Tenants Wary of Clustering of Homeless

Tenants Wary of Clustering of Homeless

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: March 3, 2009
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/nyregion/04homeless.html?hp

G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times Henry Perry, who has lived in the same apartment building since 1963, says it has changed, now that 21 of the 50 units are temporary housing for the homeless.

Twenty-one of the 50 units in Mr. Perry’s five-story brick building are now occupied by homeless families as part of a Bloomberg administration program that has turned dozens of apartment buildings throughout the city, most of them in the Bronx, into de facto homeless shelters. Known as cluster-site housing, the program contracts with nonprofit agencies to temporarily place families in apartments; it has swelled in two years to 1,503 apartments from 1,092, at an estimated cost of $59 million this year.

With the number of homeless families in New York at near-record levels, cluster-site has quietly replaced the costly and controversial scatter-site housing program that the Bloomberg administration pledged in 2002 to wipe out. Unlike the previous program, it uses nonprofit agencies to provide employment help and other social services to the homeless families, who spend an average of 284 days — about nine months — in the apartments.

But while rent-paying tenants in the buildings are not subject to the curfew or sign-in requirements, many complain that their landlords have been pushing them out to make way for homeless families because the cluster-site program pays far more — an average of $1,730 — for the units, many of which are rent-stabilized (Mr. Perry pays $248.68 a month). Many say they have been intimidated with repeated notices regarding rent or other matters, and that they were never notified of the impending changes in their buildings (the city says it notifies residents only if more than half the building will be used).

At Mr. Perry’s building, on Mosholu Parkway in the northwest Bronx, longtime tenants were stunned on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008, when several homeless families arrived in vans, carrying their belongings in shopping bags, and were swiftly ushered into recently renovated apartments.

“They’re going to bring in homeless people, and then they’re going to make us homeless,” said Deonarine Srikishun, 64, who pays $830 a month for the two-bedroom apartment where he has lived for 27 years.

Advocates for the homeless condemn the cluster-site program for temporarily solving one problem by creating another: displacing low-income residents. Rather than put homeless people in temporary apartments, they say, the city should give more of them the federal subsidized housing vouchers known as Section 8.

“The city is shooting itself in the foot,” said Steven Banks, the attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society. “It is far more costly to house families in apartments as shelter than to house them in permanent housing.”

But Deputy Mayor Linda I. Gibbs, who oversees homeless programs, said cluster-site housing worked well because it provided families with caseworkers who develop independent living plans, including target move-out dates and employment goals. Families are expected to abide by a curfew, keep their rooms tidy — there are weekly inspections — and search for jobs.

“Our strategies are focusing on helping the families to become economically independent,” Ms. Gibbs said.

The controversy over cluster-site housing comes amid Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s years-long battle to reduce the city’s homeless population. He declared in 2004, when there were 38,000 homeless on the city’s rolls, that he hoped to cut the number by two-thirds within five years; instead, the city is currently housing 35,000 people.

Putting homeless people into apartments began during the Giuliani administration as an emergency measure to relieve overcrowded shelters. By 2002, it had grown from 50 units to more than 2,000, and was widely criticized as an expensive failure costing $2,900 a month per apartment. After a public outcry, Mayor Bloomberg and Ms. Gibbs, then the commissioner of homeless services, vowed to shut down the program.

Technically, they did. According to the Department of Homeless Services, there were 723 scatter-site units in December 2006; by January 2007, there were zero. But in a new column of data, labeled “cluster sites,” there were 1,092 units, a number that slowly crept up throughout 2007.

Unlike the scatter-site program, in which the city paid rent directly to landlords and provided little else for the families, the Department of Homeless Services works with five nonprofit agencies that seek out landlords, negotiate rents and offer support services to tenants in the 127 cluster-site buildings. Before the agencies establish longer-term contracts with the city, they are paid $90 per diem, about $2,700 per month, per family.

Robert V. Hess, the homeless services commissioner, said each apartment was inspected before a homeless family moved in to make sure it was suitable.

But at 3001 Briggs Avenue, a 26-unit building in Bedford Park in the Bronx that has been largely taken over by the cluster-site program in recent months, there are 315 open housing-code violations, according to city records, including complaints of broken windows, peeling lead paint, mice, roaches and bedbugs.

Outside the quiet, run-down building on Sunday afternoon, a security guard in a dark blue jacket patrolled the front door while a group of children played in the lobby.

Dominique Gee, 15, who was carrying a bag of laundry, paused outside the entrance of the building, where she moved with her mother, stepfather and sister three days earlier. “It’s not too bad, except we’re not allowed to have visitors,” she said. “So if we want to see somebody, we have to come outside.”

The cluster-site program at the building is run by Aguila Inc., an organization that began working with the city in 2000 with 55 scatter-site units; it now operates more than 300 cluster-site units in the Bronx as well as standalone shelters for single adults.

According to public records, Aguila received $9.2 million from the Department of Homeless Services in 2006. Peter Rivera, the executive director of Aguila and the son of the Bronx state assemblyman of the same name, did not return calls seeking comment.

Fernando Tirado, the district manager for Community Board 7 in the Bronx, said he had been bombarded with calls from residents on Briggs Avenue. (Howard
Miller, the manager of the building, did not return repeated telephone messages.)

“It has become apparent to us that landlords have been forcing tenants out, either through coercion or through other means,” said Mr. Tirado, who called the cluster-site program “despicable.”

Geraldine Salvatorelli, whose 91-year-old father is among the few remaining rent-paying tenants there, said: “It was easy to get most of them out — they owed back rent.”

Mr. Hess, of the homeless services department, says the city investigates thoroughly when it receives information that tenants have been intimidated, and had confirmed two such cases over the last three years.

“We’re not going to allow anything to happen where other tenants are going to feel that they’ve been pushed out so we can occupy more,” he said.

At the building on Mosholu Parkway, Mr. Srikishun, 64, said his landlord had wrongly accused him of owing more than $8,000 in back rent, slipping notices
under his third-floor apartment door.

“He’s torturing me with these papers under the door, every month,” Mr. Srikishun said, his voice rising in anger. “All these things are fabricated.” He says he has always paid his rent and owes nothing. The property managers, Lev Management, did not return calls.

Despite the opposition, the number of cluster-site apartments appears likely to keep increasing, given the deepening recession and state budget cuts to homelessness-prevention programs.

“We certainly understand the pressure they’re under,” said John Reilly, the executive director of the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation. “But to take existing affordable housing off the market, it just seems like it’s an agency solving its own problem, but not solving the city’s problem.”

Catherine Barbosa, an elementary school teacher who pays $1,050 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in one of the cluster-site buildings, said she sympathized with the problem — but not the solution.

“I understand that homeless people, they need a place to live, they don’t need to be out on the street,” she said. “I don’t pay rent to live in a homeless shelter, that’s how I feel.”