing (PATH) office in the South Bronx, the city’s sole intake center for families seeking emergency shelter. Franceska and Joe were fingerprinted, photographed and entered in a database. They were now officially homeless.

THE NEW HOMELESSNESS

Families who were once barely getting by have been pushed into homelessness by the economic recession, says Ralph da Costa Nunez, president of the Institute for Children and Poverty, a nonprofit that studies family homelessness. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, from July to November 2008, more than 1,300 new families entered New York City’s shelter system each month, the highest monthly average since the city began recording this data 25 years ago.

“There are some families that are here because of chronic poverty issues,” Nunez says. “Some are here because something happened and they couldn’t pay the rent.” He calls this growing population the “new homeless.” “These are people that were middle class, that had jobs, that had no other options.”

“When I first went into the shelter, I thought I could stay there and work and get out,” Franceska says. DHS had placed the family in the Metro Family Residence on Queens Boulevard, a 45-minute subway ride from the elementary school where Zach attended first grade. Nearby was Nick’s pre-school, which also provided day care for Eden.

The kids thought they were in a hotel, so Franceska told them, “Listen, we’re homeless. We don’t have a home right now, but we’re going to get one and things are going to get better.” She laughs, “After a while, they started asking, ‘When are we going to get one?’”

A month into the family’s residency, Franceska said that DHS determined the family’s unit was “too small” and relocated them late one night to the Flushing Family Residence in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The family’s new unit looked like it had just been evacuated by the previous family. “There was literally someone’s taco dinner still on the kitchen table,” Franceska says. Cockroaches were crawling out of a box of bed sheets. On the inside of the front door, someone had scrawled the word “bitch.”

“It was at that point I felt like I had no control over my life situation anymore,” Franceska says.

‘NO CONTROL’

The shelter’s location in Brooklyn presented another problem for the family. Upon the advice of the city’s Board of Education, Franceska decided to keep her children enrolled in Queens. This meant a two-hour subway trip requiring two transfers. Franceska asked the city to provide her children with direct transportation to and from school, arguing that not only was the commute arduous, but Nick had difficulty walking due to a developmental disorder. But the city was not able to coordinate her children’s transportation. Instead, the shelter issued Franceska a MetroCard with the stipulation that it be used only for the school commute.

The early morning commute is “exhausting,” Franceska says. Zach was often late to school. Some days, when the weather was bad, she paid $25 of her benefit money for a 45-minute taxi ride.

By December, Franceska and Joe’s marriage had deteriorated. A month later, at Franceska’s request, he moved out of the shelter.

Living in the shelter “became harder after their dad left,” Franceska says of her children, especially for Zach, who started seeing a school counselor once a week. On top of this, the family had been chronically ill since moving to Bushwick. “We were throwing up a lot. The kids were missing school a lot,” Franceska says. It did not help that the shelter lacked a medical facility.

A few months ago, Zach became seriously ill. Franceska moved all three children to a friend’s house. The next morning Franceska left Nick and Eden with her friend and took Zach to Flushing Hospital Medical Center where the emergency room admitted him for “acute gastritis.” He was released the following morning after his condition stabilized.

Franceska returned to the Flushing Family Residence that evening with her children. Everyone was tired and eager to relax. But the family did not make it past the front desk. The Dillella children had been out of the shelter for 48 hours, the guard told Franceska, which violated shelter rules. As a result, the whole family had been “locked out of the DHS system.” Franceska explained that she had not been aware of the rule. It did not matter, the guard told her. There was nothing for her to do except to return to PATH in the Bronx and reapply.

“So I was there at PATH with my kids, showing them the hospital papers,” Franceska remembers. “I tell them, ‘My kid’s been hospitalized. Why don’t you just call the shelter and ask them if I can come back in?’” A case worker informed her that it was not possible. Because her family had been locked out of the Flushing residence, the computer system automatically assigned the unit to the next family on the waiting list.

Franceska says she called the DHS Office of Client Advocacy and asked for help. “We don’t do that,” the representative told her. “Client advocacy means that we explain DHS rules to you.”

BACK TO SQUARE ONE

Frustrated and exhausted, Franceska reapplied at PATH to re-enter the system. Having lost shelter during Zach’s brief illness, Franceska also lost her Public Assistance benefits. To regain them, she had to go through a second round of extensive paperwork and required meetings. The family was immediately assigned to a new home at the Stockholm Family Residence in Bushwick, about a mile from the Flushing residence.

“This is what the system has become,” says Nunez, who served as a deputy to the Mayor’s Office of Homelessness Services in the 1980s. The city holds residents to strict rules because it is “overwhelmed with homeless families,” he says. “If they can find a reason to throw somebody out, they will take it so they can make room again.”

“The reality is this system is uncontrolled. It is all over the place, and this woman is stuck in the middle of it,” Nunez says.

DHS and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment by The Indypendent.

KEEPING HOPE ALIVE

Parenting responsibilities and an unpredictable routine, including frequent mandatory mid-day HRA appointments, have cost Franceska two jobs since she entered the shelter system last October. In March, she landed a position as an administrative assistant to the CEO of an artists cooperative in downtown Manhattan. The job paid only $1,200 a month, but she enjoyed the work and felt as if she was developing a career. She began to save up for an apartment so she and her family could leave the shelter system. The last week of April, Franceska received a notice from DHS announcing a new “income contribution program.” The policy required all working families living in municipal shelters to pay rent. The city determined that Franceska’s contribution would be $450 a month, made payable to the Stockholm shelter.

Franceska was incredulous. “What are my choices?” she wondered. “Put my children in foster care so that I can work on my own and sleep on someone’s couch until I have money to get my own place? Is that the solution?”

She wrote the shelter a check for $50, but refused to pay any more. Instead, she took her dissent directly to the city. Along with 15 other Stockholm parents and their children, Franceska and her children traveled to City Hall May 9 “to let the city know what we thought of its program.”

While she has “never been afraid to stand up against something that’s not right,” Franceska felt ashamed, she says, as she watched Zach march outside City Hall, his small hands holding up a sign that read, “Let my mom keep her income.”

“I want better for my children,” she says. “And I know that every family in there feels the same way.” The rent program was immediately slammed by homeless advocacy groups and city officials, including City Council member Tony Avella (D-Queens) and City Comptroller William Thompson, both mayoral candidates. Citing concerns over “technical issues,” DHS announced a temporary suspension of the rent program May 21.

MOVING ON , MOVING OUT

In March, Franceska qualified under the DHS Work Advantage program for a $1,070 rental subsidy (see “Ticket to Nowhere” below). After weeks of searching for an apartment on her own time, she found a broker willing “to deal with the city.” He had one listing: a two-family house in the East Bronx.

The apartment had only one bedroom and crumbling walls, but the landlord would accept Franceska’s city voucher, so she agreed to take it. That was when she learned that the rent was actually $1,150 a month. “But that’s not what the lease is going to say,” the broker told her, explaining that she would have to pay the extra $80 a month out-of-pocket.

Franceska says she is excited to be leaving the shelter. “My door. My lock,” she says. More important, she adds, her kids will have a home again.

Yet the challenges ahead are daunting, says Linda Contes, an advocate with the nonprofit Picture the Homeless. The city’s voucher expires after two years. “Once her [Franceska’s] rental subsidy runs out, how is she going to maintain her apartment? How is she going to maintain her kids?”

Franceska, who recently became the manager of a SoHo gallery, says that she is hopeful about her and her children’s futures.

Reflecting on her time within the system, Franceska appreciates the housing and monetary assistance she did receive. Shea adds, however, “You can’t rely on this system. Just normal life becomes dysfunctional.”

Back in June 2004, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an ambitious five-year plan to reduce the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds.

“At its heart,” the mayor said, “this new plan aims to replace the city’s over-reliance on shelters with innovative, cost-effective interventions that solve homelessness.”

Bloomberg’s five years are up, and critics say there’s little cause for celebration. While the City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) reported a decrease in the single adult shelter population, the total homeless population continues to hover around 36,000. More significantly, since 2005, the number of families entering the shelter system has steadily increased. The nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless reported that in March 2009 there were more than 9,600 families with 15,500 children living in city shelters. (DHS has not released an annual progress report on the mayor’s plan since July 2005. )

DHS counters criticism by pointing to the number of families moved out of the shelter system each month. But these numbers are misleading, says Ralph da Costa Nunez, president of the Institute for Children and Poverty, a nonprofit that researches family homelessness. While DHS trumpets the number of families moved out of the system, says Nunez, it neglects to mention the number who re-enter it. “[Shelters] see families come back all the time,” Nunez says. He believes the high recidivism rate is a direct consequence of the Bloomberg administration’s scramble to meet what he calls an “arbitrary goal.”

“They’re getting into the business of pushing people through the system,” Nunez says.

As a deputy to the Mayor’s Office of Homelessness Services under Ed Koch, Nunez was responsible for coordinating the policies and services administered by all city agencies dealing with homelessness. He has since authored six books on family homelessness, including, A Shelter is Not a Home — Or Is It? Lessons from Family Homelessness in New York City.

Nunez says the push to reduce the shelter population is being facilitated by new DHS initiatives, including “targets.” Every month the city sets a target number of families to be moved out of each nonprofit shelter.

“For every family you go above the target, you’ll get $2,000,” explains Nunez. But for every family that a shelter falls below the target, “they’ll deduct $2,000, or something like that.” The targets are “often unachievable,” he says, and subject to change from month to month.

Another DHS initiative attracted national attention in early May when The New York Times reported that the department had begun charging rent to the working homeless living in city-contracted shelters. The media unearthed numerous cases of people living at the poverty line being told to pay up to 50 percent of their income or face eviction from their shelters.

The Bloomberg administration said the program had been mandated by a state regulation. Advocacy groups, as well as many city officials including City Comptroller and mayoral candidate William Thompson, decried the rent program as an attack on the working poor.

“We think what we see here is the Bloomberg administration trying to put into place policies that make it harder for families to stay in shelters in an attempt to push them out,” says Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst of the Coalition for the Homeless.

The rent program also penalizes shelter providers, Nunez says, noting that the provider, not the municipality, collects the rent from the tenant. If a tenant fails to pay, the shelter suffers a financial loss. Nunez calls the policy another instance of the Bloomberg administration “trying to force the providers to move [tenants] out faster.” More remarkable, Nunez says, is the policy’s short-sightedness: Families evicted from shelter for failure to pay will only end up re-entering the system.

DHS announced the suspension of the rent program May 21. In a written statement, Commissioner Robert V. Hess said the department was “actively working with the state to make sure [the program] is not reinstated until it is fair and understandable.”

New York City Council member Bill de Blasio, chair of the General Welfare Committee, is calling on Bloomberg to lobby in support of state legislation, introduced several weeks ago by Senator Daniel Squadron and Assemblyman Keith Wright, that would nullify the state regulation.

Meanwhile, the city’s foundering shelter system is being forced to absorb a new population composed of working-class families hard hit by the recession. Since June 2008, reports the Coalition for the Homeless, the number of homeless families living in New York City shelters has increased by 12 percent, and the number of new families entering the system is at a record high.

The Bloomberg administration, in the meantime, has not shifted from the policies enacted under its five-year plan. Nor has the Mayor, who is facing reelection, publicly addressed how his administration intends to respond to the surge of new homeless families.

Nunez, for one, is pessimistic. “You look at this issue a year from now, and you watch how their hands are going to be full,” Nunez says. “This whole system is going to explode.” — S.S.

Homeless families eager to move into permanent housing often encounter an immediate obstacle: The vast majority of landlords and brokers refuse to accept the city’s Department of Homeless Services Work Advantage voucher, a limited-time rental subsidy introduced by the Bloomberg administration in 2007.

FROZEN IN TIME: Franceska Dillella, mother of three, finds a
moment to smile. PHOTO COURTESY: FRANCESKA DILLELLA

“You are not going to find an apartment with the Work Advantage voucher for the voucher’s amount,” says Linda Contes, an advocate with the direct action group Picture the Homeless. Contes, who has been living in a shelter with her husband since August 2008, says it took her months before she found a landlord willing to accept the couple’s $962 monthly voucher — but he would only take it on the condition that the Contes pay him an additional $300 a month. The couple agreed to the terms.

Contes says these kinds of arrangements, known as “side deals,” are illegal. They are also unavoidable. “[Landlords] know that people coming out of the shelters will do that because these people want to get out of the shelters.”

The terms of Work Advantage further constrain a family’s options by requiring that they move into the first available apartment, no matter where they lived before becoming homeless. If a family takes too long to find a place, the city either revokes the voucher or places the family in “any apartment it finds,” Contes says, “and regardless of your needs.”

The city’s rental assistance expires after two years. As a result, says Contes, families that have not been able to shore up their finances often find themselves back where they started: in a shelter.
— S.S.

For more information see “Three Kids, No Home: Navigating the Shelter System One Step at a Time” by Sarah Secunda, with photos by Joel Cook in this issue of The Indypendent. Also see “Homeless Advocates Criticize New DHS Rule: City Plan Could Close Down Dozens of Faith-based Shelter“ by Alex Kane in the March 20th issue of The Indypendent.

GETTING STARTED: Franceska Dillella and her daughter Eden share breakfast at a homeless shelter in Bushwick, Brooklyn. PHOTO COURTESY: FRANCESKA DILLELLA

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Franceska Dillella is a working mother with three kids: six-year- old Zach, four-year-old Nick and two-year-old Eden. For eight months, she struggled to keep her family together while contending with the city’s homeless shelter system. Here is an example of a typical day:

UPHILL STRUGGLE: The morning commute to Astoria, Queens, where Franceska’s children attend school and day care requires two subway transfers. The city’s Department of Homeless Services was unable to provide the family with school transportation

6:00a.m.
At the Stockholm Family Residence in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Franceska wakes up the kids, gets them dressed and fixes breakfast.

PATIENCE: The family waits at the Central Avenue subway station in Bushwick for the M train.

7:30a.m.
Franceska and her children head out the door to catch the M train from Central Avenue to Essex Street, where they switch to the F train. They take the F train one stop to Second Avenue and transfer to the V train. The family disembarks at the Steinway Street station in Astoria, Queens, and walks to Zach’s elementary school.

8:30a.m.
The school day starts. Zach is often late for first grade because of the long commute, which can take up to two hours.

MADONNA AND CHILD: “It’s not easy for anyone to say they are homeless,” Franceska says, “especially children.”

9:00a.m.
After dropping off Zach, Franceska takes Nick to his pre-kindergarten school nearby, which also provides day care for Eden.

9:30a.m.
Franceska gets on the N train to travel to her job in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

10:00a.m.-4:30p.m.
Franceska works, but often has to attend mandatory meetings at the office of the Human Resources Administration located in Sunnyside, Queens, where she has waited up to four hours to meet with a case worker.

4:30p.m.
Franceska heads back to Astoria to pick up the kids, who get out of after-school day care at 5:30 p.m. The family then makes the long commute back to the shelter.

TIME FOR CLASS: Zach arrives at his elementary school in Astoria. He has missed a number of school days this year due to poor health.

7:00p.m.-8:00p.m.
The family eats dinner. Franceska helps Zach with his homework.

8:00p.m.
Franceska often goes to a friend’s house to use the Internet for her job. The shelter has no computer and the public library closes at 6 p.m.

10:00p.m.-11:00p.m.
The family must check into the shelter before its 11 p.m. curfew. Franceska puts the kids to bed.

A record number of families are flooding New York City’s emergency homeless shelters. In February 2009, there were more than 9,600 families in the city’s shelter system, the highest number since New York City began tracking this data 25 years ago.

A local economy plagued by job losses and home foreclosures guarantees that these numbers will only rise, writes Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless. Since June 2008, the number of New York City families in homeless shelters has increased by 12 percent.

“Your typical family today is a single mother with two or three kids,” says Ralph da Costa Nunez, president of the Institute for Children and Poverty. “Your typical homeless person is a child and the majority of homeless children are aged 6 or below. They are very young, and that’s because their parents are very young.”

BY THE NUMBERS:

• According to the Coalition for the Homeless, children account for nearly 15,500 of the city’s total shelter population of about 36,000. Throughout the course of the fiscal year 2009, approximately 34,000 different children slept in city shelters for at least one night.

• Long commutes, frequent absences and repeated school transfers cause homeless children to struggle academically.

• 23 percent of all homeless school-aged children repeat a grade. 75 percent perform below grade level in reading, while 54 percent perform below grade level in math.

• The health of homeless children often suffers from a combination of unsanitary shelter conditions, poor access to healthcare and chronic stress.

• 46 percent of New York City’s homeless children experience a decline in health after entering shelters. These children get three times as many gastrointestinal disorders and 50 percent more ear infections than non-homeless children, and they are hospitalized twice as often.

• 23 percent of the city’s homeless children often go hungry.

• 41 percent of homeless children suffer from psychological conditions.

Source: A Shelter is Not A Home…Or Is It? Lessons from Family Homelessness in New York City, by Ralph da Costa Nunez (White Tiger Press, 2004).

For more information see “Growing Up Homeless” by Sarah Secunda in this issue of The Indypendent.