Homelessness into Focus - The Institute for Children, Poverty, and

Spring 2014
D
E
R
O
S
N
UNCE
American Family Experiences with Poverty and Homelessness
A Sweet Mission
The Greyston Foundation Bakes Brownies
The Greyston Foundation Bakes
and Builds Lives
Brownies and Builds Lives
Bringing Child
Homelessness into Focus
A Photo Essay
Guest Voices
Homelessness and the Law — A Community
Comes Together to Defend Homeless Citizens
of the Nation’s Capital
The Historical Perspective
A History of Inequality in New York City
Volume 5 ■ Issue 1
ICPH
UNCENSORED
USA
Institute for
Children, Poverty
& Homelessness
www.ICPHusa.org
44 Cooper Square, New York, NY 10003
T 212.358.8086
F 212.358.8090
PUBLISHER
Ralph da Costa Nunez, PhD
FEATURES
8 A Sweet Mission
The Greyston Foundation Bakes Brownies and Builds Lives
14 Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus
A Photo Essay
CONTENTS
EDITOR
Linda Bazerjian
Managing Editor
Clifford Thompson
EDITORIAL STAFF
Matt Adams
Elizabeth Ezratty
Katie Linek
Anna Simonsen-Meehan
Kate Slininger
Ethan G. Sribnick
Lauren Weiss
CONTRIBUTORS
Marta Beresin
Craig Blankenhorn
Amber Harding
Nassim Moshiree
Mari Rich
2 on the Homefront
2 Conferring on Homelessness
Beyond Housing — The ICPH 2014 Conference
4Databank
5 on the Record
The State of Children’s Mental Health and Associated
Costs of a Fragmented System
6 The National Perspective
Preventing Homelessness among Foster Care Youth
through Discharge Planning
Letters to the Editor: We welcome
letters, articles, press releases, ideas,
and submissions. Please send them
to [email protected].
Visit our Web site to download or order publications and
to sign up for our mailing list: www.ICPHusa.org.
UNCENSORED is published by the Institute for Children, Poverty,
and Homelessness (ICPH), an independent nonprofit research organization
based in New York City. ICPH studies the impact of poverty on family and
child well-being and generates research that will enhance public policies and
programs affecting poor or homeless children and their families. Specifically,
ICPH examines the condition of extreme poverty in the United States and its
effect on educational attainment, housing, employment, child welfare,
domestic violence, and family wellness. Please visit our Web site for more
information: www.ICPHusa.org.
Copyright ©2014. All rights reserved. No portion or portions of this publication
may be reprinted without the express permission of the Institute for Children,
Poverty, and Homelessness.
EDITORIALS AND COLUMNS
20 The Historical Perspective
A History of Inequality in New York City
24 Guest Voices
Homelessness and the Law — A Community Comes Together
to Defend Homeless Citizens of the Nation’s Capital
29 Resources and References
Cover: Taneya Keys leaves a Livingston, New Jersey, night shelter with her family. They are
one of many families whose daily lives have been documented by the photographer Craig
Blankenhorn in an ongoing effort to draw attention to child homelessness.
Back cover: Leilan Silva waits with her three children and nephew for transportation to reenter
temporary housing in Tampa, Florida. After Leilan took in her nephew, she and her family
were asked to leave the mission where they had been living for six months.
Spring 2014
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Dear Reader,
UNCENSORED aims to convey the urgency of child and family homelessness and to shine a light on promising efforts
to fight it. I think you will find that the feature stories in our Spring 2014 issue do just that.
In “Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus,” the internationally renowned photographer Craig Blankenhorn shares
the work he began two years ago, when he set out to document the heartbreaking experiences of families around the
country with one thing in common: lack of a place to call home. Through their stories, we see the determination of
these families — from the mother and father both studying to become medical technicians to the educated mother
hoping for work even if it means scrubbing floors; in their faces, we see the pain and weariness of ordinary people
facing the instability and uncertainty that are increasingly common in America.
But there are also increasingly innovative and promising ways of addressing the problem. And perhaps only in America
would an aeronautical engineer and two ice-cream magnates come together to help impoverished individuals and
families help themselves. That is the story told in “A Sweet Mission,” about the Yonkers, New York–based Greyston Foundation, with its open-hiring policy for the Greyston Bakery and its programs to employ, train, support, and encourage
struggling adults who are trying to provide for their children.
These stories are just two components of our Spring issue, whose many perspectives on a growing problem offer a
wealth of information, insights, and challenges.
Sincerely,
Ralph da Costa Nunez, PhD
Publisher
President and CEO, Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness
page 1
UNCENSORED
on the
Homefront
Conferring on Homelessness
Beyond Housing
The ICPH 2014 Conference
ICPH’s 2014 conference, Beyond Housing: A National Conversation on Child Homelessness and Poverty, took place in New
York City from January 15 to 17. The conference’s approximately
450 attendees were able to choose from among 40 “breakout”
sessions, with topics ranging from outreach for LGBTQ youth,
to collaborations between homeless-services departments and
day care centers, to the participation of homeless individuals
in advocacy efforts.
The conference featured three stirring keynote speeches. ICPH
president and CEO Ralph da Costa Nunez gave the first, on
January 16, citing history to make the case for what he called
“a regulatory system for poverty.” The programs that grew out
of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society, he noted,
alienated many people who saw them as intrusions into their
lives — with children bused to schools in other neighborhoods
in efforts toward integration, for example, or low-income housing built in middle-class neighborhoods. That alienation set the
stage for the election of Ronald Reagan, who presided over a
dismantling of social programs that, despite their shortcomings,
constituted much of the safety net in the U.S. That dismantling,
Nunez said, contributed heavily to the current homelessness
problem. Discussing the importance of that government safety
net, Nunez pointed out that without such programs as food
stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare, the current poverty rate of 16
percent would be closer to 32 percent. The lesson to be drawn
from this, according to Nunez, is that while some programs have
been flawed, the solution is not to end all programs — that the
U.S. needs neither “big government” nor smaller government
but good government. Nunez also argued that homelessness is
a multidimensional problem with numerous causes and therefore cannot always be solved through rapid rehousing; he
stressed the need not only to house families but to help them
improve their overall circumstances to the point at which they
are self-sufficient. He drew applause with the line, “Our job isn’t
to get homeless people off the street. It’s to get homeless people
on their feet.”
Author, educator, and MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry gave
a very well-received, humor-filled but trenchant lunch keynote
on January 16. Posing the question “Why are people poor?”,
Harris-Perry noted that race is “strongly determinative” when
it comes to suffering from poverty. Discussing her own success,
she explained that she came of age in a time of “high-quality,
integrated public schools” and benefited from “aggressive affirmative action” programs. She pointed to historical as well as
contemporary structural barriers to success for many racial
minorities, from the decision to let states choose who received
housing loans — a policy that worked against southern blacks —
to a judicial system that in some states leaves up to ten percent
of black adults incarcerated, because “the real crime is being
poor.” Structural barriers, she said, are as much a cause of poverty as individuals’ life choices. Addressing those barriers,
Harris-Perry added, requires political will. She also pointed out
that a political coalition between blacks and middle-income
whites would serve both groups, since those whites have more
in common with blacks, economically speaking, than they do
with higher-income whites. In addition, she set out to puncture
myths, explaining, for example, that there is little demonstrated
connection between poverty and the so-called marriage dearth,
since the marriage rate has seen a steady drop while the poverty
rate has been much more erratic.
On January 17 Nikki Johnson-Huston gave the final keynote,
recalling her journey from homeless child to successful Philadelphia-based attorney. She told her spellbound audience that
she had entered the shelter system at age nine, and that she had
learned the importance of service from her grandmother, who
had later taken care of Johnson-Huston when her own mother
could not. Johnson-Huston described herself as “the legacy of
[her] grandmother” and of “the social safety net.” She recalled
that during her
time in shelter,
she loved to visit
libraries — warm,
comfortable places
where books fed
her imagination
and her dreams.
Johnson-Huston
went on to college,
and though she
Ralph da Costa Nunez
page 2
Melissa Harris-Perry
on the
Homefront
struggled there, due to a low self-image from having been homeless, she later worked as a live-in nanny for a kind family who
helped her to pursue her ambitions. Johnson-Huston’s brother,
she revealed, had not been as fortunate, having entered foster
care because his grandmother could afford to take in only one
child. The path her brother took as a result contributed to his
early death. While grieving for him and carrying a burden of
guilt, Johnson-Huston discovered a community of people who
had greatly valued her brother, which led her to realize how
much human life and potential are wasted when families are
broken up because of poverty. She urged advocates and government officials to “please try to keep families together.”
Conference breakout sessions included “Working to End Homelessness: Best and Promising Practices of Employment Interventions for People Experiencing Homelessness.” In this session,
Chris Warland and Caitlin Schnur of the Chicago-based National Transitional Jobs Network explained that employment is a
significant determinant of health and that people need not be
“100 percent employable” to begin working. For example, if an
alcohol-dependent person can refrain from drinking while on
the job, that person can be employed, even if he or she is not yet
ready to stop consuming alcohol at other times. The philosophy behind transitional jobs, Warland and Schnur explained, is
“meeting people where they are.” Another session was titled
“The Role of Emergency Housing in Promoting Stability and Sustained Recovery in a Housing-First World.” During that session
Elizabeth von Werne and Holly Woodbury of Miami’s Chapman
Partnership recalled the organization’s founding
by Alvah Chapman in the early 1990s, and they described its
continuing, successful work in enlisting employers, local
government, volunteers, and faith- and community-based organizations to provide an “ecosystem of support” for homeless
individuals and families. A network of local organizations is also
integral to the work of the COMPASS Community College Collaborative, a Massachusetts program that was the focus of
another breakout session. Jodi Wilinsky Hill of COMPASS for
Kids and Susan Leger Ferraro of Inspirational Ones, which
serves disadvantaged youth, described their success in promoting education and job-readiness training
for parents who are homeless or at risk
of homelessness.
In a departure for the Beyond Housing
conference, on January 17 ICPH staff led
separate, hour-long breakfast discussions,
each devoted to a different question
regarding poverty and homelessness.
Conference attendees were free to
participate in discussions of their choice.
Spring 2014
Deb Ellis, executive director of the New Jersey Coalition to End
Homelessness, and Jan Edgar Langbein and Jon Edmonds of the
Dallas-based service provider Austin Street Center were among
the participants in a discussion focusing on the questions, “With
respect to national and local plans to end homelessness, what
does the end of homelessness actually look like? What are the
goals, and are they realistic?” The discussion yielded agreement
that the “end of homelessness” would mean that all who wanted
to access homeless services could do so, and that there would be
no unsheltered homeless individuals or families. Ellis argued that
ending homelessness could not be done solely by government
and that communities must be involved, which led Edmonds to
suggest the term “community first” as a slogan emphasizing
the importance of shared responsibility for individuals, families,
and neighborhoods. Another breakfast discussion centered on
community experiences with rapid rehousing programs for families. Conference attendees from Nashville, Tennessee; Lowell,
Massachusetts; Arlington, Texas; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Des
Moines, Iowa, discussed the challenges of rapidly rehousing
families in their respective communities as well as successes
some had seen through that approach. Those finding fault with
rapid rehousing noted that providers were often required to have
significant liquid assets on hand to cover the lag time between
rent payments to landlords and reimbursements to providers. They also expressed frustration with the shift in funding priorities in favor of rapid rehousing at the expense of transitionalhousing providers. Proponents of the strategy felt that in their
communities, rapid rehousing allowed providers to do more
for their families with less money. Participants in the discussion
agreed that under the right circumstances and with appropriate targeting of funding and case-management resources, rapid
rehousing can work for some families.
Another special feature of the Beyond Housing conference was
the exhibit on January 16 by the internationally published photographer Craig Blankenhorn. The photographs document the
experiences of some of the 1.6 million homeless children in the
U.S., in regions as disparate as Las Vegas, Florida, and New Jersey. Blankenhorn’s often heartbreaking images depicted children
of different races, all suffering the effects of housing instability.
For conference attendees who saw the exhibit, the photographs
were a poignant reminder of why they were gathered in New
York City, and whom they had come together to serve.
— Clifford Thompson
and Elizabeth Ezratty
For videos, presentation footage, and additional information
related to the Beyond Housing conference, see the ICPH Web site
at www.ICPHusa.org.
Nikki Johnson-Huston
page 3
UNCENSORED
on the
Homefront
Databank
THERE ARE
1.1 MILLION
HOMELESS STUDENTS
IN U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS.*
CA
248,904
STATES WITH
THE MOST
HOMELESS
STUDENTS
NY
96,881
*DOES NOT INCLUDE INFANTS AND TODDLERS
SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, ANALYSIS OF 2011—2012 FEDERAL DATA COLLECTION AND THREE-YEAR COMPARISON, 2013
page 4
TX
94,624
FL
63,414
Spring 2014
on the
Homefront
on the Record
The State of Children’s Mental Health
and Associated Costs
of a Fragmented System
The New York City–based Institute for Community Living (ICL) provides comprehensive care to individuals
and families who are at risk of, or affected by, mental illness or developmental disabilities. David J. Woodlock,
president and CEO of ICL, spoke with UNCENSORED about mental illness as it affects children.
UNCENSORED: Given the dangers that mental
health problems in childhood pose for
success in adulthood, what is being done to
address the issue?
WOODLOCK: There is little in the way of
an overarching national public policy
concerning mental health among children. This is in spite of the fact that while
one out of ten children has a serious
emotional disturbance, only 20 percent
of those kids ever receive treatment.
Children with mental health issues have
the highest school-dropout rate among
all disability groups, and only 30 percent
graduate with a standard high school
diploma. Sadly, more children suffer from
psychiatric illness than from leukemia,
diabetes, and AIDs combined.
Progress has been made to address the
needs of these troubled children more
comprehensibly. Spurred by the Systems
of Care initiative introduced by SAMHSA
(the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration) in the mid1980s, states now recognize that emotionally troubled children often face a
multiplicity of issues:
•Up to 75 percent of children in
juvenile justice settings suffer from
mental illness.
•50 percent of kids in the child welfare
system have mental health problems
•21 percent of low-income children
suffer mental health problems
UNCENSORED: What else should be done?
WOODLOCK: Several government organi-
zations have evolved to deal with these
so-called “cross-system kids,” in areas
including substance abuse, education,
child welfare, child development and
heath, and juvenile justice. But the truth
is all troubled children are cross-system
kids, and the very systems created to
address their multiple needs separately do
so ineffectively. Departments operate in
silos and rarely interact with each other,
resulting in a fragmented approach that
is both costly and inefficient. Efforts such
as the Family Movement have exposed the
overwhelming task that parents and caregivers face in having to deal with so many
organizations just to get minimal help.
Today, with the move to Medicaid
Managed Care to contain costs, we should
be concerned lest we take a giant step
backward in our thinking about public
policy with regard to troubled children
and the funding to address their needs.
UNCENSORED: Considering the need to
contain costs, what approach should be taken?
WOODLOCK: Yes, it is expensive to treat
a cross-system child when you consider
the breadth and the depth of fragmented
and often duplicative services whose
practitioners don’t necessarily communicate with one another. Until substantive
changes are made to address the lack of
integration, we will continue to see a rise
in the number of youth becoming adults
who need services. Many continue to
view the systems for adults and children
as separate and distinct; however, the
same initiatives that work so well in the
adult system — coordinated care among
agencies to address multiple difficulties —
should be applied to the whole children’s
system. Early behavioral interventions
can improve health care and save money.
When these approaches are applied to
children, the improvements are ten-fold.
Dealing effectively with children’s multiple issues while they are still young can
go a long way toward preventing future
problems such as homelessness, substance
abuse, unemployment, and crime. More
than half of adults who were in foster care
have an Axis I diagnosis [for example,
a diagnosis of schizophrenia or a mood
disorder], an employment status well
below that of their peers, and a rate of
post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD,
twice that of combat veterans. Imagine
what could have been done with effective
early treatment.
Rather than turning to Medicaid expenditures alone, states should look more
broadly with regard to children’s mental health. Targeted behavioral health
interventions can improve outcomes
and reduce expenses for child welfare,
education and special education, juvenile
justice, and more. For example, Maryland,
New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Rhode
Island have all employed a “wraparound”
approach to customizing services for troubled kids. These states have implemented
changes in policy, services, financing, and
training in order to expand their systems
of care so that more children and their
families can benefit. ■
page 5
UNCENSORED
on the
Homefront
The National Perspective
Preventing Homelessness among
Foster Care Youth through Discharge Planning
by Matt Adams and
Anna Simonsen-Meehan
Each year, approximately 23,000 to 30,000 youth across the
country “age out” of the foster care system, also known as
“emancipating.” Unprepared for independent living and lacking
the social supports afforded to youth living in stable families,
many become homeless immediately following exit and are also
at risk of experiencing housing instability later in life. In one
large-scale study, two-fifths (42%) of youth were homeless within
two years of exiting the system, while researchers estimate that
anywhere from 10% to 40% of homeless adults have formerly
been in foster
care. Prepar“Aging out” and “emancipating”
ing foster care
refer to the process of leaving the
youth for
foster care system upon reaching
stable indethe age of majority— most commonly
pendent living
age 18 — instead of receiving placeis an essential
component of
ment in a permanent home through
curtailing both
reunification with parents, adoption,
youth and adult
or placement with relatives.
homelessness.
Childhood and young-adult years are critical from a developmental perspective, as they lay the foundation for future health
and stability; the brain continues to mature substantially up
until age 25. Many foster care youth experience emotional neglect,
physical abuse, and other forms of trauma before they enter
state custody, which have been shown to alter brain development and lead to a higher risk of negative health, academic,
and social outcomes. Cycling through multiple foster care placements while under state supervision can lead to additional
trauma and may impede access to necessary mental and physical health care services. With histories of trauma and without
caring adults to rely upon for emotional and financial support,
many youth, not surprisingly, struggle to attain self-sufficiency
after discharge.
page 6
At the federal level, several key initiatives focus on improving
outcomes for foster care youth. The federal plan to end homelessness, Opening Doors, recognizes that providing foster care
youth with extensive preparation prior to emancipation as well
as establishing ongoing supports are key practices in preventing and ending youth homelessness. As part of its annual
application process for homelessness program funding, the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
requires Continuums of Care (CoCs) to detail their efforts to
prevent the routine discharge of foster care youth into homelessness, provide information about the places where youth
routinely go upon discharge, and identify the stakeholders
responsible for ensuring the prevention of homelessness for
these youth. The Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008 (hereafter “Fostering Connections”)
requires states to work with youth to develop personalized
transition plans, and the John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program provides $140 million annually to fund services
aimed at helping older foster care youth transition successfully
to independent living.
With these financial incentives and legal obligations in place,
it is time to take stock of whether communities are active and
well-informed partners in providing these essential dischargeplanning services. How well-versed are CoCs in the discharge
transition planning requireA Continuum of Care, or CoC, is a
ments found
strategic planning body that coorin Fostering
dinates homeless services in a given
Connections?
geographical area and serves as a
Do CoCs know
mechanism for all homeless service
where former
providers within the CoC to apply
foster care
jointly for funding from HUD.
youth end up?
Among the few,
Spring 2014
on the
Homefront
Figure 1
PERCENT OF COCS MENTIONING A PARTICULAR DISCHARGE PLANNING FOCUS AREA
(by issue area and state)
California
Florida
New York
Legal documents and/or
benefit enrollment
No specifics provided
Case management,
mentoring (or similar)
Employment assistance
Education
Income or financial supports
"Services" (unspecified)
Housing assistance
0%
10%
if not the only, sources of information on how the collective
body of CoCs is approaching foster care discharge planning
are CoCs’ annual funding requests to HUD. CoC applications
for 2011 in California, Florida, and New York— the three states
with the largest homeless populations — indicate that in many
communities, the homeless services systems may not be knowledgeable and active participants in the foster care discharge
planning process.
Fostering Connections mandates that transition plans address
housing, employment assistance, education, health insurance,
and mentoring and ongoing support services. Foster care youth
need assistance in navigating the housing-search system, including identifying and securing stable housing — services that are
provided by the majority of communities in these three states,
but not all (see Figure 1). Less than two-fifths of California localities included employment-related activities, and fewer did so in
Florida and New York. Just over one-third of CoCs in California
and Florida and one-fifth of CoCs in New York cited education
services as part of their discharge-planning protocol. Only a handful of CoCs described efforts to connect foster care youth to
health insurance or to case management, counseling, and
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
mentoring, despite those services’ being legally required components of discharge planning.
Funding applications indicate that CoCs differ in their involvement with discharge planning but that, in general, a minority
of CoCs meet the standards set by Fostering Connections. That
the level of awareness of discharge planning practices among
CoCs within the same state varies considerably suggests that
some CoCs are unfamiliar with the workings of the foster care
system. Numerous CoCs did not even attempt to answer all
of HUD’s questions. When asked, for example, to list the nonshelter housing options discharged foster care youth routinely
seek out, more than half of CoCs in all three states neglected
to provide any information. HUD asks CoCs not to discharge
youth into homeless situations, including shelters receiving HUD
funds. Nevertheless, a few CoCs listed homeless shelters as
actual discharge locations while making clear that HUD-funded
programs were never used, a response that appears to miss the
point of the main directive guiding HUD’s questions: do not discharge foster care youth to homelessness. The homeless services
and child welfare systems must better collaborate in order to prevent emancipating youth from becoming homeless. ■
page 7
A Sweet Mission
page 8
Spring 2014
The Greyston Foundation
Bakes Brownies and Builds Lives
by Mari Rich
Dion Drew had plenty of time to think during a four-year prison sentence, which he received for
selling drugs in his struggling neighborhood in Southwest Yonkers, New York. There, close to a
third of all residents live below the poverty line and more than 40 percent of all adults lack high
school diplomas. “I had been dealing since I was 14 and in and out of jail since I was 19,” Drew
recalls. “So during that long four-year term I decided I was finally going to stay off of the streets
and get a real job when I got out.” Drew knew that upon his release it would be difficult to find
legitimate work because of his criminal record. Then he remembered hearing about the Greyston
Bakery, a Yonkers-based facility with an unusual policy its management calls “open hiring.” An
applicant need only walk in and put his or her name on a list; as soon as a post opens up, the
applicant is hired — with no questions asked about work experience, criminal history, substance
abuse problems, or past mental health issues.
Soon after leaving prison, Drew, now a youthful-looking 36, put his name on the list, and he was
hired as a bakery apprentice two weeks later. He recently celebrated five years with the company
and has been promoted several times. “You could say I’m in middle management now,” he says
proudly. “I help with research and development, and I’m engaged in training new workers, many
of them neighborhood people I used to hang around with.” He continues, “I think it’s ironic in a
way that I once took so much from the community by selling drugs, but now I’m giving back to that
same community in a very positive way.”
Asked if he might still be dealing drugs if he wasn’t working at the Greyston Bakery, Drew replies,
“There is no question I would still be out there getting into trouble. This job has allowed me to take
part in what I call a ‘real’ life. I get up every day and come to work, and I earn a living wage that
lets me support my family.” The only sad part: after five years on the bakery floor, the naturally thin
Drew doesn’t even smell the aroma of brownies anymore. “I take them home sometimes though,”
he says, laughing. “The kids love them.”
Dion Drew, who once served prison time for selling drugs, has been promoted several times in his five-year career with
the Greyston Bakery.
page 9
UNCENSORED
A Sweet Mission
The Greyston Bakery Story
Greyston’s motto is: “We don’t hire people to make brownies,
we make brownies in order to hire people.” But hiring — and the
visionary way the company goes about it — is only one of the
objectives of the Greyston Foundation, the umbrella organization
that oversees the bakery and several other programs. The motto
could be: “We make brownies in order to hire people, offer
high-quality day care for their children, help them find affordable housing, provide services for those living with HIV/AIDS,
teach them to garden, and foster their personal growth in a holistic way.” While that might make for an excessively long motto,
it only begins to describe the scope of the group’s mission.
How that ambitious mission began to be fulfilled involves a
cast of characters that even the most creative Hollywood
screenwriter might have difficulty imagining. Among them
are a former aeronautical engineer turned Buddhist master,
a pair of ice-cream magnates, and an award-winning architect.
In 1982 Bernie Glassman, a Brooklyn, New York, native and former aeronautical space engineer who had given up that career
for the serious study of Zen Buddhism, borrowed $300,000 and
opened a small bakery in the New York City borough of the
Bronx. He hoped that the bakery would provide jobs and income
for members of the Zen Community of New York; that group,
which he had founded a few years earlier, originally operated out
of a run-down donated mansion in the Bronx called the Greyston
Estate. (In preparation for the new venture, the aspiring bakers
had traveled to the San Francisco Zen Center, whose members
ran the popular Tassajara Bread Bakery, to learn about commercial food production.) Glassman, believing that employment
was the first and most critical step in solving issues of homelessness and poverty, also recruited local homeless people to work
in the bakery. The business was soon supplying a line of cakes
and desserts to high-end retail outlets and restaurants — whose
owners sometimes intimated to diners that the selections had
been made by their own pastry chefs. While it might have been
equally profitable to produce basic, less-upscale
confections, Glassman was determined to prove
that his employees could not only work at a
skilled profession but excel at it. (He was particularly proud when Greyston’s cheesecake was
named the best in the region by Zagat.)
Glassman later moved his base of operations
to an abandoned 1920s-era lasagna factory in
Southwest Yonkers. While some Yonkers residents were initially skeptical, thinking that the
Buddhists would prove to be proselytizing nuisances, Glassman and his charges slowly won
them over, donating food to local soup kitchens, engaging in community service, and — not
incidentally — baking decadently delicious
desserts.
In 1987, at a meeting of the then-fledgling Social
Venture Network, a group dedicated to connecting business leaders and social entrepreneurs who shared the goal of creating a just
and sustainable economy, Glassman met Ben
Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of
the thriving ice-cream business Ben & Jerry’s.
The pair were developing a new ice-cream
sandwich and looking for a bakery to provide
a thin, chewy brownie for it. Glassman agreed,
realizing that a commercial account the size of
Ben & Jerry’s would allow him to offer work to
many economically disadvantaged job seekers.
Jessica Alicea, a Greyston child care worker known to her
charges as “Miss Jessica,” is currently earning a college degree.
page 10
Spring 2014
A Sweet Mission
The first shipment of brownies that arrived at Ben & Jerry’s
Vermont headquarters in 1988, however, had become stuck
together in unwieldy hunks. An attempt to excavate individual
brownies from the 50-pound blocks only resulted in a crumbled mess. Frantically trying to salvage something from the
shipment, workers stirred the crumbled pieces into batches
of chocolate ice cream, serendipitously creating one of the
most popular flavors in the history of Ben & Jerry’s — Chocolate Fudge Brownie.
Today, some 90 percent of the bakery’s brownies are used by
Ben & Jerry’s as “mix-ins” for the Chocolate Fudge Brownie
flavor and for Half Baked, a best-selling variety that combines
chocolate and vanilla ice creams with brownies and bits of
chocolate chip cookie dough. Additionally, the brownies can
be purchased via the Greyston Web site, and the company
recently partnered with Whole Foods to make the baked goods
for that company’s Whole Planet line.
Open Hiring Requires Open Hearts and a Pragmatic Mind
The brownies — 30,000 pounds a day of them — are produced
by more than 80 people who, like Dion Drew, faced significant
barriers to employment before coming to Greyston. Mike Brady,
the president and CEO of the bakery, which brought in revenues
of $10 million in 2012, explains, “No matter what mistakes some-
one has made in the past, everyone deserves a second chance.
That’s the philosophy behind our open hiring.” He realizes that
the work is not for everybody: for one thing, jobs in the bakery — which can require lifting enormous sacks of ingredients
and withstanding excessively hot temperatures — are physically arduous. New hires are also sometimes unprepared for the
demands of showing up for work on a regular basis and adhering to certain standards of workplace behavior. For that reason,
all must undergo a rigorous training program, and their attendance, punctuality, and performance are monitored closely during
six- to eight-month apprenticeships. “We are exceptionally serious about quality, safety, and cleanliness,” Brady asserts. “So, as
you can imagine, we have very strict requirements for our bakery employees.”
Some don’t come in for a second day of work, and others stop
showing up after receiving their first paychecks. Brady takes
that phenomenon in stride. “Of course, people like Dion, who
remain with us for years, are enormous successes,” he says.
“But in some respects, everyone who walks in our door and
puts their name on our list is a success. They’re taking steps to
change their lives and we’re happy to help them, whatever
stage of readiness they’re at.” If an employee stays at the bakery for the entire apprenticeship period, he or she is eligible
to join a union and to receive periodic raises as well as generous
Social Enterprises: Where Mission Meets the Marketplace
In his well-regarded book Faith and
Fortune: How Compassionate Capitalism Is Transforming American Business
(2004), journalist Marc Gunther writes:
“Is Greyston’s model replicable? In theory
it is — [but few of its]achievements have
come easily. The bakery is a small workplace that has benefitted from patient,
charismatic and deeply committed
leadership [and it] has been sustained by
the Ben & Jerry’s deal. …” Jerr Boschee,
a co-founder of the Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA), respectfully disagrees with
those sentiments. “Greyston is a prime
mover in the world of social enterprise,
but you don’t need a charismatic founder
or a multimillion-dollar contract to be
successful,” he asserts.
Boschee explains that the term “social
enterprise” refers to organizations that
directly address social needs through
their products and services or through
the number of disadvantaged people they
employ. The revenue earned can be a
significant part of a nonprofit’s funding
stream, which might also include charitable contributions and public-sector
subsidies; as Boschee notes, this distinguishes social enterprises from traditional nonprofits, which rely primarily on
philanthropic and government support.
Boschee does not have to think
hard or consult any materials to reel
off examples of social enterprises in a
wide variety of fields and sectors: “The
Delancey Street Foundation, which is
based on the West Coast, provides job
training and other needed services to
former gang members and drug addicts,
and they run a dozen businesses, including a restaurant, a car service, and a
moving company. Gulf Coast Enterprises
employs more than 1,000 people with
severe disabilities such as cerebral palsy
and blindness, and they engage in everything from janitorial work to administrative and clerical support. Homeboy
Industries, which was started by Father
Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, provides
things like job training and legal services
but also tattoo removal, because that’s
a real barrier to employment for the
former gang members the group serves.
Their motto is ‘Jobs Not Jail,’ and their
social enterprises include a line of salsa
and a custom silk screening business.
The list just goes on and on.”
To read more about the Social Enterprise Alliance, whose motto is “Where
Mission Meets the Marketplace,” and
to learn more about the history of the
social enterprise movement, visit https://
www.se-alliance.org/
page 11
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A Sweet Mission
benefits. Some 35 percent of those hired successfully complete
the apprenticeship process, and Greyston estimates that its
open-hiring system saves Westchester County, where Yonkers
is located, more than $1 million a year, thanks to reduced
recidivism in the prison system.
The Greyston Foundation, which Glassman founded in 1992, operates with the support of public and private donors including the
Detroit-based Kresge Foundation; New York’s Gary Saltz Foundation; the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, also headquartered in New York; and the financial services giants Bank of
America and Wells Fargo. The Greyston Foundation — which
oversees the bakery as well as programs for both employees and
nonemployees — also engages in workforce development, training
aspirants for a variety of jobs in fields known to have consistent
need for employees, such as medical billing, customer service,
and building maintenance. Greyston then provides job-placement assistance. Since the workforce-development program was
implemented, in 2009, it has helped more than 200 participants
enter the work world.
“I think it’s ironic in a way that I once took
so much from the community by selling
drugs, but now I’m giving back to that
same community in a very positive way.”
Making a Path at Greyston
While Glassman knew that having a job is an important element
of a meaningful, productive life, he also knew that it is just one
element. As a result, Greyston has instituted a program called
PathMaking, which involves assessing employees’ strengths
and challenges to help identify specific issues, habits, and life
experiences that aid or hinder positive movement along their
individual paths. The PathMaking program helps employees set
long- and short-term goals and encourages them to develop
unity of body, heart, mind, spirit, and self.
While that may suggest New Age idealism, PathMaking is a
decidedly real-world program with tangible results, providing
guidance in continuing education, physical and mental health,
nutrition, literacy, and personal finance, among other important areas. The Ruth Suzman PathMaking Center at the bakery,
named in honor of one of its most devoted board members,
features a library and several new computer workstations. “Our
goal in PathMaking is to help people become more self-sufficient and self-assured, so they can become stronger participating members of the community,” Steven Brown, the president
and CEO of the foundation, explains. “And — whatever you care
to call it — that can only benefit the entire community.” An
page 12
example of the program’s benefits is Celia, who has two young
children and has worked at the bakery for nine years. Celia was
embarrassed about not being able to read well and wanted to
read to her children. Through the support of the PathMaking
women’s group, Celia was paired with a volunteer reading specialist, who came to the bakery to meet with her for several months
during her work shift (on company-paid time). Celia was able to
register for classes to receive her Servsafe Certification at Westchester Community College the following year. She is one of four
bakery employees currently enrolled in a bakery-sponsored PathMaking/Workforce Development GED pilot program.
The Other Stepping Stones
The remnants of a bagel and muffin breakfast buffet are spread
out near the entrance to the Greyston Child Care Center, located
just a few blocks from the bakery. “That’s left from the parents’
meeting we just had,” Jessica Alicea (or “Miss Jessica,” as her
young charges call her) explains. “We don’t just provide day
care and after-school programs. We have general meetings for
parents where they can voice their concerns, parenting classes
especially for fathers to encourage them to be a part of their
children’s lives, sessions where everyone can get advice on child
development … really, anything we can do to increase parent
involvement, we’ll do.”
Alicea not only works at the center — which is free of charge to
all bakery employees and provides affordable care to other
Yonkers residents — she is the mother of two preschoolers who
attend it and a seven-year-old who arrives in the afternoon for
an after-school program. All three have been coming since infancy to the center, which is accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). “This is
like a second home for them,” Alicea says, “and it’s that way
for many of the children. I’ve been here since 2000, and I’ve gotten to see several of our students grow up. Some of them I met
originally in the infant room are teenagers now!”
The center is licensed to accept 96 children, from ages six weeks
to five years, and it provides a variety of programs, including art
and music and movement. The vast majority of those who attend
go on to pass the Creative Curriculum Assessment, which gauges
their readiness for kindergarten.
“Knowing that their children are in good hands makes it much
easier for parents to find and keep jobs,” says Alicea, who is earning a college degree in addition to working and raising her own
brood. Greyston estimates that in 2012 alone, parents who were
able to work because their children attended the child care
center earned almost $800,000 collectively.
In addition to jobs and child care, the foundation is active in the
movement for affordable housing and now has almost 300 units
Spring 2014
A Sweet Mission
in its portfolio, including a new $32 million, multifamily development with 92 modern, energy-efficient apartments. Half of
Greyston’s housing stock is reserved for the formerly homeless,
who receive ongoing support services whenever needed. As
of 2012, more than 200 formerly homeless tenants had been
housed in Greyston units for longer than two years.
The organization has also taken on the mission of serving and
housing those living with HIV/AIDS at its bucolic Maitri Adult
Day Health Center and Issan House complex, located on the site
of a former convent overlooking the Hudson River in Yonkers.
The Maitri program, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word
for “loving kindness,” is the only adult HIV program of its type
in Westchester County; its wide range of services (meals, counseling, and educational programming among them) has resulted
in vastly better medical outcomes for attendees, including
reduced viral loads and fewer infections. The apartment units
in the Issan House are fully handicapped-accessible, and its
residents have access to comprehensive medical treatment that
encompasses both traditional and complementary therapies.
Greyston estimates that having a health care facility directly onsite saves more than $100,000 a year through avoided emergency room visits for Issan residents, many of whom suffer from
substance-abuse or mental health issues in addition to HIV/
AIDS. There are also other, less tangible benefits. “Meditation at
Maitri cleans my mind, counteracts the damage my meds do,
gives me calmness in the midst of a storm,” says Lloyd. “I am calm
because I know that Maitri has my back,” he adds. “The nurse
answers all my questions and reminds me of questions I need to
ask my doctor, and the Health Education and Nutrition groups
teach me everything I need to know about my condition and my
body.” Lloyd also attends the Coping With Loss group run by
Brad Fritz and a clinical staff member every week. “It helps me
to deal with the murder of my sister by her son,” he explains,
“because it gives me a safe place to vent, a safe place to cry, and
a place to cry out. I am comforted. Everything I learn at Maitri
makes me stronger and more able to face the world outside.”
a rooftop garden where employees can go to relax. Plans are
underway to incorporate the vegetables that are grown there into
employee lunches as a way to encourage good eating habits.
Extending that mission to the general community, Greyston also
runs an ambitious community-gardens project, which has resulted
in the greening of several formerly empty lots.
Certifiably Beneficial
In February 2012 New York State began to authorize Benefit Corporations (sometimes referred to as “B-Corps”), entities that are
required by law to create a “general public benefit,” which is
defined as “a material positive impact on society and the environment.” That month Greyston Bakery became the first business
in the state to register for the new designation.
“We don’t claim to be healing the entire world,” Mike Brady
says, “but we do try to help every person who walks through
our doors, and that seems like a very good start.” ■
Can Brownies Be Green?
The bakery, which needed to expand because of steadily increasing demand for its goods, is now located in a 23,000square-foot facility — not far from the Yonkers waterfront — that
was designed in 2000 by Maya Lin, the architect best-known
for creating the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. It
was built on a former brownfield site contaminated by decades
of industrial waste and pollution, which Greyston chose in large
part because of the role the cleanup would play in revitalizing
the entire area. The building, which officially opened in 2004,
features several innovative energy-saving features, as well as
Preschool children participate in Reading Time at the Greyston Child Care Center.
page 13
Bringing Child Homelessness
Internationally published photographer Craig
Blankenhorn may be best known for his work
photographing the stars of hit television shows
such as Sex and the City and The Sopranos.
Two years ago, however, Craig came across a
very different subject — homeless children. It
was then that he embarked on a personal journey to document the unseen and little-discussed
phenomenon of family homelessness. Wanting to
put a face to the devastating statistics he learned
about the number of homeless children, and to
shine a spotlight on this growing problem, Craig
began spending his free time as a fly on the wall,
chronicling the daily struggles of families trapped
in the seemingly endless cycle of poverty and
homelessness. Through this journey, Craig has
learned about the experiences, determination,
and struggles of homeless families. His aim is to
chronicle, in every state across the country, the
lives of families experiencing homelessness.
Craig continues his documentation of the crisis of
child and family homelessness in America. The
following photo essay is an expansion of a blog
post featured on the Institute for Children, Poverty,
and Homelessness Web site, in which Craig shares
his insights on the issues faced by homeless families. To learn more about his project, visit his Web
site at www.ChildHomeless.org.
The tables are turned when photographer Craig Blankenhorn — shown here documenting
the lives of a Las Vegas family experiencing homelessness — becomes the subject of a
photograph. Blankenhorn follows consenting homeless families through typical days, snapping photographs that highlight the struggles they face, as part of a project that aims to
draw attention to the plight of child homelessness. Photo courtesy of Las Vegas Sun News.
page 14
Spring 2014
into Focus A Photo Essay
By Craig Blankenhorn
There are 1.6 million homeless children in the United States.
That one statistic was all it took to change my life. I began taking pictures of homeless families in January 2012,
hoping to put a face to the often invisible and forgotten people
combating this growing issue. By documenting their daily
struggles, I try to show the real people and real suffering that
make up the much broader issue of homelessness.
Over the past two years, I’ve gained a lot of respect for these
families. Being homeless is far from easy; it’s a 24/7 job that
involves moving constantly from one shelter to another, looking
for a job, and taking care of children.
There’s also the stigma surrounding poverty. Many people would
like to believe that the situations of these families are their own
doing. The reality, however, is that bad things happen to all of us,
be it a job loss, illness, etc. The difference I’ve seen is that those
who become homeless don’t have family or a social network to
turn to for support when things go wrong. Many don’t know how
or where to find the resources that are available to them or have
barriers in the way of options they do know of.
One of the issues I hear about most frequently from parents is
the lack of affordable child care. You can’t get a job with kids
in tow, but you can’t afford child care without a job, creating a
Catch-22.
The result is tragic. The choice comes down to remaining
unemployed and continuing a life of poverty and homelessness
or leaving the children in the care of people they barely know,
risking their safety in the process. I’ve been told stories of children who suffered physical and sexual abuse by the strangers
taking care of them.
For the safety of these children, a lot of parents keep them
holed up in motel rooms away from danger. Unfortunately, this
tactic deprives children of necessary social interaction and
mental stimulation.
The age before children even attend school is crucial in their
development and future success, but oftentimes young homeless
children are stunted in this development. How can children keep
up with their peers academically when they face stressful living
situations, have little parental involvement, and are continuously
switching schools or missing days?
Homeless children are in need of positive role models in their
lives. Many of these parents grew up poor or homeless themselves and are teaching their children the same behaviors and
attitudes that kept them in poverty, continuing the cycle. One
woman I met was never taught proper hygiene. She lost all of
her teeth at a young age, adding to her difficulties in finding
a job. How many other valuable lessons could she have learned
with the right person to look up to?
Legislation to provide federal funding for universal pre-K has
been introduced into Congress, following a plan touted by
President Obama earlier in the year. (Although the legislation is
currently stalled in Congress, the president recently proposed
a budget for fiscal year 2015 that allocates $750 million in funds
to pre-K programs.) This seems to be the best and most immediate solution available for the benefit of homeless children across
the country. The option to send children to pre-K provides safe
child care for parents and offers positive role models, education,
social interaction, and development opportunities at a critical
age for children — especially the vulnerable population of homeless children who need it the most.
We have a moral obligation to take care of the poor. My primary concern is to bring awareness to the plight of child homelessness and to allow others to witness the pain these children
are dealing with on a day-to-day basis as well as their perseverance. My ambition is to create a sociological chronicle of this
devastating moment in history through this visual endeavor —
and for the world to recognize the unimaginable grief of child
homelessness. page 15
UNCENSORED
Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus
The Gerstner Family Scottsdale, Arizona
Despite the stigma surrounding homelessness, the reality
is that it can happen to anyone who faces the wrong set of
circumstances. Many parents want to work and support their
families, if only they can find a job that pays a living wage.
According to Family Promise, the shelter where Syri Gerstner, 41, and her two daughters, Kari, seven, and Kahlyn, eight,
are currently staying, there is no city or county anywhere in
the United States where a worker making the minimum wage
can afford a fair market rate one-bedroom apartment.
Kari is shown here waking up at Family Promise on
Christmas morning.
The family had been living in various shelters for two
months when I met them. They had never been homeless
before and were grateful for the help they received.
“I’m not asking for a handout, because I’m willing to
scrub floors. But I shouldn’t have to, I’m educated, I’m very
personable, I’m not a bad person, and I have some great
qualities. Don’t just give me food stamps and say, ‘It’s going
to be okay, just hold on to that.’ No. Assist me in getting
whatever it is that the people who are hiring, want. Don’t
leave me sitting here floundering, wondering why I feel
that my country, the one I used to think was so wonderful
and grand, doesn’t care about me at all.”
The Cariquitan Family Las Vegas, Nevada
Maria Martha Cariquitan, 35, is a single mother
raising her ten-year-old daughter, Francesca,
and her six-year-old son, Nathaniel, shown here
walking to the Nevada State Welfare office
along a notorious area of northern Las Vegas
known as the “homeless corridor.” The neighborhood, officially called the Corridor of Hope,
is home to several city shelters as well as high
numbers of homeless people living on the street.
The family of three is applying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. As
of 2012, two in five female-headed families,
like the Cariquitan family, lived in poverty.
Programs such as SNAP are essential to offset
the impact of poverty for these families. Over
47 million people receive SNAP benefits to
help them afford an adequate diet. If eligible,
Nathaniel and Francesca will join the 22 million other children who rely on these benefits
for their health and well-being.
page 16
Spring 2014
Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus
The Coleman Family Janesville, Wisconsin
Ronald Coleman, 23, Jessica Rhodes, 24, who is
seven months pregnant, and their son, Greyson,
who is eight months old, received a voucher from
a Wisconsin homeless coalition to stay at a motel
when they became homeless. They are among
thousands of families across the country crowding
into motels as family homelessness skyrockets
and the shelters fill up. Such a lifestyle is problematic, especially for a family with children at such
a crucial stage in their development. Poor nutrition
is a frequent result of motel living. The lack of a
full kitchen severely limits a family’s meal options,
resulting in the stocking of nonperishable and
nutritionally lacking foods such as those shown
here or the purchase of inexpensive and unhealthy fast food. Amid the stress and chaos of
such a living situation, intimate moments such
as the one shown here between Ronald and Greyson are treasured, as they are in all families.
page 17
UNCENSORED
Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus
The Keys/Becker Family Livingston, New Jersey
Lack of access to affordable child care is
often a major obstacle for families struggling
to break out of the cycle of poverty. For Guy
Keys, 48, one of approximately 8,000 homeless
veterans living in New Jersey, and Amanda
Becker, 24, who attend Drake College of Business to become a nurse’s aide and a dental
technician, respectively, the inability to pay
for child care presents a challenge.
Their two daughters, Taneya, four, and
Shyla, two, are not yet old enough to attend
school, requiring either Guy or Amanda
to look after the girls while the other attends
class. The family’s long day begins when
they leave the shelter first thing in the morning with all of the day’s meals packed. They
then spend the day relying on several shuttles
to get from place to place, taking classes,
and walking around Newark, New Jersey,
with the girls in tow.
Rachel’s Family Tampa, Florida
Child care and other types of early
education, such as the summer camp
Tiffani, seven, shown here, is waiting
to attend, offer numerous benefits to
homeless children as well as their
parents. Tiffani’s mother, Rachel, 32,
takes the opportunity to attend
classes and search for work while
her children are safely cared for.
The shelter where she and her four
children, Keegan, 12, Arianna, ten,
Hunter, eight, and Tiffani have been
staying has been “more of a family
than my own family,” according
to Rachel.
page 18
Bringing Child Homelessness into Focus
The Edinger Family Kissimmee, Florida
Spring 2014
William Edinger, 44, and Laura Mannetta, 35, had been living in a hotel
room for about one year with their three children — Billy, 12, Jessica, ten,
and Melissa, two — when I met them. The Edinger children are among the
approximately 47,000 members of America’s “hotel generation.” With very
limited safe space to play outdoors, the children have little choice but to
stay in their hotel room with their parents. This can deprive children of
much-needed mental stimulation and social interaction.
When a family of five shares one hotel room, it is nearly impossible for
anyone to have a quiet moment or private conversation. Jessica Edinger,
shown here, often uses the space behind the curtain as a temporary “room”
to have a moment of privacy. She looks out the window to “imagine sea
otters and ducks swimming” in the pond across from the hotel parking lot.
page 19
The Historical Perspective
A History of Inequality
page 20
Spring 2014
in New York City
By Ethan G. Sribnick
Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of New York City, has made
fighting New York’s poverty and inequality a focus of his
young administration. While the percentage of the country’s wealth concentrated among its top earners has been
on the rise for four decades, New York is one of the most
striking examples of American inequality: among the
nation’s 30 largest cities, it is home to the biggest income
discrepancies. In 2011 the median household income in
New York’s richest area, the Upper East Side, was $247,200.
By contrast, in the city’s most impoverished neighborhood, the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, the figure
was $9,500. The numbers speak for themselves.
De Blasio’s efforts seem aimed at undoing the policies of
his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, who, according to
his harshest critics, turned Manhattan into a preserve of
tourists and the wealthy. The inequality and poverty that
de Blasio hopes to alleviate, however, have roots much
deeper in New York’s past. The recently published book
The Poor Among Us: A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City, which I coauthored with
Ralph da Costa Nunez, documents the presence of poverty
and inequality in New York from the eighteenth century up
to today. A companion Web site, www.PovertyHistory.org,
provides interactive maps, timelines, stories, and images so
the user can explore the nature and experience of poverty
in the city’s past.
A foreman in a box factory teaches a worker, Carmen Zapata,
to operate a stamping machine in 1960s. Photo courtesy of the
Library of Congress.
There are many periods of inequality addressed in the
book and Web site that suggest parallels to the scenario de
Blasio faces. A look at the chasm of inequality created over
the nineteenth century by the process of industrialization
might reveal telling similarities to circumstances seen in
the city today. Instead, this article will discuss a period of
relative equality in the city’s past — the period beginning
after World War II and extending through the 1960s — and
explore the makeup of that more equal city. The “tale of
two cities” that de Blasio now cites has its first chapter in
the deindustrialization that ended the postwar boom and
resulted in the service industries that still form the core of
the city’s economy.
In the postwar era, that economy was based on manufacturing. As the city’s manufacturing base developed in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York did not come
to resemble other industrial centers; the giant plants that
were typical of Pittsburgh or Detroit, for instance, were never
built in the city. Instead, with limited space, New York was
peppered with many small-scale manufacturing shops. The
secret to New York’s industrial success was its ready supply
of labor and its flexible production capacity.
The apparel business, also known as the garment industry,
formed one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the
city and exemplifies the nature of production. Production
of clothing required changes that would accommodate
the new trends of each fashion season. It also called for
highly skilled craftsmen to work closely with less-skilled
and lower-paid workers. In New York, small firms, each specializing in a particular aspect of apparel production, were
page 21
UNCENSORED
A History of Inequality in New York City
able to make limited quantities of garments at a fairly low cost.
In 1947 the average-size garment-manufacturing shop in the city
employed only 20 people. When more production was required,
manufacturers culled more workers from the city’s ready supply
of low-skilled labor.
For this system to be economically viable, a large pool of lowwage workers was needed. As the city’s garment industry grew,
these workers were often recently arrived European immigrants
looking to gain a foothold in the United States. In the 1940s the
children of these immigrants still made up the majority of the
city’s blue-collar workers. Yet, black migrants from the South
who had begun arriving in New York in the 1910s and Puerto
Rican migrants who had started to show up in large numbers in
the 1940s were quickly joining the ranks of the working class.
With manufacturing dominating New York’s economy, the
large number of workers involved in production dominated
the city’s politics. Of the 3.3 million employed people living
in New York City in 1946, 2.6 million could be considered
part of the working class. With their husbands, wives, and
children included, this working class formed the majority
of the city’s population. The presence of powerful, politically
engaged unions further increased the strength of the working
class. As a result of all this, New York became a city with extensive publicly funded services, one described by the historian
Joshua Freeman as a “homegrown version of social democracy.”
This included an extensive transportation system, tuition-free
colleges, hospitals, and even a radio station. The labor move-
ment, with public
support, created
new cooperative
housing complexes for
workers and their
families. New
York City unions
even built their
own health clinics
and, with government encouragement, helped
oversee prepaid
medical plans that
covered workers’
health care.
The future of all
of these public
and semipubRobert Moses and Mayor Robert Wagner take a housing
lic programs
tour. Moses’s plans to redevelop much of New York
depended on
led to dislocation for many poor and working-class New
continued wideYorkers. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
spread employment and steadily
increasing tax revenue. Unfortunately, at the same time that
many of these programs were being put in place, manufacturing centers were beginning to move out of New York City. At
first they relocated to suburban areas, where property was
less expensive. In 1953, 56 percent of the metropolitan
The James Weldon Johnson Houses, a New York public housing project, is seen being
region’s manufacturing took place within the city limits; by
built in 1947. When complete, the Johnson houses would cover the blocks from 112th
1966 the majority of those jobs were elsewhere. Many of
to 115th Streets and from Park to Third Avenues in East Harlem, rapidly becoming a
the jobs lost were in the apparel industry, whose workforce
predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.
shrank by 29 percent between 1950 and 1965. In an effort
to keep work in the city, the unions made concessions
that lowered salaries in this key industry. In 1950 garment
workers made 10 cents per hour more than the average
manufacturing employee in the city, but by 1965 they made
22 cents less per hour. The quality of life of people in these
low-skilled positions began to decrease. Much of the burden of this economic decline fell on the black and Puerto
Rican communities. As relative newcomers to New York,
blacks and Puerto Ricans often had less union seniority
and were frequently the first to be laid off.
The decline in manufacturing in the city was largely the
result of national and global economic forces that made it
less expensive to produce goods of similar quality outside
New York. But choices made in urban planning and redevelopment, especially with regard to Manhattan, also contributed to the flight of production out of the city. The New
page 22
A History of Inequality in New York City
York area’s first regional plan, developed in 1929, envisioned
a Manhattan virtually free of industry, with manufacturing and
port facilities moved to New Jersey and the outer boroughs. In
the period after World War II, this vision for the city began to
become reality. The urban redevelopment along the East River
that occurred between 1945 and 1955 — which included the
construction of the United Nations, Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village, and, on the other side of the river, the Brooklyn
Civic Center — led to the loss of 18,000 manufacturing jobs. This
trend in urban renewal would continue. From 1954 to 1965,
years that encompassed Robert Wagner Jr.’s tenure as mayor,
200,000 manufacturing jobs left the city.
The redevelopment of New York and the changing economy also
had consequences for where New Yorkers lived. Urban renewal
projects frequently failed to build the number of housing units
they destroyed, and many of the units they did provide were more
expensive than those they replaced. For example, according
to Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, the urban planner
who oversaw many of these developments, the Lincoln Square
urban renewal project, which built the Lincoln Center complex,
destroyed 7,000 low-income units and built only 4,400 dwellings, 4,000 of which were luxury apartments. The movement of
poor and middle-class communities out of most of Manhattan
and into the upper reaches of the island and the outer boroughs
had begun in the early twentieth century. But in the postwar
era, projects such as urban renewal helped to push more struggling families to the outskirts of the city. A 1953 study found that
150,000 people, more than half of them black or Puerto Rican,
would be dislocated by public works projects. While it is difficult
to say in every case where those people ended up, the city saw
a general movement of poverty out of Manhattan and other core
areas and into neighborhoods in eastern Brooklyn and the South
Bronx. As the maps on www.PovertyHistory.org demonstrate,
this movement has continued in recent years. At the same time,
neighborhoods in Manhattan have grown more affluent, with only
a small number of poor residents.
Spring 2014
by arson and neglect, and the safety of residents was threatened further by the drug trade and gang conflicts. Declining tax
revenue, along with the city’s efforts to maintain the extent and
quality of its services in transportation, education, and housing,
would lead to the New York fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the
eventual peeling back of social programs.
Today, the service economy is firmly in place in New York City.
Of the 3.77 million New Yorkers in the workforce, only a little
over 155,000, or 4.1 percent, work in manufacturing, and about
188,000, or 5 percent, have jobs in construction. The vast majority of the remainder are employed in some aspect of the service
industry. The term “service industry,” however, encompasses a
wide range of jobs. The fast-food worker is hardly in the same
economic class as the Wall Street attorney. New York’s service
economy is largely divided into low-skill, low-pay service jobs
that often do not allow families to exceed the poverty threshold
and high-paying jobs held by some of the wealthiest New Yorkers. This fact, which is at the root of the inequality in New York
City, is what makes de Blasio’s challenge so difficult.
Some observers view the development of this bifurcated service
economy as a tradeoff. They see the city’s choice to replace
manufacturing and working-class housing with world-class political and cultural institutions in Manhattan — the U.N., Lincoln
Center — as prescient; they view the subsequent efforts under
Giuliani and Bloomberg to make the city accessible and welcoming as at least part of the reason that New York has not gone
the way of Detroit. At the same time, as de Blasio has made
clear, there are consequences for these choices, among them
inequality and pockets of deep poverty. The Poor Among Us and
www.PovertyHistory.org document this poverty, demonstrating
its long history in New York City. As the de Blasio administration
takes its first steps toward confronting this enormous problem, it
would be wise to heed the lessons from the city’s past. ■
The dislocation in work and housing experienced by many
New Yorkers was the result of an economic transformation from
a manufacturing economy to a service economy. This transformation would continue into the 1970s; between 1969 and 1977
the city lost an additional 600,000 manufacturing jobs, leading
to declining wages for many who had once worked in that sector. The loss of work decimated many of the city’s working-class
communities, leaving neighborhoods with high concentrations
of poverty. The housing in many of these areas was destroyed
Boys play catch in a vacant East Harlem lot in 1954. Many of New York’s
poorer neighborhoods would see an increase in abandoned properties
and demolished buildings, especially over the 1960s and 1970s. Photo
courtesy of the Library of Congress.
page 23
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Guest
Voices
Homelessness and the Law
A Community Comes Together to Defend
Homeless Citizens of the Nation’s Capital
by Marta Beresin, Amber Harding,
and Nassim Moshiree
The writers are staff attorneys at the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless, a District of Columbia
nonprofit organization that advocates for the legal protection of those struggling with homelessness and poverty.
In the spring of 2013, District of Columbia mayor Vincent Gray
proposed dramatic changes to the local laws governing homeless services. These changes threatened to turn back the clock
on the rights of D.C.’s homeless residents and represented a
troubling shift to an outmoded philosophy about the causes of
and solutions to homelessness.
The Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless (hereafter
“Legal Clinic”), along with numerous allies who included
both professional advocates and those who would be directly
affected by the changes, succeeded in scaling back the most
drastic elements of the mayor’s proposal, many of which were
based on negative stereotypes and prejudices about people
experiencing homelessness.
In this article, we examine the strategies employed, challenges
faced, and lessons learned as a community came together
quickly to stop a local government from infringing on the rights
of its most vulnerable residents.
The Rise of Family Homelessness
From 2000 to 2012, D.C. lost half of its affordable rental stock, or
35,000 of its 70,000 units of affordable housing. The fair-market
rent for a two-bedroom apartment in D.C. rose from $840 per
month to $1,506 per month. The changes were due primarily to
a combination of gentrification and federal and local cutbacks
in funding for affordable housing.
page 24
At the same time that the cost of housing was rising, the Great
Recession struck, causing D.C.’s poverty rate to rise to nearly 20
percent by 2010. Among children, the rate was even higher. By
2011, nearly one in three children growing up in D.C. was living
at or below the federal poverty line.
As a result of steeply rising housing costs and increasing levels
of poverty, family homelessness rose 73 percent in D.C. from
2008 to 2012. But funding for homeless services and housing
programs did not keep pace with demand during this period.
Tax revenues were down, and the D.C. government’s resulting
cuts most deeply affected programs that serve low-income
residents, its least powerful constituency.
One example was the narrowing of families’ year-round access
to shelter. District law mandates a right to shelter for all D.C.
residents who are homeless when the temperature falls below
32 degrees Fahrenheit. Until the spring of 2011, the District’s
policy was to shelter families who had no other safe place to
stay, regardless of the temperature. Citing budgetary pressures,
the District ended this policy, leaving families already in crisis
without a safety net for much of the year, including on winter
days when temperatures teetered close to freezing but were not
below freezing, as required to trigger the legal right to shelter.
Family homelessness continued to grow. From 2009 to 2012 the
number of families at D.C. General Emergency Family Shelter,
Guest
Voices
the largest family shelter in D.C., soared. While just 53 families
stayed there in April 2009, by April 2013, 285 families with
nearly 600 children were residing at the shelter.
During this time, the Legal Clinic and other community allies
increased the pressure on the District to resolve this crisis
by highlighting stories of parents and children left outside or
in other dangerous situations because they could not access
emergency shelter services. In the winter of 2012 –13, local
media began to focus on the problem of family homelessness
as well, highlighting both the magnitude of the need and the
administration’s failure to respond to it with either shelter or
housing resources.
It was in this climate that, in March of 2013, the Gray administration introduced a package of amendments to the Homeless
Services Reform Act (HSRA) of 2005, the law governing homeless services in D.C., as part of its proposed FY 2014 Budget
Support Act.
A Punitive Approach
The mayor framed these proposals as a way to stabilize families
and help them move out of homelessness, but the amendments
were almost entirely punitive in nature. They proposed to roll
back many of the rights of homeless families and individuals
and to increase the number of ways the government could deny
access to emergency shelter services.
For example, the amended law would have allowed the District to place families in shelter “provisionally” while the D.C.
Department of Human Services (DHS) determined the families’
eligibility for shelter or sent them to places other than shelter.
The deputy mayor for Health and Human Services, Beatriz
“B.B.” Otero, wrote that these provisional placements were
meant to “keep families safe while they complete their assessment and explore alternatives to shelter,” “quickly reconnect or
rehouse families using emergency or rapid rehousing funds,”
and “allow the District to place families in shelter even during
non-hypothermia periods.” Notably, nothing in the existing law
prevented the District from sheltering families in non-hypothermic weather, and nothing in the proposed law guaranteed a
right to such placements.
Moreover, “provisionally placed” families would stand to lose
many legal rights that had protected families in shelter for
years. According to the amendments, these families could be
terminated from shelter or housing for rule violations with only
24 hours’ notice and without due process of law. They could
lose other protections as well, among them the right to 15 days’
Spring 2014
notice of termination or transfer, the continuation of shelter
services during the appeal process, and all rights granted to
those in temporary shelters — including the right to receive
case-management services.
Another key feature of the amendments was that families could
be terminated from shelter for turning down two offers of “rapid
rehousing,” or housing with a short-term rental subsidy, regardless of whether the program or the particular unit was appropriate for the family. In other words, a family would not have been
able to turn down two units — even on the grounds that they were
unaffordable, were not wheelchair accessible, had egregious
housing-code violations, were not the right size for the family,
or were unsuitable for any other reason — without facing possible termination from shelter.
The proposed laws reflected a shift
backward to a view that the causes of
poverty and homelessness are poor
behavioral choices rather than structural
forces beyond an individual family’s
immediate control.
The amendments also proposed eliminating several important
rights of tenants in supportive housing. Providers could create
arbitrary time limits and terminate participants once they
reached those limits, no matter the reason. The amended law
also would have permitted D.C. to terminate supportive-housing
tenants from the program for being hospitalized or otherwise
institutionalized for 60 days or more.
Finally, the amendments proposed giving the mayor authority
to mandate that shelter residents contribute to escrow accounts
as a condition of receipt of shelter. That measure had been
rejected in favor of a voluntary system when the Homeless
Services Reform Act passed because of the high administrative costs, negative impact on staff/resident relationships, and
inability of many shelter residents to contribute to escrow and
still meet their basic needs. Under the proposed amendments,
programs could terminate residents from shelter if they failed to
place money in escrow each month.
Creating Meaningful Process Where There Isn’t Any
One thing was for sure: we needed to act quickly. The normal
legislative process would have allowed plenty of opportunity
to respond to the proposed changes. Normally, we would have
page 25
UNCENSORED
had a chance to educate the community — including our advocate peers, providers, and, most importantly, our clients, who
would be directly impacted — about the harm these amendments
would do if enacted into law. By putting the amendments in
the budget, however, the administration was assured a truncated
review process, and there was a real danger that the amendments would be passed into law without a full public vetting: there
would be no separate hearing on the proposed legislation, just
one hearing on the entire Budget Support Act. The attention of
those focusing on the budget would already be spread too thin
for them to take in the amendments.
Faced with such a short time frame (a few months instead of
up to two years), we saw that the proposed measures had to be
taken out of the budget and put through the regular legislative
process before we could address their substance.
In late April, the Legal Clinic and several key partners, including the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute (DCFPI) and the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence (DCCADV), drafted a sign-on
letter to the mayor and D.C. Council citing our objections to
the inclusion of such far-reaching proposals in the Budget Support Act without public vetting. We requested that the mayor
withdraw the amendments from the FY 2014 Budget Support
Act and allow the public a chance to have input. Councilmember Jim Graham, chair of the D.C. Council’s Committee
on Human Services, agreed to hold a separate hearing on the
proposed legislation if the mayor would remove it from the
budget. The District’s own chief financial officer had certified
that the proposed amendments would have no fiscal ramifications, and we argued that they were therefore not germane to
the budget.
Nearly 200 organizations, including service providers, legal aid
offices, and other advocacy organizations, signed on. The letter
sent a clear message to the D.C. Council that there was broad community support for taking a careful look at these amendments.
Fighting the “Culture of Dependency” Myth
The administration’s official response to the sign-on letter was
less than conciliatory. Otero issued a statement on behalf of
the administration, arguing that the amendments were necessary to motivate families to leave shelter. She wrote, “Because
families in shelter today pay no rent, no utilities, receive most
of their meals for free, keep the full amount of their income,
including TANF and food stamps, and receive many other supportive services, such as transportation and child care, there is
a significant incentive for families to stay in shelter.”
page 26
Guest
Voices
Perhaps what was most disconcerting about the mayor’s proposals and the deputy mayor’s response was that they reflected
a shift backward to a view that the causes of poverty and
homelessness are poor behavioral choices rather than structural forces beyond an individual family’s immediate control,
such as the steep rise in housing costs or the recession. During
this period, the term “culture of dependency” became commonplace in policy discussions with the Gray administration.
Officials claimed that the “cycle of poverty and dependence”
was at the root of D.C.’s growing family-homelessness problem.
The idea was that homeless parents were to blame for their
own situations, and that if they were not making progress, they
were probably not trying hard enough and they shouldn’t be
rewarded with continued assistance.
Many proposed changes to the District
of Columbia’s policy were based on
negative stereotypes and prejudices about
people experiencing homelessness.
The deputy mayor’s response also attempted to pit homeless
families against homeless individuals without children, a
strategy that ultimately failed. She claimed that the administration would save $5.3 million by passing the amendments, and
threatened that if they were not passed, “DHS will be forced to
close these [three large singles] shelters outside of hypothermia season, beginning October 1, 2013.”
Both of these statements proved to be major missteps for the
administration. First, there was the depiction of D.C. General —
the District’s largest family homeless shelter — as a place where
families are so comfortable that they have little incentive to
leave, which struck us, our clients, and our allies as both laughable and offensive. For years, local media had detailed the poor
conditions in which families were living at D.C. General, from
overcrowding to heat and elevator outages to mold to inedible
meals and more. And many of the “perks” that the letter mentioned, like free transportation and child care, did not exist at
the shelter or elsewhere. Otero’s explanation of why there were
so many families left at the shelter was based on harmful myths
rather than the reality of the affordable-housing crisis and suppressed wages in the District. When families at D.C. General
learned of the deputy mayor’s characterization of them, they
began to organize and became committed to making sure their
side of the story was heard.
Guest
Voices
Spring 2014
Similarly, homeless individuals without children were tired
of being threatened and pitted against families. The homeless advocacy group SHARC (Shelter, Housing and Respectful
Change) began organizing shelter residents to attend meetings
and rallies with the message that they both supported families
and opposed shelter closures.
providers and affected community members, and, together,
developed a strategy.
At the large hearing on the Budget Support Act a week after
the sign-on letter was sent, a group of parents staying at the D.C.
General shelter, several with kids in tow, read a statement of
opposition to the proposed legislation on behalf of families
at the shelter. They testified that they had not been afforded
an opportunity to weigh in meaningfully on proposed changes
to the law that would directly affect them, and they challenged
the negative stereotypes on which the changes were based.
The mothers insisted that families had every incentive to leave
the shelter, but that many were encountering obstacles for reasons that were out of their control. They implored the council to
remove the proposals from the budget and to invest in affordable-housing programs as a real solution to the families’ plight.
The affected community in particular came out in force. Representatives of SHARC were very vocal and persuasive. Their
message was clear: the proposals did nothing to solve homelessness and, worse, were based on unfounded stereotypes
about people who are homeless, such as that people are poor
because they don’t know how to manage their money. The message was one we had all espoused, but it had added resonance
coming from them.
Councilmembers seemed sympathetic, and those whom we
had already briefed about our concerns asked the mayor’s
budget director pointed questions about why the amendments
had been put in the budget when D.C.’s chief financial officer
had certified that they had no budgetary impact.
The following Monday, the D.C. Council voted to remove the
mayor’s proposal from the Budget Support Act. Councilmember Graham introduced it as stand-alone legislation — Bill
20-0281, the “Homeless Services Reform Amendment Act
of 2013.” He announced that a hearing on the bill would be
held in early June.
Mobilizing the Community
As a community, we had won a more open and transparent
legislative process via a public hearing, but we had no time
to celebrate, because the bill was still on a fast track under
mayoral pressure. Along with some key partners, we continued
our outreach to people who were homeless or in supportivehousing programs to inform them of the key provisions of the
amendments. We encouraged them to voice their concerns via
the upcoming June hearing and visits to the D.C. Council.
At an open informational session a week before the scheduled
public hearing, we shared the Legal Clinic’s analysis of each
proposed amendment, heard additional concerns about the
substance of the amendments from the perspective of service
At the June 3 hearing, which lasted for ten hours, more than 60
public witnesses testified against the bill and offered alternatives to the proposals.
Most advocates, providers, and community members testified
that the amendments should be withdrawn completely — that
the proposed law would hurt, not help, people experiencing
homelessness. Some testified that the underlying assumptions
and premises of the proposals were flawed. Experts noted that
some provisions violated basic constitutional due-process protections and federal antidiscrimination laws. For instance, the
section proposing termination of tenants for stays in hospitals
or institutions would have violated the civil rights of tenants
with disabilities. (This legal testimony prompted Councilmember Graham to request that the District’s attorney general, Irv
Nathan, look into the constitutionality and legality of some of
the proposed bill’s provisions.)
A community came together quickly to
stop a local government from infringing on
the rights of its most vulnerable residents.
The administration had made its own efforts to mobilize providers to support the bill at the hearing but had failed to educate
them adequately on details of the provisions. For instance,
several providers testified that escrow programs were helpful
and therefore important to the residents of their shelters or
housing programs. But upon further questioning, they admitted
that they were in favor of escrow programs only if they were
voluntary, and that they would not expel people from their programs for missing escrow payments, as the proposed amendment stipulated.
page 27
UNCENSORED
The public pressure worked. After the hearing, we were approached by representatives of the administration about setting
up a meeting to explore whether there was any room for
agreement between the two sides. A series of meetings with
the D.C. Department of Human Services ensued, and large
parts of the bill were dropped. Yet soon we reached an impasse.
We were able to obtain a meeting with the chairman of the D.C.
Council, Phil Mendelson, at which we shared our remaining
concerns and our impression that the mayor would not budge
any further. Chairman Mendelson listened to our specific proposals and suggested that we try once more to reach agreement,
intimating that only after significant additional effort on our part
to reach an agreement would he intervene in the matter.
The fight could not have been won without
the active engagement of families and individuals
who would have been directly affected by the
regressive proposed policies.
At the final meeting with the deputy mayor, representatives of
the Department of Human Services, Councilmember Graham,
and members of our coalition, we presented our positions and
suggested possible compromises. A SHARC representative spoke
eloquently about the hundreds of homeless people he had
talked to about the misguided nature of the bill. He asked why,
if the mayor was invested in solutions to homelessness, he was
proposing only policies that left people out on the street instead
of working to create good-paying jobs and affordable housing.
The deputy mayor dismissed those comments, stating that there
would be no further negotiation and that the mayor was personally committed to seeing the bill, as it stood, pass. The SHARC
representative walked out of the meeting, while the rest of us
wondered why we were there if no further work was to be done.
The deputy mayor’s complete dismissal of the community’s
concerns and proposals left us free to realign our course in two
significant ways. First, we were able to go back to our original
positions on the provisions instead of proposing compromise
language. Second, we could now report to Chairman Mendelson that we had done our very best to work out a compromise
but had found the administration to be unyielding. Probably
page 28
Guest
Voices
noting our good faith efforts, the broad coalition we had
amassed, the substantive concerns we had raised, and the
positions of D.C. councilmember Graham and other councilmembers, which were more progressive than those of the
mayor, the chairman redlined the bill himself and took out
or ameliorated every one of the sections with which we still
had concerns.
In another stroke of good of luck, three days before the scheduled vote on the bill, the District’s June revenue forecast revealed
a surplus of $92.3 million for FY 2014. This disproved the administration’s claim that it would have to close singles shelters
if the legislation did not pass.
A Triumph of Community Teamwork
The bill that was passed at the June 27 council hearing was a
vast improvement over the original. Many of the most punitive
sections of the mayor’s proposed law were removed entirely
from the final version, including the provisional-placement
scheme, time limits for housing, and an expanded list of
grounds for termination from supportive housing.
Other sections of the original bill were greatly improved. The
law now gives the mayor authority to develop a mandatory
savings program, but an individual cannot be kicked out of
shelter for failing to save money. Similarly, a shelter resident
cannot be threatened with termination for failing to accept a
rapid-rehousing unit that does not meet his or her household’s
specific needs. Finally, the section that would have allowed
terminations of participants in supportive housing was altered
to protect the rights of people with disabilities and to extend
the right to return to housing after absences.
This process was an example of the power of communities to
safeguard the rights of their most disenfranchised members. At
the start of this journey, the administration had the advantage
of power, influence, and, at the beginning, control of the message. We faced setbacks along the way, but it was a testament
to the strength of our relationships with our allies that we were
able to adapt and shift strategies in a timely way. Finally, this
fight could not have been won without the active engagement
and participation of those residents, both families and individuals, who would have been directly affected by the regressive
policies in the mayor’s original proposal. ■
Spring 2014
Resources and References
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A Sweet Mission
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NY ■ National Association for the Education of Young Children http://
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http://www.gulfcoastenterprises.org/GulfCoastEnterprises/ Pensacola, FL ■
Homeboy Industries http://www.homeboyindustries.org/ Los Angeles, CA.
ON THE HOMEFRONT
Conferring on Homelessness
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EDITORIALS AND COLUMNS
Guest Voices
Homelessness and the Law
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UNCENSORED would like to thank
the Greyston Foundation for providing
photographs for use in this publication.
page 29
ICPH
USA
Institute for
Children, Poverty
& Homelessness
www.ICPHusa.org