Because of the brouhaha over the Rev. Jesse Jackson's
injudicious threat to Senator Obama, not much attention has been
paid to the issue that was being discussed by Mr. Obama; the
expansion of President Bush's faith-based initiatives. That is a
pity, because these initiatives work and I hope Mayor Bloomberg
will not dismiss them in his efforts against homelessness.
A Sun reader who is a parishioner of Sacred Heart Church in
Glendale, Queens, wrote me when she discovered that the church's
homeless shelter had been closed. Sacred Heart had one of the
longest running church-related shelters in the city. She wrote:
"All the workers are volunteers i.e. cooks, overnight
security etc. The guests want to come to our shelter because it
is safe, clean, and pleasant. In fact, many of the guests
actually request this shelter."
I spoke to the pastor of Sacred Heart, Father John Fullum, who
clarified the story. It is true that the shelter, for the moment,
is closed, but he said it only operated in the winter, because
the shelter is located in the church basement which gets
insufferably hot in the summer. The church received
"guests" who were referred to it through a screening
process performed by the Partnership for the Homeless, whose
funding has now been cut. The actual work at the shelter was done
by over 200 church volunteers.
He referred me to John Ciraolo, who explained how the shelter
operated. The Partnership for the Homeless has drop-in centers
for those individuals needing shelter and a meal. Guests would be
screened and their needs analyzed before they would be referred
to the Sacred Heart shelter. Typically these were people with
low-paying jobs, not the ones sleeping in boxes on the street or
those with substance abuse problems. He spoke of an example of
two recent guests who are college students left homeless when two
of their other roommates left for one reason or another. Unable
to afford the high rents in the city, they were left homeless.
Mr. Ciraolo said that he understood why the mayor is trying to
realign the homeless agency, but he said, "We're not dealing
with commodities or something that can be solved with a business
plan. We're dealing with people, individuals who have different
needs, personalities. Many of our guests have jobs, and are
high-functioning. They're just down on their luck
temporarily."
I then spoke to Zoila Torres at the Partnership for the Homeless.
When I expressed dismay at the lack of affordable housing in the
city that I consider the root cause of the homelessness, Mr.
Torres concurred.
Mitchell-Lama is a program that provides tax incentives to
developers if they provide some housing for low-income families.
It made it possible for my husband and me to live in Waterside
Plaza in 1975 in the East River complex. The program was
selective and we qualified because my husband was in the
entertainment industry and we "fit in" with the other
high-end renters in the surrounding buildings.
Many of the homeless guesting in these church shelters will not
qualify for Mitchell-Lama housing. Warehousing the homeless in
city-run facilities may get the homeless out of sight, but it's
the faith-based shelters that provide them with dignity,
inspiration, and hope.
This weekend at the Algonquin Theatre, 123 East 24th St., there
are two performances of a choreo-poem called "Every Soul has
a Song" by J. Fitzgerald. The playwright is a former
homeless man. He's now clean and sober thanks to help he received
through the faith-based initiatives.
These programs work. Why cut them?