Thread by @thebl0w

I’m gonna tell 4 stories of things that happened yesterday to people I know in the NYC shelter system to dispel once and for all the myth that Dept of Homeless Services has resources to help people with their physical & mental health or with their housing. Here we go.

Let’s start with Josie. (Im using pseudonyms as DHS is known to retaliate harshly.) Josie said she had struggled with addiction for years but once she moved to the hotel she was able to get sober. Nobody helped her: she found a nearby methadone clinic & took it one day at a time.

Josie said that when the buses arrived to move them out of the hotel she wanted to use so badly. She watched many of her fellow residents just take their bags and go directly to sleep on the street. She wanted to stop them but she only felt strong enough to take care of herself.

DHS is granting some lucky ppl “Reasonable Accommodation.” If you can convince them that due to your physical or mental health condition it isn’t safe for you to sleep in a room w/ 30 other people in Covid they’ll grant you a single or double room. Josie got “RA.” That’s good.

All the women I’m writing about here got “Reasonable Accommodations” & DHS is likely congratulating themselves on how humanely they’re treating people w/ vulnerable medical conditions, but let’s talk about how this is actually playing out & the situations they’ve put people in.

A quick aside to point out the irony of DHS referring to someone having a single or double room as a “Reasonable Accommodation.” It’s almost as if they’re admitting that forcing dozens of adult strangers in varying states of distress to share a bedroom is Unreasonable.

Josie was told she would be moving to a new location on Monday, but per DHS policy nobody getting Reasonable Accommodation is told where they are going until they are on the bus. They also don’t say what time you’ll go. They told her to take her bags outside and just wait.

So Josie waits outside, all day, watching women lose their shit because it’s stressful & 85 degrees & they cant go inside to pee. There are no caseworkers checking on people, nothing but guards moving bags onto buses & throwing ppl’s belongings away if they have more than 2 bags.

At some point they let her back inside the hotel because the van to pick her up did not arrive until 11:30 at night. She got in & they started driving to a hotel in Brooklyn. After driving a long time the plan changed & they went to Jamaica Queens. She got to the hotel at 2:30am.

She said the place was clean, there were tourists staying there, and the hotel staff treated her kindly. She went to the room, laid on the bare mattress because there was no bedding in the room and went to sleep in her clothes. Nobody banged on her door in the am so she slept in.

I called to check in yesterday and Josie said she had no idea how she was going to get to her daily methadone appointment. She missed the day of the move because she couldn’t leave. Her clinic is two blocks from the old hotel. She had no money because she’d lost her debit card.

So the supposed “care and services” DHS provides to people with addictions & physical ailments apparently includes placing them at places that require a 2 hour daily train trip to get to their essential appointments. DHS has closer locations. Arranging this is not a priority.

The hotel is directly off the freeway near JFK. They had offered her an apartment out in Jamaica in January but the area made her uncomfortable, she didn’t think she’d do well there. She said sending her there was maybe DHS’s sick joke. Im sure they didn’t think about her at all.

In the end, a friend drove her to her clinic today & I put her in touch with the amazing people at VOCAL-NY to help her arrange ongoing daily transportation. We are are volunteers & advocacy groups doing the care that @NYCMayor keeps insisting that DHS provides. They do nothing.

Next: Rosalia is an elder woman who uses oxygen. She, like every person getting Reasonable Accommodation from DHS, wasn’t told where she was being moved. She has to go to the hospital in the Bronx everyday to switch her oxygen tank. DHS won’t even say what Borough you’ll be in.

Usually people only learn where they’re going once they’re on the bus (or like Josie, while en route) but they told Rosalia her hotel would be in Jamaica. She said she can’t go to Jamaica, the trip to the Bronx would be 2 hours each way. They said, “Sorry. That’s what you get.”

Rosalie was sitting outside of the hotel with her oxygen tanks on their little cart, crying and staring into space. She said she couldn’t go to Jamaica. She would take her tanks & sleep on the street. She sat outside for hours, no staff came to help. She was in a lot of distress.

My friend was advocating for Rosalia and I think (hope) she got a place near her hospital. There were so many crises happening at once & just a few volunteers and people from other orgs attempting to help. There was literally no staff from the nonprofit out there helping. Nobody.

Sa’kaia was awoken by guards at 4:30 am Monday morning. They told her that her application for Reasonable Accommodation was still pending so she should go to the congregated shelter and wait there. They made her get on the bus but she got back off. She would rather sleep outside.

Sa’kaia has documentation from her psych doctors that she has hallucinations and can’t sleep in a congregated setting. The staff of the hotel (it’s the same staff as the non-profit shelter provider) could have investigated whether she’d been approved, but they didn’t do anything.

After standing outside waiting all day she had still heard nothing by 10pm. Sa’kaia is a soft spoken trans woman, gentle and southern and not starting anything with anyone. Unprovoked, a staff member called her a “f*g” and physically came at her, scratching her on the face.

Eventually, by the evening of the next day, Sa’kaia was moved to a Brooklyn hotel. It’s a coed site and living with men causes her anxiety. She said that a man said to her, shortly after she got there, “I’m gonna bend you over and f*ck you tr*nny.” She was terrified.

A staff worker said in front of Sa’kaia & a roomful of other people, “Why do they keep sending tr*nnies here?” effectively outing her in front of the other residents. She doesn’t feel safe there & thats because she likely isn’t. People are assaulted in DHS facilities regularly.

(As I’m writing this I just got a text from another woman in the same hotel shelter saying “I don’t feel safe here to be honest.” I wish that I could pass this info along to someone at Dept of Homeless Services and believe that they would care, or do something.)

Lastly: Jennie. A friend told me a trans woman was being treated badly so I reached out. By chance, she was in the same hotel that Sa’kaia got moved into. Yesterday she got a knock on the door & was given 10 minutes notice that she was being moved. She had no prior notice.

Jennie had been at that Brooklyn hotel a month and had just gotten settled. She told me the exact same story that Sa’kaia did (they didn’t overlap at all in timing): a man said he wanted to bend her over and ... She said she felt like he wanted to make her his “prison b*tch.”

Jenny had made a good friend there and they’d agreed to stick together, I heard the friend backing up Jennie’s stories in the background. Jennie said she had no idea if DHS would keep them together or separate them, she had no control over where she was sent.

By law, DHS has to inform you of a transfer at least 48 hours ahead, but they break their own rules and it’s hard to report them, and they retaliate when you fight back. Jennie was furious that she’s had a housing voucher for months & still doesn’t have a home. She’s right to be.

These are 4 people I happened to speak with on one particular day. There are 80,000 people in the DHS system. The city is spending a minimum of $3500 a month for each single adult shelter bed, sometimes as much as $9000 for a family. And NONE OF THIS INCLUDES “SERVICES.”

DHS is a $3 billion yearly system set up to create income for non-profit shelter providers on the backs of mostly people of color, & hide people without wealth away from upper class NYC neighborhoods. This system is not designed to help, house, or aid in the sobriety of anyone.

There is a way DHS could be immediately improved, it’s easy and not expensive and ready to go: @NYCMayor can implement an already-passed bill, Intro 146, & housing vouchers will jump in value from $1265 to $1900. Thousands of people could get homes now, and GTFO of the shelters.

I believe that I & the hundreds of brave NYC homeless activists leading this movement for justice and dignity will live to see the end of NYC Dept of Homeless Services. Things are already changing, I feel it. #HotelsToHousing #JulyHomelessRights
#DHSisaMess

I just realized I didn’t clarify: the hotels people have been in are run by the shelters they were in before Covid. They have all the same staff & all the same “services.” Hotels are better because ppl have their own space. But nowhere in DHS do ppl receive real support or care.

There is a whole ecosystem of non-profits running shelter networks & thereby the hotels. Some are known for being more or less brutal. All of them market themselves as benevolent operations, putting rainbow flags on their twitter images, etc. They all profit from homelessness.