Volunteers offer hot comfort for hungry, homeless

Monday night was a bitter 24-degress, the coldest night so far of this winter season, and yet Paul Fitzgerald, Nime LaFauci and Mick Galvan were still driving around the Bronx, delivering food to people in need. 

“We fed about 200 people, tonight, that’s about average,” Mr. Fitzgerald, who has worked with the Coalition for the Homeless for five years, said. “We had meatball soup, bread, milk, juice.”

The “coalition has 11 different programs, each focusing on a different aspect of preventing homelessness or helping people who are already homeless,” he said. The Grand Central food delivery line is one of those programs, dispatching teams out each night to drive around the city and provide food for those waiting at the stops. 

The teams run two food-delivery “buses” in Manhattan and another one in the Bronx. The Bronx one makes seven stops, mostly in the south of the borough, until it comes to a final stop at 9:10 p.m. on the corner of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. 

The volunteers sad they encounter a range of people and stories each night. 

“There’s all kinds of people, couples with baby children to people who are really messed up on drugs to people who are down on their luck,” Mr. Galvan said. 

“No kind of one stereotype in terms of ethnicity or race; poverty is the sort of line through everything,” Mr. Fitzgerald added. 

The Grand Central line is able to guarantee soup, bread, milk and oranges on weeknights. On weekends, they offer sandwiches instead of soup, and they often receive and give out donations.  On Monday, for example, they were able to offer scarves and socks in addition to the food. 

Programs like these are aimed at helping the growing number of homeless in New York City.  According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 62,306 homeless people checked into shelters in October.  More than 24,000 of those were children and there were 15,769 families. 

According to City Comptroller Scott Stringer, roughly 30 percent of people living in city shelters have jobs but cannot afford an apartment.  Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz confirmed that number. 

“That’s why things like raising the minimum wage is so important,” he said. “People who are working shouldn’t be homeless—nobody should be homeless—but if you’re working and you’re still homeless, that’s just crazy.”

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, homelessness in New York has increased 37 percent since 2007, although it did drop 2 percent from 2015 to 2016.

“I truly believe the rise in homelessness is directly tied to the weakening, or the lack of strengthening, of rent protection laws, which has resulted in huge rent increases in New York City, far outstripping inflation, that has just priced many people out of being able to pay rent,” Mr. Dinowitz said. “The increases in rent and the increases in homelessness on a graph would look virtually identical, in my opinion.”

New York is also one of only four states that considers its citizens have a right to shelter, placing an additional burden on the city to not only prevent and reduce homelessness, but to provide shelter for every homeless person in the city. 

As a result, the city has begun paying for hotel rooms like at the Van Cortlandt Motel in order to help house homeless families. 

Mr. Stringer said there are some 2,500 families living in hotel rooms around the city with no kitchens, often all being forced to stay in one room.  Some of these rooms, Mr. Stringer said at a meeting with community leaders in at the Spuyten Duyvil Library last week, cost the city as much as $600 per night. 

“We have the Van Cortlandt Motel, which I think is disgusting, it’s just that there are families in there, it’s no place for kids to live,” Mr. Dinowitz said in an interview after the meeting. “I don’t know how old most of the kids are there, but if they go to school, presumably some of them do, is that an environment where they’re going to go home and do homework? Everybody is in one room, without a kitchen, I might add.  They’re supposed to do their homework there, with all the things that are going on?”

Councilman Andrew Cohen said the immediate answer for the problem of homelessness in New York City has to be placed on keeping people in their homes. 

“If I had the answer, I would be mayor. It is a very complicated problem, but ultimately we need to get people out [of shelters],” he said. “Temporary shelters is not the answer, permanent affordable housing is the answer.”

Mr. Dinowitz went one step further, suggesting the city and state help subsidize the rents of individuals and families who are at risk of becoming homeless. 

“I know the pain of paying other people’s rents would rub everybody the wrong way,” he said. “The fact is, it’s a lot cheaper to help pay or pay much of the rent of a family to keep them in their house.  That’s cheaper than paying the cost of putting them up in a shelter like the Van Cortlandt Motel, that costs hundreds of dollars, I don’t know what the rates are there but it’s thousands of dollars a month.”