Radio Workshop

Getting Tough on Homelessness...and the Homeless (Transcript)

by Andrea Lee

NARRATION

Lawyers for the city went to court today to challenge a 22-year-old ruling that forces the city to provide shelter to every man, woman and child. Instead, the city wants to establish a new set of rules to determine who would receive shelter. It believes these rules would make it easier for the vast majority of the 38,000 homeless people currently living in New York to find permanent housing, even if that means keeping some people in the street.

ANDERSON:

No one is interested in suspending anyone's shelter, period.

NARRATION:

Jim Anderson, a spokesman for the city's Department of Homeless Services, says that creating CONsequences will deter the few individuals in the system who threaten the rights and safety of others. Others, he says, who are working VERy hard to pull their lives back together.

ANDERSON:

What we have is a very small number of people who continue to disrupt shelter life, sometimes acting out, you know, in violent wasy towards other clients, and that's really the purpose of this policy.

NARRATION

Under the new regulations, individuals would be forced, for example, to seek and accept appropriate housing, and follow drug treatment programs or see psychologists, if the city decided it was neessary. People who do not follow the rules would be denied shelter for a minimum of 30 days. Children whose parents do not follow the rules will be given shelter through foster care. The policy is aimed at creating safe, effective and caring shelter communities.

But Patrick Markee, a Senior Policy Analyst for the coalition for the Homeless, says that setting RULES to weed out SOME people is not an efFECtive way to keep ALL people OFF the streets.

MARKEE:

The real question here is: do we want an individual who's trying to get their life back together, who misses appointments with a social worker, to be thrown out in the street because city bureaucrats say "We don't feel you're trying hard enough."

NARRATION:

He also said that people who are most likely to be kicked out are sometimes those who need the most attention.

MARKEE:

They're people who, um, have serious mental, physical and social dysfunctions as a result of chronic mental illness, of substance abuse disorders, of traumatic incidents in their lives, these are folks who, by very definition, are going to have a difficult time negotiating a complicated set of bureaucratic rules.

NARRATION:

The decree dates back to 1979, when a homeless man named Robert Callahan decided to fight for shelter...in court. Lawyers from the Coalition for the Homeless argued his case, and won. The judge ruled that the City MUST provide suitable shelter to all qualified men -- and later, women and homeless families -- who need it.

But this is not the first time a mayor has tried to overturn the judge's decision.

The Giuliani administration tried in 2000, but failed. Markee says that his coalition will fight for as long as necessary.

MARKEE:

This won't be the last word. If, unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration prevails, we'll do everything in our power to appeal that court order and continue to fight for the protection of our clients.

NARRATION:

He said that being sent back into the streets -- especially in the winter -- amounts to a death sentence. Before his case was finished, Robert Callahan died, sleeping, in the street.

For Columbia Radio News, I'm Andrea Lee.