Hotel Rules Keep N.Y. Homeless on the Run

Joseph Johnson, homeless and dispirited, sat with his pregnant wife and 21-month-old son in a welfare office, waiting and waiting to be told what hotel bed they would sleep in that night.

“It’s like being sent on a cattle truck,” Johnson, 33, said as he squashed a cockroach on a wall.

“Just being here wears you down. No human being should have to live under these conditions. If there’s a breath left in my body, I’m going to get out of this system.”

New York City provides private rooms for homeless pregnant women and their families, but because not all of the 55 city hotels that shelter the homeless allow long stays, some families are bounced from hotel to hotel like human pinballs. The numbing ritual begins in the city’s four emergency assistance units, or EAUs, where an average of 85 families show up nightly.

On a recent rainy Friday night in Brooklyn, Johnson plopped down in a plastic chair next to his wife, Angela, six months pregnant. Their son chewed on a pizza crust and fidgeted in a stroller under a dingy Christmas decoration spelling out, “Season’s Greetings.”

The Johnsons, welfare recipients who had been burned out of their apartment, left their old hotel at 11 a.m., checked in at the welfare office and came to the EAU at 5 p.m. At 9 o’clock, they were assigned a hotel, but the welfare check to pay for it wasn’t processed until midnight. They waited for a van and got to sleep at 2 a.m. The tedious process began anew within hours.

In a waiting area, mothers stripped their tots to bare bottoms to change their clothes. Diapered infants napped on sheetless, spotted mattresses inside metal cribs. A nurse gave pregnancy tests in a restroom. Three security guards watched a baseball game on a color television placed inside a vacant crib.

Well past midnight and a normal bedtime, youngsters scampered around an untended metal detector. The detectors, used to check for concealed weapons, are standard at all shelters and EAUs.

Plastic garbage bags and beer cases bound with string are luggage the homeless drag with them every night.

Theresa Keels, 35, four months pregnant, had stayed in three hotels in three nights.

From her bag, she pulled four crumpled and unfilled prescription slips for asthma medication. She had lost her Medicaid card and was on the run too much to get a new one, much less go for prenatal care.

“I’m worried about losing this baby and not having no place to stay,” said Keels, whose aunt kicked her out of her former apartment. “It’s a physical and mental strain on me. You’re never settled. You’re running from this place to that place. It’s a miserable life.”

Among her meager possessions was a tattered blue book on legal rights of the homeless printed by the Legal Aid Society.