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

The Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed 1,050 people, mostly civilians, as of Jul. 26, 2014. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Jul 27 2014 (IPS)

Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets in multiple protests this past week against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, which has left at least 1,049 Palestinians dead and over 6,000 injured since Jul. 8.

Among demonstrators’ many demands was that the U.S. government end its massive flow of aid and arms to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

The Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation estimates that the United States has shelled out over 100 billion dollars’ worth of military and economic aid since 1949.

Protests on Thursday, Jul. 24 drew over a thousand people, holding signs proclaiming U.S. complicity in the war on Gaza. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

In 2007, the U.S. government pledged to provide 30 billion dollars worth of weapons to Israel in the decade 2009-2018. This year, according to the FY2015 budget submitted to Congress, the Barack Obama administration set aside three billion dollars for military aid.

The protests also had particular significance for New York City, whose former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced in 2011 his support for a 100-million-dollar partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Institute of Technology (the Technion) that would allow the construction of a state-of-the-art new complex on Roosevelt Island.

Thousands of U.S. citizens have called on the government to end military aid to Israel. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

An alliance known as New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT) says the Technion is “complicit in Israeli’s violation of international law and the rights of Palestinians”, namely its mandate to develop and design weapons and technologies that are used to enforce the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.

Among other ‘achievements’, students at Technion were instrumental in creating the remote-controlled Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, the IDF’s weapon of choice in demolishing Palestinian homes; and its Autonomous Systems Program (TASP) was responsible for developing the so-called ‘stealth drone’, capable of carrying two 1,100-pound ‘smart bombs’ for a distance of up to 2,000 miles.

Highly visible at both protests were members of the organisation known as ‘Neturei Karat International: Jews Against Zionism’, who carried signs proclaiming, “Jews reject the Zionist state of Israel and its atrocities”.

A statement prepared by the organisation ‘Jews Against Zionism’ appeals to world leaders to “stop the latest ongoing cruelty and the attack on the people of Gaza.” Credit: Kanya DAlmeida/IPS

Others waved placards claiming “New York Jews Say ‘Not in Our Name’.”

Thursday’s action, which brought out over 2,000 people, was part of the National Day of Action for Gaza, endorsed by over 55 U.S.-based human rights groups. The protest followed on the heels of a demonstration by Jewish Voice for Peace on Jul. 22, which saw the arrest of nine Jewish activists for occupying the office of The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in Manhattan.

The Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has cost Israel billions of dollars in investments. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

One of the co-organisers of the march, Adalah-NY, handed out leaflets urging demonstrators to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, a non-violent civil society-based campaign modeled on the international boycott movement that was instrumental in dismantling apartheid in South Africa.

Roadside vendors joined a massive protest on Friday, Jul. 25, that snaked through lower Manhattan. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

Outreach workers with Operation SNUG in New York City's Central Harlem talk to a young man in their programme. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, May 1 2014 (IPS)

It’s four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in Harlem and 19-year-old Solideen Rann is spread out on a plush hand-me-down couch inside an old glass-and-aluminum storefront on Malcolm X Boulevard.

His body language is making no effort to conceal he’s only reluctantly participating in a conversation with Dedric Hammond, 36, who’s taking up the other corner of a dream in bright orange velour. “If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.” -- Dedric Hammond

“You do this one thing for me and I’ll leave you alone,” Hammond says, leaning into him.

“I’m not about that sh*t no more,” Rann pleads uncomfortably, trying to get the six-foot-four-inch man to leave him alone, which is proving futile.

“Just this one time. That’s it,” the elder continues his persuasion.

In a not-so-distant universe, this script of a conversation between two men intimately familiar with the darker side of Harlem’s bustling streets could spell a shady affair with a dangerous outcome.

Today, however, the conversation is about an upcoming panel discussion and Hammond, who’s known in the neighbourhood simply as “Beloved”, is pushing Rann to step up as a role model to other teens.

The office they sit in is that of Operation SNUG (“guns” spelled backwards), a team of “interrupters” charged with breaking the cycle of youth violence in this stretch of Central Harlem between 125th and 137th street.

Here, roughly one in three families live below the poverty line.

“That sh*t” Rann referred to is getting into street fights – fights that once landed him in jail and killed his best friend.

These streets and others like them funnel some 24,000 young people each year into New York State’s juvenile justice system – one of the harshest in the United States, where teens as young as 16 can serve time in adult prisons.

Half of those arrests are in New York City, where 52 percent of juvenile delinquent cases involve crimes against another person.

At all hours of the day, cell phones are buzzing in the SNUG office. They’re brimming with messages from community leaders, concerned parents and local youth providing tip-offs that a conflict between rival groups has reached boiling point. Within minutes, SNUG staff hit the streets to step in and mediate between the different sides.

They mediate on street corners and in public parks, in hospital waiting rooms and public housing hallways.

When a shooting or stabbing victim is submitted to Harlem Hospital, SNUG staff are the first to be called –ahead of the local police — to talk the victim, family and friends out of retaliating.

“I’d be over there talking to the whole hood,” Hammond tells IPS about the containment they do right after a violent event. “I’m talking to their people, I’m talking to their mother – whoever will make a tear come to their eyes, I’m talking to them too.

“Because the moment we know… what they have feelings for, that’s when we can start this conversation and begin the process of healing.”

It’s a process that Hammond and his team of 10 interrupters know first-hand. Each one of them is a former member of one of Harlem’s 60 some crews, each one with criminal convictions of their own.

“I’ve got people on my team who killed people,” says Hammond, surrounded by plastic flowers and props the team uses to stage “mock funerals” – one of many tactics to get “their kids” to see the devastation their actions can cause.

Hammond, who picked up his first gun to protect his little brother at age 13, spent eight years in jail and was shot twice after leaving gang life behind.

These experiences of having been on both sides of a gun are key to SNUG’s ability to connect with high-risk youth, says Beloved, whose reputation as a shooter once earned him the street name Bad News.

“Back when I would recruit a dude, I’m going to his church, I’m at his school, I’m at his mother’s house, I’m where he’s at on the basketball court.

“So the same strategies we used to do robberies and stick-ups and all that other stuff, are the strategies we use today to stay in these kids’ ears – we got to pacify them.”

Understanding the streets

“They innately understand the rhythm of the street, the rhythm of what happens when…” says Aarian Punter, project manager for Restorative Justice Services at the Harlem unit of the New York City Mission Society, a community cornerstone that provides educational services and after school programmes for youth.

“They know when to hit the streets, hit the blocks, call their caseload.”

Eighty-hour workweeks are not uncommon for SNUG’s outreach workers.

Apart from the 24-hour crisis interventions, there’s the regular heart-to-hearts on the bright-orange couch. There’s the monitoring of social media for signs of brewing disputes and there are the spontaneous field trip to the ice cream shop as a way to keep two rivaling groups out of each other’s hair.

It’s all part of the puzzle to stop the viral transmission of violence.

Containing the virus

Operation SNUG is an offshoot of the Cure Violence model created by epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who found that major outbreaks of violence like the Rwanda genocide followed the patterns of outbreaks of infectious diseases and who holds that violence can be contained and even eradicated when approached like a virus.

Key, according to Slutkin, is a shift from public shaming of “bad” people to identifying the transmitters of violence and changing personal behaviors and community norms.

In New York state the vast majority of juveniles in youth facilities – 83 percent in 2010 – are black and Latino. Eighty-nine percent of boys and 81 percent of girls relapse into crime by the age of 28.

Statistics like these hint at the devastation done to communities of colour by violence, drugs and chronic poverty.

Devastation reached a peak in the crack era of the 1980s and 90s when New York’s overly punitive Rockefeller Drug Laws sent a generation of men to prison, initiating a ripple effect that can be felt today, says Punter.

“You have no idea what these kids have seen. These kids have seen their fathers go to jail for 20 years, they’ve seen their mothers destroyed by the crack era… So you have a whole generation of kids whose issues were never really dealt with.”

In recent years, New York City police responded by overpolicing black and Latino youth through its controversial Stop and Frisk policy, which further criminalised low-income communities of colour.

Working with referrals from SNUG and others, Punter and her colleagues aim to change young people’s relationship with the criminal justice system, away from one that’s “normal”, and provide educational opportunities that allow them to envision a life beyond the streets.

Operation SNUG found a home under the umbrella of the Mission Society after many other organisations found the programme too risky to take on. But without violence interruption, few other services have a chance to flourish, says Hammond.

“If you build me a [sports] centre and I was shot yesterday – and the guy who shot me is at the centre today – you can bet I’ll come over there to shoot something. But it ain’t gonna be no basketball.”

According to a 2013 study by the NYC Department of Health, gunshot wounds decreased from 52 to 26 in a one-year period in SNUG’s target demographic. While it’s hard to attribute decreases in crime to one factor only, Rann has no doubt that “Without SNUG, a lot of [guys] would have died.”

Today, Rann works two jobs to support his baby son and is considering college.

After a solid hour of persuasion by his mentor of three years, he never did step up to speak on the public panel. But Hammond doesn’t see it as a defeat.

“It’s like working with clay,” he says. “You push and mold and when you get it to where you want it then you continue to work on it like that.”

A Nov. 15 town hall event on HIV/AIDS in New York. Credit: Courtesy of Matt Curtis/VOCAL-NY

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Dec 1 2013 (IPS)

Four hundred Eighth Avenue, home to the largest welfare centre for people with AIDS in New York, is the kind of grey, drab city building that seems like it was dragged, scowling, into the 21^st  Century.

Sandwiched between the banal hustle of Penn Station and the outer reaches of Manhattan’s once gritty waterfront, the corner of 30th street buttresses the north end of Chelsea, New York’s historically gay neighbourhood, where AIDS activism began over 30 years ago but today new glass condos price out long-time residents."If states like New York can take it that last lap, it can really provide this bellwether to say that it can be done.” -- Simon Bland

On a rainy afternoon in November, several HIV and AIDS Service Administration (HASA) clients stood out front, waiting for a drizzle to let up and chatting with workers, occasionally bumming cigarettes from them.

Inside, next to an older black gentleman blowing his nose and chatting on a cellphone about his boyfriend, a slight Latino man sat quietly watching a scratched-up television box and the neon ticker next to it that would show his number. The man was immediately recognisable to straphangers who ride the A, C, E and 2, 3 subway lines, where he has panhandled for years.

For more than a decade, activists have fought to include HIV-positive New Yorkers in protected groups that by law cannot be made to pay more than 30 percent of their assistance for housing. Currently, many are forced to choose between food and rent or have to enter the shelter system, which has swollen in recent years.

“City administrations have been relatively hostile to people with AIDS the last 20 years, since [Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani took office,” said Mark Harrington, a longtime activist and founder of Treatment Action Group (TAG).

But with new progressive mayor Bill de Blasio taking office in the New Year and a more attuned state government, activists are pushing to introduce a plan of action bolder than any before: to end AIDS in New York by 2020.

A long road home

In 1983, only two years into the pandemic in New York, playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer wrote “it is the sad and sorry fact that most gay men in our city now have close friends and lovers who have either been stricken with or died from this disease. Doctors are saying out loud and up front, ‘I don’t know.’”

Much has changed since then and the height of the epidemic a decade later, when nearly 10,000 New Yorkers were dying from AIDS every year.

Today, if the disease is caught early, HIV-positive young people following a strict anti-retroviral regimen can expect to have “near-normal” live expectancies. Needle exchange programmes have reduced infections among intravenous drug users in New York from over 13,000 a year to only 150.

Yet today the state is also home to more HIV-positive people than ever, an estimated 160,000 New Yorkers. Of those, 30,000 likely don’t know their status.

Gay men still make up the overwhelming majority of new cases, and among young gay men, infection rates are rising at an alarming 22 percent nationally.

Nationwide, African Americans silently make up 44 percent of new infections. In New York, people of colour make up 79 percent of the HIV-positive population.

Although a 2010 New York AIDS Institute study found that deaths among persons with AIDS had declined 82 percent since 1992, 2,000 New Yorkers still died of AIDS that year.

The same data showed that 46 percent of HIV-positive New Yorkers were not receiving regular care and 63 percent didn’t have their viral loads under control.

Disturbingly, a quarter of new HIV diagnoses are made when patients already have full blown AIDS.

So last year, frustrated by what they saw as a failed national AIDS strategy, Harrington and Charles King, CEO of Housing Works, sat down to come up with a plan for New York.

The national plan “was not a strategy to end the epidemic, it was a strategy to maintain an epidemic,” said King, who interrupted President Barack Obama at the White House unveiling to say as much.

“The technology is there, the tools are there,” King told IPS. “Do we have the political will to make it happen?”

Of course, without a cure, ending HIV is not on the horizon, but ending AIDS, the dangerous late stage of the virus, is something UNAIDS has already proposed globally with its “zero new infections, zero people dying of AIDS and zero stigma” campaign.

“Surveillance is the big picture,” Harrington told IPS. “On the community level we need to greatly increase testing among populations at risk, like young gay men and transsexuals.”

New York can learn from other cities, added Harrington. In San Francisco, the number of people who know their status increased “from about 80 percent to about 93 percent in the last six years – one of the ways they’ve done it is to increase testing among at risk communities from once a year to three or four times a year.”

If more people know their status, more are going to get proper treatment and get their viral loads under control.

Studies have shown that HIV-positive people on proper anti-retroviral treatment and with low viral loads can lower the chances of transmitting HIV to their partner by 96 percent.

“The first level of the end is control and very minimal transmission… reducing viral load as much as you can,” King told IPS. “If you got 80 percent of infected population virally suppressed, it would have a huge effect on transmission rates.”

“We should be encouraging everyone who is HIV-positive to start treatment,” he added.

The New York plan would institutionalise testing that can distinguish between chronic HIV patients those that have early, acute infections, when it is most contagious.

Exposed populations – intravenous drug users, gay men having unprotected sex or anyone who feels they don’t have control over how and with whom they have sex – would be further encouraged to use microbicides, vaginal rings and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – the most common of which, Truvada, has been shown to reduce infection rates by up to 78 percent.

Post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP), a sort of morning-after pill for HIV which is effective up to 72 hours after infection, is already recommended to victims of sexual assault. But organisers want to increase awareness among doctors and hospital staff, who can be unfamiliar with when and how to use PEP.

Harrington says this year’s Affordable Care Act and will mean most New Yorkers will have healthcare and its prevention mandate will encourage more regular testing, prevention and treatment.

But organisers know they have their work cut out for them. For one, the image of AIDS as a survivable disease can be an obstacle.

“Younger gay men are not having as much sex with condoms as they did 20 years ago, when people were dying all around them,” said Harrington. “The reality is it’s far from over and there’s going to need to be a lot of resources and political action to end it.”

With the CDC predicting that half of young gay men will have HIV by the age of 50, ending AIDS is not a choice, he says.

“More than 30 million people have died and because of activism and research we have these amazing tools. We have a humanitarian imperative to do it but it also makes economic sense and as human beings if we have a chance to end the suffering, we have an obligation to do that.”

Other groups, including Vocal-NY, ACT-UP and GMHC have joined the coalition.

And after several activist think tanks and meetings with state officials, King is optimistic that Governor Andrew Cuomo will include a variation of their proposals in his 2014 State of the State in January. Doing so would send a message to other states.

If the crisis were to come full circle and end as a pandemic in the city where it first gained infamy, the implications globally would be huge, says Simon Bland, director of the New York Office of UNAIDS.

“How do we ensure that the complacency doesn’t set in? I think that if states like New York can take it that last lap, it can really provide this bellwether to say that it can be done.”

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?”

Kazi Fouzia in the street where she had an accident in 2010. Her shoulder sustained multiple fractures, but the only treatment she received was painkillers as she was undocumented at the time. Credit: Silvia Romanelli/IPS

By Silvia Romanelli
NEW YORK, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

Ataur was 18 when he left Bangladesh and arrived in the United States in 1991 as an undocumented migrant. He took two jobs at the same time, earning about 35 dollars a day in total.

Vincent was smuggled into the U.S. from China in 2001. Ten years after Ataur, his working conditions were even worse. He worked in several Chinese restaurants, for 60 to 70 hours a week, six days a week, for about 300 dollars a month, an average of one dollar per hour.“When you’re late, they fire you. When you’re sick, they fire you … When you complain [about] anything, they can fire you.” -- Vincent, an undocumented worker from China

Both asked that only their first names be used.

“In New York, if you go in the street … if you ask 10 people, I’m sure at least five or six are undocumented,” Vincent told IPS, while talking in a café in New York’s Chinatown.

The U.S. is home to more than 11 million undocumented workers, and there are an estimated two million migrants working in the city of New York.

They are taxi drivers, domestic workers, restaurant, retail and construction workers. They are paid far less than the 7.25 dollars per hour that is New York’s minimum wage, and they are often mistreated by their employers.

Their lives may undergo major changes if the U.S. House of Representatives approves an immigration bill, passed by the Senate at the end of June, which offers a 13-year path to citizenship for undocumented migrants, but also reinforces border security and enables businesses to check workers’ social security numbers, under the E-verify programme.

The programme would make “every single undocumented person one click away from being notified or deported,” according to Monami Maulik, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), an organisation of low-wage South Asian immigrants in Jackson Heights, Queens, which counts 2,000 members.

“Our members… and many others in immigrant communities are really disappointed with this legislation. It’s turning out to be more and more repressive, harsher measures,” she said. “So we are following it very closely.”

After Latinos, she added, South Asians are among the second largest undocumented population in New York.

Stolen wages, mental pressure and fear

Employers tend to say, “I hire you even if you’re illegal, so you should say ‘thank you’, no matter how much I pay you,” Vincent told IPS.

Because there are so many undocumented migrants ready to work for extremely low wages, other needy workers are pressured to accept the same conditions, no matter what their immigration status and nationality are.

Ataur’s sister, Amana, arrived legally in the U.S., but was still paid less than the minimum wage for eight years.

Mental pressure at the workplace is also huge. “When you’re late, they fire you. When you’re sick, they fire you … When you complain [about] anything, they can fire you,” said Vincent.

“Employers often don’t pay workers for a week or months at a time. There has been a case of a year at a time. They’ll do things like hold people’s passports, threaten to call immigration if they ask for the wages that they earned,” Maulik told IPS.

In 2009, DRUM launched monthly “workers’ rights clinics”, to help migrant workers reclaim their stolen wages and raise awareness of their own rights.

In a phone interview, Sayma Khun, a Bangladeshi national, told IPS how she managed to recover, with the help of DRUM, 5,000 dollars of unpaid wages from her previous employer.

Similarly, in 2008, Vincent, together with other 35 co-workers, filed a lawsuit against their employer, in this case with the help of the Chinatown-based Chinese Staff and Workers Association (CSWA).

But as soon as the lawsuit was filed, the restaurant was shut down. It re-opened some time later in a different location under a new name, a strategy widely used by Chinese employers to avoid lawsuits, according to Vincent.

“By federal law this is not supposed to happen. Even undocumented workers are protected under U.S. labour laws around minimum wage,” Maulik told IPS.

In order to launch a neighbourhood-wide investigation on workers’ rights respect, the Department of Labour needs a certain number of individual complaints. But workers often refrain from complaining because they fear employers’ retaliation and deportation.

The husband of Nadera Kashem, a Bangladeshi DRUM member, is at risk of being deported, after he was caught, last year, during a police raid in the perfume shop he worked in. Because he was undocumented, he was sent to an immigration detention centre. He’s been there for 17 months now.

In these cases, “The employer is supposed to be punished, but it always means the worker is punished,” said Maulik.

At the local level, immigration is being enforced by police officers, often accused by migrants’ rights organisations of profiling and discrimination.

“The biggest fear an undocumented person has is the local police officer, because that’s the person who’s going to stop you, ask you for identification, possibly deport you,” Maulik said.

In June, the New York City Council passed two bills of the Community Safety Act establishing accountability mechanisms for the New York Police Department (NYPD) and allowing citizens to file claims against NYPD’s misbehaviour.

Finding the courage to speak up

“We see no future, why are we still working like slaves? So that’s why I organised my co-workers, we wanted to improve the working conditions, and not just for ourselves,” Vincent told IPS.

Before joining CSWA, he said, he didn’t even know that there was a minimum wage or what “overtime” meant.

“Organising protects you, never puts you in trouble,” is what Kazi Fouzia, a Bangladeshi community organiser who joined DRUM in 2010, says to other migrant workers to encourage them to speak up.

Fouzia used to work in a retail sari shop in Jackson Heights, Queens. Her employer owned three stores; one day he asked her to go get some clothes from another shop across the street. While she was crossing, she was hit by a car and thrown 13 feet.

Fouzia’s employer didn’t allow her to call 911 because she was undocumented. She had multiple fractures in her shoulder, but she didn’t have insurance so the only medical care she received were painkillers. The next day she discovered she had been fired.

This is not only her personal story, she told IPS, “This is every undocumented worker’s story, every one.”

A Syrian pastry chef in Little Syria. Photo courtesy of Save Washington Street.

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

A brick red, six-story tenement house, St. George Melkite Church and a community house in desperate need of repair are nearly all that remain of a once thriving Arab-American community in downtown New York City.

High-rise buildings now populate the area of Lower Manhattan formerly called Little Syria that has been a gradual casualty of industrialisation and urbanisation and which Arab-American youth are fighting to keep alive.

With the church declared an official landmark in 2009, one organisation, Save Washington Street, hopes to preserve other remnants of this neighbourhood. Its primary goal is to achieve landmark designation for the community centre, which used to provide immigrants with resources ranging from jobs to glass bottles of milk, said Carl Antoun Houck, director of Save Washington Street."The Syrian refugees and their history are...not so new to this country."
-- Carl Antoun Houck

Norah Arafeh, an undergraduate student at University of California Berkeley, serves as the outreach director of Save Washington Street and was drawn to the cause by her Syrian roots.

Arafeh’s father was raised in a neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria and came to the United States when he was 17, said Arafeh, who joined the Little Syria campaign almost two years ago and now reaches out to various groups to solicit support for the neighbourhood.

“The importance of preserving history – both in the U.S. and in Syria, in this case – cannot be understated,” Arafeh said.

For many Arab Americans today, Little Syria was where ancestors arrived in pursuit of the American dream. Among them were Houck’s mother’s family, who emigrated from Lebanon.

Preserving the past is a huge part of every Arab American, Houck said, raising his voice amid the din of construction work in the area.

With the Obama administration considering resettling of hundreds of Syrian refugees in the United States, Houck pointed out, “The Syrian refugees and their history are, after all, not so new to this country.”

A lost melting pot

Little Syria once extended from what was the World Trade Centre down to Battery Park and to the west of Broadway behind Trinity Church to West Street, according to Joe Svehlak, an urban historian and preservationist.

“It was a melting pot with 27 different nationalities living together in harmony and peace. They were Syrians, Lebanese, Slovaks, Germans, Irish,” he said.

In Little Syria’s heyday, from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, it wasn’t surprising to find a German living next to a Lebanese, who would be living adjacent to a Syrian, with all of them trusting one another, Svehlak added.

Peddling was the main occupation of the immigrants living in the area, which was comprised of merchant houses, restaurants, cafes and factories making the linens from which immigrants earned livelihoods, said Todd Fine, a historical and strategic adviser for Save Washington Street.

While economic factors were the main impetus for emigration from Greater Syria, many others also left to escape persecution and conscription in the Ottoman army, according to historians.

Those who lived in the area, Svehlak said, actually referred to it as the “Mother Colony”, while outsiders from other parts of the city called it Little Syria, dubbing it thus because the majority of residents were Arab Christians from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, as well as parts of Iraq, which was once part of Greater Syria, said Fine.

The decline begins

In the early 1900s, some immigrants in Little Syria moved to other parts of the city, primarily Brooklyn, where the burgeoning population could have more space, and real estate prices were reasonable.

Still, it remained a robust community until the 1940s, according to Svehlak.

It was when families were told to move their homes to accommodate the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, built in 1948, that dealt a huge blow to Little Syria, and a majority of the neighbourhood was destroyed, according to Fine.

Many families temporarily vacated the area after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, and some of those who remained were asked to leave during the subsequent reconstruction of the World Trade Centre.

At that point Edward Metropolis, 52, had to leave his studio apartment, where he had lived his entire life and which is part of the last standing tenement in the area.

“I came back after four months, and some of the people who left never came back,” he said.

Fine said that in a way, the years after 9/11 encouraged construction and thus contributed to the destruction of the history of the area, said Fine.

“Rampant development did the rest,” Svehlak concluded.

An ignored past

With Jun. 20 observed as World Refugee Day, the history of a community who immigrated here more than a century ago is largely forgotten by New Yorkers, according to experts.

“It’s a tragedy,” lamented Fine. “While everybody knows about Chinatown and Little Italy, everybody seems to have forgotten about Little Syria.”

For Sarab Al-Jijakli, a Syrian-American who has been involved in raising awareness and humanitarian aid since the beginning of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, the neighbourhood is more than just a piece of history.

“It helps to build confidence regarding our role and presence in the American narrative – our history in this country, which did not begin on 9/11,” he said. “Little Syria helps reclaim this narrative from Islamophobes and bigots who wish to bury it.”

History links generations of immigrants and teaches people about Arabs’ contributions in building America, Al-Jijakli added, even as the existence of Arab history in the city has been overshadowed by the current unrest in the Middle East, especially in Syria.

According to the United Nations, close to 93,000 people were killed in fighting between the government and rebel forces in Syria between March 2011 and April 2013.

Arafeh believed that in the United States, the importance of preserving Arab American history has been trivialised.

“The demolition and raiding of major cities of history denies future generations of the privilege and historical heritage that is their patrimony,” she concluded.

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.

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