Men line up to receive food distributed by Coalition for the Homeless volunteers at 35th St, FDR Drive, in New York City. Credit: Zafirah Mohamed Zein/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 2 2014 (IPS)

A United Nations panel reviewing the U.S. record on racial discrimination has expressed unusually pointed concern over a new pattern of laws it warns is criminalising homelessness.

U.S. homelessness has increased substantially in the aftermath of the financial downturn, and with a disproportionate impact on minorities. Yet in many places officials have responded by cracking down on activities such as sleeping or even eating in public, while simultaneously defunding social services.

The new rebuke comes from a panel of experts reviewing the United States’ progress in implementing its obligations under a treaty known as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, commonly referred to as CERD or the race convention.

“The Committee is concerned at the high number of homeless persons, who are disproportionately from racial and ethnic minorities,” the CERD panel stated in a formal report released on Friday, “and at the criminalization of homelessness through laws that prohibit activities such as loitering, camping, begging, and lying in public spaces.”

This was only the second time that the United States’ record on race relations and discriminatory practices, and particularly the federal government’s actions in this regard, have been formally examined against the measuring stick of international law.

The panel not only called on the U.S. government to “abolish” laws and policies that facilitate the criminalisation of homelessness, but also to create incentives that would push authorities to focus on and bolster alternative policy approaches.

The CERD findings were actually the second time this year that new U.S. laws around the criminalisation of homelessness have been criticised at the international level. Similar concerns were expressed by the Human Rights Committee, which warned the cumulative effect was “cruel, inhuman, and degrading”.

“These are human rights experts who have seen human rights abuses all over the globe, but still when they hear about these issues in the United States it boggles their mind,” Eric S. Tars, a senior attorney with the National Law Center on Poverty & Homelessness, told IPS.

The CERD panel underscored these concerns by requesting additional information from the U.S. government before the country’s next such review, in 2017. The other issues so highlighted included racial profiling and gun violence, areas that have typically received far more interest from policymakers and the media.

Questionable progress

The formal review of the United States’ progress on implementing the race convention took place over two days in mid-August, attended by some 30 U.S. officials and dozens of civil society groups. The federal government’s formal report to the committee is available here, while non-government analyses lodged with the commission covering education, housing, gun violence, health care, immigration and other issues, are available here.

Observers say the mere act of the government going before an international body to discuss these issues was important, a sense strengthened by the significant delegation and substantive response offered by the administration of Barack Obama.

“In many ways it undercuts the idea of U.S. exceptionalism – that we don’t have human rights violations here,” Ejim Dike, the executive director of the U.S. Human Rights Network, a leading organiser around the CERD review, told IPS following the CERD discussions.

“In fact we have a lot of human rights violations, and our racial past and unfortunate racial present are indications of these concerns. Sometimes the headlines are so reminiscent of what happened during the 1950s and 1960s that it begs the question of how much progress we actually have made.”

Indeed, some metrics of racial discrimination in the United States are currently worse than they were decades ago. An official summary of the review’s discussions between the U.N. experts and civil society groups noted one committee member’s shock “to realize that in spite of several decades of affirmative action in the United States to improve the mixing up of colors and races in schools … segregation was nowadays much worse than it was in the 1970s.”

Likewise, recent years have underscored the significant racial disparities that continue to characterise homelessness in the United States, a discrepancy noted by the U.N. panel. This pattern has continued and has even been strengthened in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

In 2010, for instance, African-Americans were seven times more likely to need emergency housing than whites, according to statistics from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, a research organisation. Similar discrepancies can be seen in the case of Hispanics and other minority groups.

This is important because, unlike U.S. domestic law, the race convention prohibits policies that have the effect of being discriminatory, regardless of whether or not they are meant to discriminate.

Banning sleeping, eating

As important as this continued racial pattern is how officials are responding to the new surge in homelessness. Even as the financial downturn in recent years has simultaneously squeezed state budgets and led more people to lose their jobs and homes, the official response has been to strengthen enforcement – to make homelessness more difficult.

Over the past three years, for instance, the number of U.S. cities that have banned sleeping in cars has grown by 119 percent, according to findings released in July. Bans on sleeping or camping in public have likewise risen by 60 percent during that same time.

“These numbers in general are going up and in some cases going up significantly,” the National Law Center’s Tars says. “The only cases in which those numbers are going down is where some cities have removed ordinances banning panhandling and sleeping in certain areas, and instead replaced them with bans that cover the whole city.”

Meanwhile, the financial recession has increased poverty in places where such problems hadn’t previously been visible, in suburban and rural communities. Social services were likely already weak in these areas, and the economy’s broader troubles have led authorities to slash these budgets even further.
“First the communities and governments are cutting resources for homeless shelters and related organisations and saying this isn’t the government’s responsibility. But then some are even making it difficult for charities to deal with the issue – for instance, by punishing people for eating donated food in public,” Tars says.

“In fact, there’s significant evidence that criminalisation is often more expensive and less effective than providing affordable housing.”

Nonetheless, the new focus on austerity budgets in other countries, particularly in the European Union, is seeing governments across the globe increasingly turn to this U.S. model of criminalisation. In June, an Australian researcher noted a new “proliferation” of enforcement-based homelessness laws and policies internationally.

Edited by Stephanie Wildes

Men line up to receive food distributed by Coalition for the Homeless volunteers at 35th St, FDR Drive, in New York City. Credit: Zafirah Mohamed Zein/IPS

By Zafirah Mohamed Zein
NEW YORK, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

Joe sits on newspapers spread on the sidewalk by the entrance to midtown’s Grand Central Station. His head rests in his hands, only looking up when coins from passersby clink into his paper cup.

“A shelter is like a prison without guards,” he says, when asked why he was out on the street. “I’m done with them.”“A few things happened after the war. The government just forgot about me. Not only just me but a lot of others too." -- Don, a Vietnam veteran

The 36-year-old says “people who just got out of jail” steal from others in the bathroom and violence is rampant, as shelter staff members turn a blind eye. Throughout the conversation, Joe holds tight to his backpack, making sure it stays close.

While accurate figures for New York’s unsheltered homeless are hard to come by, the thousands sleeping on the streets are in addition to the 53,615 people – a record-breaking figure not seen since the Great Depression – who enrolled in the city’s shelter system in January this year. Yankee Stadium would not be able to seat all of them.

The Callahan v. Carey consent decree of 1981 established the right to shelter in New York and put into place certain minimum standards for shelters. However, many are still plagued by overcrowding, deplorable sanitary conditions and poor infrastructure.

“While there is that right to shelter, many individuals, maybe because of bad experiences, choose not to go there and prefer to be on the streets,” said Gabriela Sandoval, a policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless.

“Some shelters do feel very much like prison and many just don’t feel like going to that environment,” she told IPS.

Most shelters have sets of rules that include a smoking and alcohol ban, as well as a 10 p.m. curfew. Punitive policies such as sanctions, which were put in place by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, can be used against those who engage in certain behaviours or if they repeatedly fail to meet with a case manager.

“There is a lot of stress in your life if you’re homeless. You have no place of your own and you are not at your 100 percent full capacity level,” said Sandoval. “Sometimes staff members in shelters don’t see it that way. They have a different perception of the problem and tend to believe that the homeless want to be homeless.”

Even for those who have secured a place in the shelter system, a way out of poverty is difficult and chronic homelessness haunts the lives of those in New York’s underclass.

Melvin gets free food from the Coalition for the Homeless on Bowery and wants the world to know the good work they do to help men like him every day. Credit: Zafirah Mohamed Zein/IPS

Sandoval attributes the rise in homelessness to the lack of affordable housing and the high unemployment rate in the aftermath of the economic recession. Some families with one or two working parents still find themselves unable to afford rent in what is known as one of the greatest cities in the world.

Outside the Bryant Park subway stop, a man and his pregnant wife are slumped behind a cardboard sign similar to Joe’s, with urgent pleas – “need money, need food, need clothes.” The couple said they were staying in the city’s shelter system and had a roof over their heads every night, but had little for anything else.

Homelessness grew under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when permanent housing assistance for homeless families was terminated and they had to rely on short-term “band-aid” policies.

The city’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has committed to the creation of 30,000 supportive units over the next 10 years. New York has also recently undertaken a plan to move families out of shelters and into their own apartments with two new rent subsidy programmes. Altogether, the administration’s plan will cost almost 140 million dollars.

For individuals on the street with mental or emotional problems, Mary, a volunteer with the Coalition’s Food Van Program, said, “Lots of times they’re mentally incompetent to even make their way to the services available. If they get in such a bad way, they get picked up, taken to the hospital and treated but they’re sent out as quickly as they can back out on the streets.”

Sandoval acknowledges a common problem regarding the assessment of homeless individuals, especially those with mental health issues. “It’s really hard to tell if someone has a mental health problem unless there is a psychological evaluation done.”

Due to the lack of resources, such evaluations are rarely carried out.

“A few things happened after the war. The government just forgot about me. Not only just me but a lot of others too, you’ll be surprised by how many stand in this line,” said Don, a Vietnam War veteran in line for the Coalition food van parked under the FDR Drive on Manhattan’s east side.

“We’re not all bums who do drugs and drink or whatever. A lot of people here got educations and everything.”

Joe agrees. He says he stays away from drugs and alcohol. The coins he collects go toward daily trips on the subway, or a night’s sleep on someone’s couch. He can make up to 80 dollars on a good day, and even more on Christmas.

He does his own laundry, he said, lifting his bright white shirt off his chest. He claims to be saving for the future and says he does not sit on the street when he can help it. Speaking with a confidence and tough hope born out of experience, Joe appears to have a system going.

Estranged from his mother upon his father’s death when he was 16, Joe had to work from a young age to support himself, mostly construction work. A fall down a flight of stairs led to medical problems, and he ended up on the streets. He does not keep in touch with his siblings, one of which is “in a bad state” and the other in prison.

“I’ve been in worse places in my life before, believe it or not. I’m just waiting for this disability to come through, so I can get a proper place. I’m halfway there, halfway there,” he said.

Homeless individuals like Joe and Don are the men of New York City’s margins, navigating their way through shelters and streets, increasingly less trusting of a city that has abandoned them in the shadows.

“I don’t think enough services are available for the homeless community,” said Jeffrey Collete, co-founder of New York City Homeless Advocates. “There is a lot not being done and it’s sad because this city is so rich, with such rich tourists.”

Caleb, another volunteer with the Coalition, says the issue of homelessness has never been a political priority.

“When it becomes a sanitary issue, then it becomes an issue. It’s a simple matter of them not having anything to do with elections. No politician ever won an election because he helped homeless people.”

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

One in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today's New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street. Credit: FaceMePLS/cc by 2.0

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Nov 6 2013 (IPS)

When Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of this city only weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, few imagined that by the time he left office a new building would have risen in the shadow of the Twin Towers.

Fewer still could have foreseen that a few miles uptown, the foundation would be laid for a super-luxury condominium that, when completed, will be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, with a penthouse apartment on presale for 95 million dollars.“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering." -- Joel Berg

That building, 432 Park Avenue, is part of a slew of new luxury constructions in New York which, only five years after the global financial crisis threw millions out of work, contrast starkly with a deteriorating housing picture and a widening income gap in the rest of the city.

“New York is the poster child for the national trend,” Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition against Hunger, told IPS. “The wealthy get wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”

The dissonance apparently proved too much for New York voters, who last night overwhelmingly elected progressive candidate Bill de Blasio to be the city’s next mayor with 73 percent of the vote.

The New York metro area suffers from the widest gap between rich and poor in the U.S., an issue that de Blasio campaigned on heavily, referring often to New York as “a Tale of Two Cities.”

“That inequality, that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind, that is the defining challenge of our times,” de Blasio told supporters during his victory speech.

The outgoing mayor’s brand of politics were no clearer than during a September weekly radio address, when Bloomberg – himself the 10^th wealthiest person in the world – told listeners “if we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

The remark, like Bloomberg’s support of a New York Police Department stop-and-frisk programme that overwhelmingly affects minorities, struck many, even those dulled to 12 years of the aristocratic foibles of a man who spent a quarter billion dollars of his own money to get elected, as out of touch.

During three terms (made possible when the city council overturned term limits in 2008) Bloomberg became known around the country as the “nanny mayor” for his progressive stances on access to healthy foods in poor neighbourhoods, nutritional labeling, banning sugary drinks and gun control, but locally was seen as at times deaf to the underlying question of why so many residents were poor in the first place.

Activists say that whether de Blasio is able to stem the rising income gap depends in large part on undoing much of the logic of the Bloomberg years, a period that saw a reintroduction of the language of trickle-down economics into one of the most liberal cities in the United States.

An affordable housing crisis

According to a study by New York University’s Furman Center, median rents in New York rose 19 percent between 2002 and 2011, while the real median income of residents saw a small decline.

During the same period, the percent of rental units considered affordable for low income households earning less than 50 percent of the area median income declined from 40 to 26.

And this year, the average rental price in New York City, excluding Staten Island, rose above 3,000 dollars per month, triple the national average.

Housing advocates are quick to point out what they see as feeble efforts by the Bloomberg administration to safeguard lower income households.

In 2006, New York City updated its inclusionary zoning provisions, increasing building allowances for developers willing to provide 20 percent of their units as affordable housing.

But the programme was voluntary and reports found the zoning effort had led to a net gain of only 2,700 affordable housing units in a city where 1.7 million residents live below the federal poverty threshold.

De Blasio has promised he will make the 20 percent cut-off mandatory, but for thousands of families who can no longer afford any type of housing at all, the debate came too late.

In 2005, the Bloomberg administration ended a longstanding practice of assisting homeless families to obtain federal rent vouchers and subsidised housing, replacing those programmes with short-term assistance.

In 2011, that assistance was cut off, leaving many homeless families with little choice but to remain in the shelter system, which has swollen to record levels.

“The next mayor is going to confront a historical homelessness crisis,” Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, told IPS. “There are over 50,000 people in the shelter system, including 20,000 children. It’s a real black mark on Bloomberg’s legacy.”

The rise in homelessness frustrates advocates who point out the ultra-wealthy and disproportionately foreign buyers of new luxury developments often spend little time in their new pied-à-terres.

But perhaps most disturbing are city estimates that one in four families in the shelter system include an employed adult, meaning that in today’s New York, a job may not be enough to get you off the street.

“This isn’t something that happens naturally,” Berg told IPS. “It’s a failure of public policy.”

Hurricane Sandy, which one year ago displaced thousands of low income families, laid bare city-wide inequities and made de Blasio’s messaging resonate with New Yorkers, he said.

“Sandy, like Katrina, ripped the band-aid off the wound, a wound that is still festering,” said Berg. “It exacerbated existing problems.”

During 12 years in office, Bloomberg repeatedly applied a ‘financial consultant approach – one he honed for decades at his eponymous firm – to issues like poverty, notably pooh-poohing calls for an increase in the minimum wage on the grounds it would force businesses to leave New York, ignoring the inevitable fact that many minimum wage workers had already made the financially-sound decision to do so themselves.

“Bill de Blasio obviously touched a chord that resonated with a lot of people,” said Tom Angotti, a professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

At the same time as he was cutting programmes for the homeless, Bloomberg welcomed developers with open arms and generous tax breaks, Angotti told IPS.

“Neighbourhoods have gone from being diverse to being sharply divided between rich and poor. You have a gentrification process that displaces tens of thousands, forcing many to leave the city because there is no affordable housing left.”

Bloomberg’s administration oversaw the rezoning of a full third of the city, spurring breakneck development in Manhattan and nearby parts of Brooklyn and Queens but also driving out those who could no longer pay rent.

Areas that were “upzoned” for greater development were more often in poorer, minority neighbourhoods while “downzoning”, which is seen as way of preserving communities, was more prevalent in wealthier, whiter areas.

Higher rents in historically Black and Latino areas made this year’s election in part a referendum on gentrification.

The question of displacement is especially painful for minority residents, many of whom lived through the city’s darkest years in the 1970s – when middle class families abandoned entire neighbourhoods and fled for the suburbs – only to find its new cachet among the professional and jet set has priced them out.

“People tell me this all the time – they struggled for decades and generations to improve their neighbourhoods,” said Angotti. “Why should we do all this work?”

By Mathieu Vaas
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 6 2013 (IPS)

For homeless youth, life on the streets is brutal. They experience sky-high rates of mental health problems, substance abuse and sexual assault. But despite the fact that it costs just under 6,000 U.S. dollars to permanently end homelessness for one youth, too little is being done to help them.

As the founder and executive director of the Ali Forney Centre, an organisation that helps homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth, Carl Siciliano has witnessed firsthand how harsh life is for them. He started the centre in 2002, naming it after Ali Forney, one of seven youths Sicilian knew who were murdered on the street and whose deaths moved him to found the centre.

Carl Siciliano, founder and director of the Ali Forney Centre. Photo courtsey of the Ali Forney Centre.

Other experiences also influenced Siciliano. “I was really religious when I was young, and worked with the homeless,” explains Siciliano. “When I came out of the closet, I wanted to figure out a way of integrating my work with them with my being an openly gay man.”

IPS spoke with Carl Siciliano about the Ali Forney Centre, the young people it shelters, and what needs to be done to improve circumstances for LGBT youth, homeless or not.

Q: What services does your organisation offer? What do you wish you could offer but can’t?

We have workers that reach out to kids on the streets and tell them about our program. We also have a big drop-in centre in Harlem where we provide food, clothing, showers and toilets, along with mental health, medical and substance abuse services.

Young people can also stay from three to six months in our emergency housing program while they figure out longer term housing. Our centre also has a transitional housing program where young people who can get a job or go to school can stay for up to two years. About 90 percent of our young people are employed and about 75 percent are going to college. When they graduate, they usually find a job and move into their own apartments.

There are several programs I would like to build, including a housing program specifically for transgender youth, who are the most vulnerable and experience the most violence and harassment on the streets. I also want to develop a model of studio apartments with intense staff supervision for youth with mental illnesses or developmental delays who find congregate housing situations difficult to manage.

One kid from Uganda reached out to us – he said that his parents kicked him out and he was afraid he was going to get killed, so I am interested in developing an international network of providers that can help young people get out of countries where their lives are in danger to reach us or other programs.Homophobia creates an environment of abuse and rejection.

Q: LGBT youth represent 40 percent of New York City’s homeless youth. As a small shelter, what are the biggest challenges the Ali Forney Centre faces every day?

The biggest challenge we face is the lack of resources. There are only 250 shelter beds for 3,800 homeless youth in New York City, and the waiting list to enter our shelter has about 150 to 200 kids on it. It breaks my heart to have to turn kids away every night.

Our day-to-day work is challenging. We occasionally have to deal with violence, and homeless LGBT youth have a very high risk of suicide, so we’re constantly monitoring them. We’re trying to protect them, but I wish there were more of a commitment on the part of the city to provide a safety net to these young people.

Q: What typically brings young people to the Ali Forney Centre? What kind of threats do they face?

The biggest common denominator tends to be family rejection. About 75 percent of our young people report that they were harassed or abused in their home for being LGBT. Some of them are kicked out. Others face so much violence and cruelty in their homes that they find it unbearable to stay. Too many parents don’t know how to cope with having a gay child.

Compared to straight homeless youth, LGBT homeless youth face twice the amount of violence on the streets by being gay bashed. They get beaten up by kids in other shelters, or staff in a Catholic youth shelter, for instance, will tell them they are sinners and going to hell.

A lot of them turn to prostitution, which puts them at greater risk of violence and a very high risk of HIV infection. Almost 20 percent of New York’s LGBT homeless youth has HIV. The stress and pressure of homelessness and the trauma of family rejecting harms their mental health, too.

Q: What should local politicians and international organisations such as the United Nations be doing to improve the situation of LGBT young people?

New York City has shelter systems for children and adults, but those the ages of 16 and 24 don’t fit in these systems. Local politicians must understand and recognise that it’s a disaster for these kids to be left out on the streets. If they get adequate support, these young people can get jobs, go to school and become healthy independent adults.

If you leave them on the streets, they become addicted to drugs and infected with AIDS. They will become an enormous cost and burden to society. Even if politicians look at it in term of smart public policy and not in term of human decency, it just doesn’t make sense to leave kids out there on the streets. You’re creating a social disaster by doing that.

In term of international organisations, the most important thing is to understand that homophobia creates an environment of abuse and rejection. Organisations trying to combat homophobia must focus more how it affects youth – how it makes them feel unsafe in their own homes and endangers the children’s welfare. It would be harder for conservative organisations that promote homophobia, such as the Catholic Church, to do it with a clear conscience if these connections were clearer.

Excerpt:

“That’s where I sleep,” says Fernando, indicating a puddled area under a bridge. A 62-year-old Portuguese citizen, he has lived in Spain for 15 years, and he is part of the growing number of homeless people in this country wracked by a merciless economic and financial crisis.

Homeless people share experiences near a shelter in Málaga, Spain

In 2008, there were 11,844 homeless people in Spain, but by 2012 the number had risen to 22,238, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which only counts people who have used homeless shelters, meaning the real number could well be higher.

Fernando*, a man wearing a full beard, walks slowly, pulling a small red cart containing two boxes of wine and a nearly empty bottle of water. He does not want to live in a hostel for the homeless, in spite of having bad legs and the weather being very cold.

He is divorced and has grown-up children. He begs from customers at the two big shopping centres in the southern city of Málaga, where people’s life stories mirror those in other Spanish cities.

Most homeless people, at one time or another, go to a shelter or soup kitchen, Toñi Martín, a member of the Street Unit team, a service provided by the local government for homeless people living on the streets, told IPS. But a small minority chooses to live on the streets, rejecting all help.

The reasons people end up on the streets are myriad. Forty-five percent say they lost their jobs; 26 percent say they could not afford to continue to pay their rent; 20.9 percent broke up with their partners and 12.1 percent were evicted from their homes, according to an INE survey published last December.

“The crisis hasn’t affected people who were already homeless, but instead those who were just keeping their heads above water and have now gone under,” Rosa Martínez, the head of the municipal reception centre for the homeless, told IPS.

Previously these people had managed to keep going, but when they were battered by the crisis, their family support networks fell apart, she said.

Martínez, who runs the 108-bed centre, says that in recent years the number of homeless people has grown and their profile has changed. “Now we are seeing entire families on the streets, people who are unable to pay the rent,” she says.

“We are seeing an increase in families, mostly single-parent families (women with children) who come to our network asking for some kind of help,” says a report by Puerta Única, a public agency coordinating care for homeless people in a diversified network of centres in Málaga.

The unemployment rate in Spain is just over 25 percent of the economically active population, and half of the youth. This month international bodies have forecast that the country’s economy will be even worse off this year than in 2012.

In the face of the crisis, the government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has applied severe budget cuts, but it is difficult to draw a national portrait of how these measures have affected care services for homeless people.

Central government funds are spent through accords with the country’s different local governments. In some provinces (autonomous communities) “the administration is firmly committed while in others, there are difficulties”, sources at Caritas, a Catholic church body that is a leader in providing care for the socially excluded, told IPS.

“There will be no downsizing of funds in Málaga this year,” Martínez said.

According to INE, nearly 46 percent of homeless people are foreigners, like Hans, a burly German who can barely mumble a few words of Spanish.

Another case is a 51-year-old Latin American who prefers to remain anonymous. He is trying to escape a history of alcohol addiction and accusations of abusing his spouse, as a result of which he was forced into the shelter where he now sleeps, in spite of having studied at university and following, for a while, a professional career.

INE statistics show that 11.8 percent of homeless people have some higher education and 60.3 percent have secondary schooling.

Many homeless foreigners, especially those originally from Morocco, went back to their own countries because of the precarious employment situation, Paula de Santos, a social worker at the municipal reception centre, told IPS. “They can’t find jobs picking olives and strawberries, as they did before,” she said.

A large proportion are people with alcohol and drug problems, but some people are not addicts; they have just been unemployed for a long time and their unemployment benefits have run out, says Martín, as he is taken around the streets in a white van by his driver, Pepe, looking for what they affectionately call their “guys and gals”.

Martín persuaded Dolores, a 61-year-old woman, to go and live in the shelter where she now sleeps and gets three meals a day.

She left her partner who abused her and shared her addiction to alcohol. “I had a shower all by myself, holding on to the tap, because sometimes I get dizzy,” she told IPS, beaming with pride, a smile lighting up her lined face.

Thirty-two percent of people who were homeless in 2012 lost their homes that same year, while 44.5 percent had been homeless for over three years, according to INE.

“Some people have made living on the streets their way of life. It has become a chronic situation; they survive this way, and it is hard for them to change their lifestyle,” said Martínez.

When it comes to these people who find living a normal life difficult, “We try at least to ensure that they maintain minimum standards of hygiene,” Martín said.

People who became homeless most recently make the most use of social services, Martínez said. For instance, Jesús, who served a 10-year prison sentence, told IPS outside the shelter where he sleeps that he has been on the streets since he was released on Dec. 27.

Homeless people are a mobile population, and this also works against them, because a fixed address is required for receiving some benefits. “Sometimes we let them register at the municipal reception centre,” said de Santos.

* Surnames of some sources have been omitted in this article.

Many families whose homes were foreclosed upon have been forced into the rental market. Credit: CC By 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Aug 7 2012 (IPS)

Even as thousands of families in the United States remain homeless due to a lack of affordable housing, millions of units are sitting empty across the country, including foreclosed single-family homes, foreclosed or vacant condominium units or entire condo buildings, and vacant high-priced apartments.

Large cities like New York and Chicago, which have been grappling with a lack of affordable apartments combined with an abundance of vacant, unaffordable condos, are now trying to turn some of those empty condo units into rentals, with varying levels of affordability.

Recent changes in the U.S. economy and the housing market have presented challenges for low-income renters.

Many families whose homes were foreclosed upon have been forced into the rental market. While some efforts, like those going on in Atlanta, Georgia, are providing downpayment assistance to get new families into these empty homes, the new families are not necessarily low-income families.

Of course, many low-income families do not have the credit or the income to qualify for a mortgage to purchase a home, and therefore are forced to rent.

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), low-income families face the greatest shortage of affordable rental units among any income bracket.

“In 2010, there were 9.8 million extremely low income renter households in the United States, and only 3 million rental homes affordable and available to these households,” the organisation states in a recent report.

Approximately 14 percent of all housing units in the U.S., or over 18.8 million units, were vacant at the end of June 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This figure includes vacant rentals and single-family homes as well as seasonal units and units that are held off the market for various reasons.

In response, Chicago and New York have set up programmes to convert empty condos into rental units.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) also recently announced a programme to convert empty single-family homes currently owned by the government-sponsored enterprise Sallie Mae into rental units.

Denise Dunckal, a spokeswoman for FHFA, told IPS that the agency will soon be announcing its decision regarding proposals submitted by investors to participate in the pilot programme.

NLIHC submitted comments to FHFA prior to the beginning of the pilot programme asking for some units to be set aside for low-income families. However, that does not appear to have happened.

“The available details of the pilot sale do not indicate that there will be an affordability component to this first stage of the programme. It is possible that affordability will be a component of future pilots or stages of the programme, although there has been no indication from FHFA that this will be the case,” the NLIHC wrote on its website.

Other than the reports from Chicago and New York and the FHFA programme, the NLIHC does not see any national trend towards dealing with the juxtaposition of vacant housing and unhoused people, in terms of providing affordable rentals, spokeswoman Amy Clark told IPS.

In Chicago, an organisation called Community Investment Corporation (CIC) noticed a problem with entire condominium buildings being foreclosed and vacant. CIC suspects that many of the condo buildings were the victims of condo fraud.

“In the course of going out on behalf of the City, looking at troubled buildings, we discovered this whole issue of condo fraud. There were buildings – it would be an empty building, trashed and totally destroyed inside, open to the elements,” Jack Markowski, CEO of CIC, told IPS.

“And then when we did a little research, say it’s a six-unit building, last year all these units were converted to condos and sold for 300,000 dollars a piece,” Markowski said. “The owner – he’s just gone – somebody walked away with 1.8 million dollars.”
Markowski says that condo fraud was made possible by banks which would give mortgage loans without proper documentation from the person applying for them. Markowski refers to them as “phony straw buyers”, who he believes may get a cut of the profits and then allow the unit to foreclose.

CIC identified over 260 condo buildings in Chicago where this appeared to have happened.

CIC and the city of Chicago worked with the Illinois legislature to pass a law in 2009 called the Distressed Condo Act, which went into effect in 2010. The Act allows courts to reassemble a condominium building – which is legally listed as multiple separate condo units with multiple owners – into a single building.

Then the CIC works to find developers who are willing to rehabilitate the building into rental units.

Markowski acknowledges that none of the units they are producing are set aside for low-income families, but points out that this still adds more rental units to the total rental housing stock of the city. This could, in turn, relieve some of the pressure on low-income families to compete with middle-income families for affordable rental units in Chicago, by at least providing more rental options for the middle-income families.

Markowski says the new Illinois law is unique in the U.S., and that so far CIC has used the law to successfully petition the courts for the deconversion of 33 vacant, foreclosed condo buildings, which, when the new units come online, will produce 372 units of rental housing in Chicago, with more likely to come.

Markowski adds that the banks who own the vacant condo units typically do not object in court because they realise that what they currently own – a condo unit in a vacant, foreclosed building – does not have any value but actually costs the banks in terms of tax liabilities.

Meanwhile, the city of New York in 2009 embarked upon its own pilot programme, called the Housing Asset Renewal Program (HARP), which invested 20 million dollars in city funds to turn stalled or vacant condominium developments into units affordable for middle-income families.

However, the programme got off to a slow start. According to a 2010 report in the Architect’s Newspaper, after the first year of HARP, not a single developer had expressed interest in the funding being offered by the City. In part this is because of lenders’ unwillingness to accept deep discounts required by the programme.

In March 2011, New York finally announced the first closing under HARP to convert 26 stalled condo units on Lefferts Avenue in Brooklyn into 46 rental units. The units had never been completed or sold on the market in the first place. All units will be affordable to middle-income, but not low-income, families.