Rudy to homeless: find a bedroom or you're under arrest

Christine Peterson quintanus at hotmail.com
Sun Nov 21 14:30:46 PST 1999



> > The latest eruption of NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani: after a pedestrian
> > was badly beaten with a brick last week, he's decided to crack down
> > on the homeless. This follows upon a new policy a couple of weeks ago
> > of requiring homeless people to work if they want accommodation in
> > one of the city's horrific shelters.
>
>I love the way Mary Brosnahan, later on in the article, read the two
>policies together:
>
> "Where's the logic here?" said Ms. Brosnahan. "We're going to round
> them up and bring them to a shelter, and if they refuse work,
> they're going to be thrown back on the streets?"

Isn't this policy really easily subject to a legal challenge. Those shelters are really dangerous. Can people be legally put in jail for refusing to enter a provably dangerous location.

My boyfriend was trying to move to NYC last August to go to school for a year. He has a way of something thrashing about in life, and he's always wanted to live in the ultimate urban environmental due to his mennonite rural and suburban upbringing. He didn't find a job or place to live or apply to CUNY ahead of time, because there is supposed to be such low unemployment, and the papers showed listings of cheap rooms and apartments. He managed to get all the way there from Portland with his unconventional friend w/o using an automobile or any ticket for a bus or plane, and he had just $150 and no bank card. The rooms he could find turned out to be really scary, like a room shared with several other people, lacking half of a wall, for $400 in the bronx, or this strange arrangement in brooklyn where this guy was renting out mattresses in rooms w/o locked doors to immigrants. Dan found a sugar daddy (he's been proceeding around Europe w/o much money in the same fashion for several months), and my boyfriend's epilepsy which he had earlier in life started kicking in again, and he had a gran mal seizure, which makes you really disoriented and tired. So after sleeping in east river park, he accepted the offer of some christians to go to their shelter for a shower. It turned out to be this awful place in the Bronx where they ran off with his pants while he was taking a shower and threw them away and couldn't retrieve them, and he had had his money in the pockets etc. And after asking him questions like 'do you drink', where he said 'yes, sometimes', they diagnosed him as a street alcoholic with anger management, even though he was a college student. There was a big room with really bright fluorescent lights which stayed on at all times, and a lot of folding chairs to sleep in and no cots, and a lot of the other people were all really fucked up, like lying there drooling. Some were quite intelligent and insightful to talk to though. And they don't let people out of the building at all for their first 45 days or something, so he had to yell at them to let him out, and they at first were just acting like 'there go your anger management problems again'. I was asking him... why the hell did you even go into this place for a night? It sounded like it would be completely difficult to navigate through this with mental health problems or low verbal ability or intelligence.

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