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WPCNR THE HOMELESS NEWS. News & Comment By John F. Bailey. November 21, 2007: Last night the Common Council and the Mayor of White Plains refused to see a group of clergymen who were all set to open a warming shelter split among three churches in White Plains. The Mayor did not put it on the agenda, and Councilmen who apparently think “out of sight, out of mind,” to their everlasting shame, put off even hearing about the warming shelter sites until next week. Not enough time the Mayor said. The organizations on the agenda were first.
No, not enough time, to hear a plea and be humane — to be decisive!
I have never been more ashamed of my city than I was when the council and the mayor chose NOT to hear what Reverend Carter Via had to say to them last night — when they could.
So as they go to Thanksgiving Dinner tomorrow, as they eat their turkey in their nice warm houses they should give a little thought to how the White Plains homeless person spends every night – in the Homeless Hotel.
The lobby is always crowded and you’ll always find some room.
It’s a real place in a wooded area somewhere in White Plains near you. I am not making this up.
The price is not right.
It opened August 6 of this year with no grand ceremony. No County Executive, Mayor and Councilmen on hand to posture, preen and take credit. Though they all can take credit for this hotel – they are responsible for it.
It’s down on lonely street where the broken hearted stay.
It’s so lonely, you could die.
It’s got a lot of open space in its “court yard.” There is no neon sign. There is extended stay…there is indefinite stay …there are forever stays.
The developers of this hotel, Westchester County in a joint venture with the City of White Plains, didn’t need to observe the allotted parking spaces regulations. No special zoning. No tax incentives. Neighborhood associations did not object.
There is no concierge. They do not have a Guest Register. No credit cards are needed. No business conference rooms or ball rooms, though the Homeless Hotel does have “Conference Clearings.”
As a guest, the only house rules are that nobody should see you go in and leave.
The furnishings: damp meadow grass, decaying leaves, hard cold earth, slabs of rock to lean against. The furniture—fallen logs. The beds, wooden pallets.
The views are spectacular of rooftops and blue sky (on nice days) through the bower of your naturally designed tree canopy. That canopy is now becoming bare of leaves as the autumn winds and bite of winter aircondition your ground floor, with sodden dampness.
Want to feel how this suite feels to the Homeless Hotel guest? It is about sundown now as I write.
Go out in your back yard tonight with a couple of blankets and see how it feels to you. Let the bracing damp air of November refresh and invigorate you. Really try and sleep. Curl up against the side of your garage to escape tonight’s temperature in the 40s.
The room service in the morning you provide yourself.
You don’t have to leave a tip for the maid. You just leave your bedding where it is and return to it in cover of darkness and slip away with it. No need to clean the sheets. Sleeping hours are from about 11 to 3 AM because long about 3 AM, the chill of the night deepens and you have to get up and start moving before you freeze. One homeless person says, “the cold wakes you up.”
So you go to a warm place. A transit center. If it’s raining, an overhang, and stay there until dawn until public buildings and malls open, where you can spend your day if you do not have a day job.
If it’s really cold, go to the hospital emergency room and complain of frostbite, cough, etc. At least you can warm up for several hours while you wait to be seen.
You are always cold. It stays with you so you are always huddled up. In summer when it is sultry, you wear a jacket. (Ever wonder why you see persons dressed in overcoats in the heat of a summer day, that may be one of the reasons.)
Your mattress can be rags and old blankets. Or you can find a wooden pallet, to keep you off the ground. Or a trench dug out military style. It is a little like returning to your grave each night.
You are living the cowboy-under-the-stars life, but no campfires someone might see you.
You always dress in layers. You try and do laundry.
Your suite is a clearing in woods or copses of trees, close to the neighborhoods and the downtown. You huddle together, talk, smoke, drink in outdoor hospitality suites you share with only the lonely.
There are no marquees at Homeless Hotel.
You have to know your way into Homeless Hotel.
The rooms cost you nothing except pain — the pain of the creeping seductive, spreading cold that gets inside of you, gnaws on you like a big New York City rat.
The cold weakens your immune system, gives you a perpetual cold, and other things, chills, nervousness, fear. The cold makes you unable to think and speak straight some nights.
There is collateral damage.
The cold of winter, the heat of summer from what I have observed of the way the homeless act freezes your soul and warps your reason, makes you so bitter you do not know what you want. You turn away help and lash out at those who would reach out to you like a teenager.
But unlike the teenager you do not have a future. Your future was decided by your past. Which everybody holds against you. As soon as you make progress, you slide back to your past.
You harbor a deep contempt for the officials at the Department of Social Services so they tell me who would take away your Social Security Income stipend in exchange for helping you – and they show you hoops to jump through and tell you places to go then do not provide you with transportation. Your government leaders describe you as criminals, sex offenders, psychotics, junkies, you are the lepers of today.
It makes you ornery.
Homeless perception makes you say crazy things even to people who try and help. You beg for jobs and when you are not given them, the shell within you hardens and the irrationality and sense of injustice within you deepens.
As an old blues song says, “Been down so long it looks like up to me.”
You make a living by collecting deposit cans and cashing them for refunds as one person does. And who knows what other ways these poor souls make money to live? Were a minority or a majority of persons staying at 85 Court Street employed? Unemployed? No one knows.
The county has not to date released any profiles of that drop-in population. WPCNR placed a call to the county to see if they have analyzed any of their records kept on who stayed at the drop-in and what those records revealed. Donna Green of the Department of Communications told WPCNR , “No, we did not keep those records.” There are no records!
What a missed opportunity! The county had 50 people a night going through that shelter and they did not keep the demographics? And the idea was when the shelter opened at 85 Court, the county and Volunteers of America would keep track of who these people were. Apparently not.
No public official really cares what the homeless are like or who they are or whether they live or die or work – except perhaps if they can make money off of them.
Food: This is not pretty what I am about to write. At Homeless Hotel there is the popular Dumpster Buffet with servings daily. The occasional discarded supermarket meat (after it has expired), a dead bird which you cook. Cheap donuts.
The indifference.
In the White Plains donut, there is the cake of White Plains (the suburban neighborhoods circling the downtown center, the hole) and then there is the Homeless Hotel –a Hooverville out of the 1930s.
The price of help for a homeless person has to pay is their freedom.
The county plan is: you accept our help or else no drop in shelter. To get our help and stay in our shelter in Valhalla or elsewhere around the county, we take your check and give you an allowance. Homeless I have talked to object to the attitudes of DSS workers towards them, the condescension, particularly, and locally alleged roughness by shelter attendants. The homeless also do not like giving up their SSI payments.
The only thing you have as a so-called “hardcore homeless person” is your pride – your stubbornness –your humanity if it can be called that.
I talked to one homeless person who attended the Downtown Residents Association recently. He said he had been cut off from a fortune in his family, and that was why he continued to be homeless. Asked by a council candidate and myself why he would not take a menial job, he said he would not do that kind of work.
As my father once said, you have to make yourself happy. Are these persons happy living in Homeless Hotel?
Well, a source told me felony convictions are a definite impediment for an undomiciled person to connect with a future in employment.
It is not just the homeless who are afflicted with the felony stigma. Gangmembers and youths once convicted of felonies seem to only be able to get work convincing other youth not to join gangs, precisely because of their convictions, according to speakers at the Westchester District Attorney’s conference on gangs. It’s much easier not to hire a person with a felony conviction than to hire them. Even unskilled job openings will not hire felony convictions.
The irony of companies not hiring persons convicted of felonies is that illegal immigrants (10% of whom have been found to be former criminals according the Department of Homeland Security statistics) are hired by corporations in the food service and cheap labor businesses, no questions asked.
The exception to this is the local day labor pool – taken advantage by many of the Hispanic homeless of which there are considerable according to our sources. A source told me that homeless who speak Spanish often get rooms through bodegas that advertise for rooms in their windows. However that source also said when he has tried calling the same room, and he does not speak Spanish, he is told no room is available.
There is a large Hispanic homeless contingent that stays together somewhere in White Plains out in the open spaces.
Reverend Carter Via and Rabbi Lester Bronstein recently have pushed for a warming shelter, at least with cots, saying the County Executive’s plan for warming shelters was inhumane.
Right now three downtown churches have committed to opening their doors as a warming shelter on a rotating basis with 19 cots.
Reverend Carter Via, whom I interviewed on this had this blunt observation:
“It’s a mess, it’s complicated, I don’t think anybody on the county or the city level really wants to own this thing. Both parties (county and the city) said they would allow something to happen if it was approved by or driven by the other party, so it’s almost as if what they agreed to allow something as long as the mess isn’t in their hands.”
Our leaders are simply playing politics.
Yet those warming center proposals still have to happen, and when? The city has to whisk through a special permit to open such warming centers. Or how about a PILOT (Permit In Lieu of Tenderness) Will the council come back after Thanksgiving and do it?
It’s not going to happen before Thanksgiving.
Now not every homeless person wants a warming center or will go to one, I am told. Some who are homeless, say it (the warming center) is just politics and they would not stay there.
There will be no shortage of warming shelters after the first homeless person is found frozen to death.
Then the politicians will do something. Because they can get good publicity out of it and, we can salute our compassionate leadership for their responding to the problem a little late – as they always do.
But if there is not any warming center, whether anyone will use it or wants to use it is a moot point.
There is another argument I have heard from homeless sources who are against the warming shelter: we need jobs, we need provisions, not just a warming shelter, they say.
What do they need and want? Why don’t they work there are plenty of jobs people ask me?
What they need is for all of us to forgive them…
…forgive them for making our lives uncomfortable for their presence
…forgive them for smelling
…forgive them for making a mistake years ago that they have never stopped paying for making
…forgive them for wanting control over their lives
…forgive them for their pride
…forgive them for not being grateful to us that we want to help them so much
… forgive them for not being perfect enough for us to employ them
…forgive them for drinking, smoking, shooting up, or whatever bad habit they use to take their minds off the hopelessness of the day and the despair of the black night, and the sameness of tomorrow.
…forgive them for making us feel guilty.
…forgive them for looking…well, homeless.
…forgive them for not having money.
