The wandering years

IN the Bronx, in front of a red brick building not far from Yankee Stadium, Shawana was playing ring-around-the-rosie. The little girl with one blue barrette amid her cornrow braids should have been in school this Wednesday morning. It was probably circle time in kindergarten.

“There’s no way I could get her there and be here to get the passes I’m gonna need to get us a place tonight,” said Shawana’s mother.

The mother is 22, and after her mother died of kidney failure last winter, the family became homeless. Now, every night, sometimes in the wee hours, the three of them -- mother, daughter and a 2-year-old brother -- board a big yellow school bus from this spot in the Bronx that takes them to a temporary shelter. They never know where in the city they’ll end up.

But they know at 5 the next morning a bus will return them here, back where they started outside the red brick building that serves as the intake center for homeless families in all of New York City.

Reporters aren’t allowed inside the center, but through a window I could see a room tightly packed with people. They were sitting on benches surrounded by their stuff. Kids were crawling everywhere. Once one gets a bad stomach flu, they all get sick, I’m told.

The average family spends 11 months waiting in this building for permanent placement. In the meantime, they haul their stuff around night after night to temporary shelters. Last week, almost 16,000 homeless children like Shawana were waking up every morning in a different bed.

Shawana and her family stayed in the same city apartment in a Bronx project for nine days last spring while bureaucrats looked into her family’s circumstances. They discovered that her mother’s aunt had an apartment in Harlem so the family was deemed ineligible for a subsidized place of their own.

“I keep getting rejected cause they say I should be sleeping at my aunt’s,” said Shawana’s mother, in between lighting a cigarette for herself and a friend. “She don’t want me. She already has nine adopted kids.”

Just then a yellow bus pulled up to the curb. For a minute, I thought it had come to take the kids to school. But then I saw the last four rows were packed high with strollers, suitcases and big plastic bags of clothes.

While the driver unlocked the back, two women got into a screaming match over whose turn it was to unload. A bottle of baby formula rolled out the back and exploded on the street.

“If you weren’t crazy before this, you become crazy after,” said Shawana’s mother. Then she started shouting, over the bellowing women, at her daughter. “Get away from there. You want to get cut?” When all the shouting finally subsided, Shawana’s mother looked at me.

“You gonna write something about us? This all been on the news before, you know. Nobody cares.” She looked around at others, women leaning on strollers, smoking, barking at their kids. In their eyes was a blend of fear and confrontation. In their ranks were so much dysfunction and bad luck.

Shawana had started a new game, counting pigeons on top of the red brick building.

“One, two, three, four, five.” She paused to see if anyone was listening. “Seven?”

No one was listening.

*

Silence on a growing problem

You hear barely a whisper about it in the presidential campaign, but homelessness is a growing problem in New York and other cities. Maybe the candidates will get to it, but why do I think John Edwards’ two Americas notion isn’t going to come up any time soon, at any length or in any depth.

Homelessness has long been a local topic, one that American cities have had to wrestle with at their soul.

Ironically, the growing perception in New York that homelessness is itself a growing problem is based on the classic vision of motley men camping each night on a different church step in cushy Manhattan neighborhoods.

But the reality is that their numbers are dwarfed by the population of children and mothers who are shuttled about and sheltered every night but who remain largely invisible to the average New Yorker. During the last six years, experts say this population has doubled to about 38,000, including the 16,000 kids.

After more than two decades of litigation, New York now has the most extensive legal protections for the homeless. For one, the city guarantees that every New Yorker has a fundamental right to a roof overhead. Providing just that through the shelter system has cost taxpayers $4.6 billion in the last decade. Which is not to say you still don’t trip over disoriented people rousing under cardboard boxes during the morning rush hour.

The vagaries of the economy, rental prices, the humanity of the man running City Hall, all have a say in the problem. Sometimes, even regular New Yorkers get a say. Five years ago when then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proclaimed that he wanted to arrest those who sleep in the street and refuse help, polls showed that New Yorkers wouldn’t have it. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has adopted a more publicly humane face, but still homelessness has grown, becoming more unmanageable every year.

*

A pastor’s efforts

After just a few listless hours watching yellow buses disgorge people and their bundles onto that Bronx sidewalk, I had to find somebody in this famously liberal city who wanted to help. I retreated to the corner of 86th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan where, tucked against a beautiful old church, lives a group of homeless men under the watchful eye of a pastor.

“The colony started this spring after we put up the scaffolding,” said the Rev. James F. Karpen of the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew (United Methodist). “Ironically, it went up because we’re redoing our basement, which is where we run our shelter and food pantry.”

The pastor has had to manage a lot of misery there. His church, partnering with a nearby synagogue, runs one of the biggest food pantries in the city. Hundreds line up here every day for free groceries.

“The homeless guys feel comfortable being around here,” said Karpen. “First, it was just one, then two. Now, there’s a little colony out front.”

Their stories explain the latest demand for government-issued cots and sidewalk nesting. One guy had his own apartment until early spring but lost his job and couldn’t keep up. He’s not ready to go to a city shelter because the streets in this neighborhood seem friendlier. When it gets really cold, he’ll rethink that, said the pastor.

Another guy has a job, cleaning offices, but finding an apartment for $400 or $500 a month is impossible these days. He also won’t go to a shelter. Another man with a sunburned face who was leaning against a bag of soda cans the size of a small couch told me he’d been on the streets most of his adult life.

The neighbors in the prewar buildings have started complaining. They didn’t pay premium prices to wonder who is sleeping in the shadows across West End Avenue.

“I try to listen, to hear what they’re really complaining about,” said the pastor. He lives around the corner with his own two little kids so he understands why people not only want to be safe but feel safe. Still, he won’t let the police on the church steps unless the men get out of hand.

“There’s a weariness that I perceive toward the homeless problem, even in this neighborhood of open-minded people,” said Karpen. “It’s like, ‘Oh, we thought we dealt with this already in the late 1980s, when there was a huge focus and lawsuits. And now here it is again.’ ”

There are all kinds of reasons for why it’s here again, for why Shawana is learning to be at home in homelessness. Blame the recession, the rocketing price of construction; blame good government programs that have expired and bad politicians who wouldn’t renew them; blame competing priorities in a city of riches and other worries, like terrorism, that preoccupy people as they navigate the canyons.

“I don’t know if a lot of New Yorkers are ready to seriously take it on again,” said the pastor. “But how can we not?”