Give a Man a Home
Two cities' responses to homelessness.
By Yonah Freemark, Yale University
Friday January 19, 2007
Immediately after arriving in Paris last May, I noticed the dozens of homeless people dotting its subway platforms and streets. Some simply slept on the stations’ benches; others rambled, disheveled, with their dogs. Almost every day I stepped aside as men and boys planted themselves in the center of sidewalks with handwritten signs indicating their hunger. At night, walking through deserted streets, I saw men and women crouching in front of the Sorbonne, in the parks, and on the doorstops of the city’s most upscale stores. Some were even found in tents lining the city’s river, the Seine.
I returned to the United States a few weeks later to live in New York City. While there were homeless people present, I saw far fewer than in Paris. Only on the steps of a Fifth Avenue church did I see a large number of individuals living without a home; there, ten men slept on cardboard boxes, their eyes bright in the light of Midtown’s riches.
Yet my observations showing homelessness to be a far worse problem in Paris than in New York are not supported by hard facts. While there are between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals without homes in the French capital, about 38,000 suffer similar predicaments in Gotham, according to each government. Paris’s population of roughly 2 million has roughly the same percentage of homeless—0.5 percent—as New York’s 8 million, though because of their living conditions, it’s never easy to produce an accurate census of the very impoverished. The fact that the homeless are more visible in Paris than New York speaks not to a larger French problem, but the different public policy stances each city has toward its homeless population.
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| Tents house the homeless along the Canal St. Martin in Paris. (AP) |
New York ’s poorest are the beneficiaries of a state law that ensures that all people who cannot find a place to live must be housed by the city if they demand help. As a result, more than 30,000 people—many of whom are children—live in municipal support shelters, where the average stay is almost a year. Many inhabitants treat these temporary homes more like permanent refuges, and recent increases in the homeless population have made solving the housing demand a priority. The Bloomberg administration has introduced new reforms (called “Housing Stability Plus”) that allow the poor to use vouchers to pay for city-approved housing in privately-owned residences.
The New York-based non-profit Coalition for the Homeless, however, argues that these reforms have augmented some of the hardship already experienced by the homeless. For example, the laws make it difficult for those wishing to take advantage of the city’s housing programs to also work—the rules require them to stay on public assistance. Consequently, people who are able and willing to be employed but still cannot afford housing because of the city’s very high rental rates are in a bind. Why should they have to pick between an apartment and a job?
Meanwhile, although 4,000 new shelter apartments were created yearly by the city between 1988 and 1992, only an average of 400 were built in recent years. To make matters worse, apartments in which the homeless can live under the new rules are often rated “unsatisfactory” by the city’s own Department of Housing; rental prices are too high for even those with vouchers to afford anything acceptable. The housing market in New York is tight and rents have been rising across the board everywhere in the city, even as the gap in income between the rich and poor continues to grow. Federal funds for affordable housing have also declined: Allocations have shrunk because of the Bush administration’s antipathy towards funding for Section 8 Vouchers and similar aid programs.
The crunch on affordable housing is partly a result of long-standing regressive policy toward the poor in New York. Beginning in 1994 during Rudy Giuliani’s time in office, the homeless could be arrested for putting their bodies down on private property; the police took about 3,000 people to jail in 2002 for committing that “crime.” Recently, there have been further efforts to ensure that the homeless are denied access to the places they’ve relied upon as shelter. Mayor Bloomberg, as quoted in a press release on July 18 of last year, announced that he would work to “let them know that their days on the street must end.” That message, supposedly based on the presumption that the streets are unhealthy places to live, is more likely a result of the administration’s perception that visible homelessness is a scar on the city that should not be visible to tourists and the rich. The city’s efforts to get the homeless out of the streets are motivated more by concerns over New York’s appearance than an interest in aiding the homeless and mitigating the housing crisis. Even though the homeless certainly don’t add beauty to the streetscape, they add a dose of reality, demonstrating that even in the richest city in the world, the poorest are still unable to afford their own homes.
On the other hand, France’s government, with its more extensive program of public housing, has proven to be far more concerned with the plight of the poor. It is easier for the poorest to find housing in the Paris region than in and around New York.
The homeless in Paris itself, unlike their counterparts in New York, are not guaranteed housing, but do have the right to sleep wherever they wish at night, as long as they do not block entries to businesses during the day. The city’s supply of emergency housing is very tight at only 3,900 beds. That’s why groups like Médecins du Monde (MDM) have installed tents in the city’s public spaces and provide free health care to those who stay in the makeshift structures. The tents may actually be encouraging life on the streets. With the city giving the homeless the ability to survive without the regulations and harshly bureaucratic surroundings of shelters, many individuals may choose not to enroll in government programs that promote rules-driven communal living. The increasingly prominent presence of the homeless is forcing Parisians to recognize that a significant portion of Paris’s population is far from well off and that urgent solutions are needed.
But many—including Paris’ Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë—are concerned about what effect the tents are having on the streets. Several tents have been burnt down and during summer, those living in the makeshift structures are more susceptible to heat-related disease than those living in buildings. Winter’s cold will likely only increase the dangers of living in such flimsy environments.
The risk also exists that Médecins du Monde’s actions, intended to encourage consciousness of the homeless population’s difficulties, may backfire and result in a push toward hiding the homeless from tourists’ eyes. In recent months, Mayor Delanoë has encouraged negotiations between MDM and representatives of the city’s neighborhoods, who for the most part resent what they see as a too-visible intrusion onto the beautiful Parisian landscape. But the mayor’s efforts to construct more housing for the poor have been resisted in the past; though he has attempted to build up to 5,000 new beds for temporary housing, projects have been held up by the power of tony neighborhoods like the 16 th arrondisement, whose residents disparage the presumption that the impoverished ought to be distributed throughout the capital. Delanoë’s push for housing, and his increasingly popular demand to provide for the welfare of the city’s poorest, have pushed even France’s conservative leaders to argue for a “right to housing.”
Neither city provides acceptable solutions to all of its indigent population. Paris gives the homeless options not available in New York—the right to live on the streets within the city—but the Big Apple’s supply of emergency housing is far more extensive. The requirement that the city provide housing for all of its residents serves as an admirable example for cities both domestic and abroad. But in the end, New York has done little beyond the surface level to help the homeless; it has provided neither sustainable housing options, the right to work, nor even a social support network and its protections. Paris’s key differentiator is that its problem is visible. Tourists and locals alike recognize the presence of the homeless—perhaps the ultimate social pariahs—on Paris’ streets. If we’re truly interested in ensuring the right of all individuals to shelter, then we must recognize that solving the plight of the poor requires a multi-pronged effort, one that combines the best efforts of both of these leading cities.
Yonah Freeman is a junior at Yale. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Hippolytic, a Campus Progress-sponsored publication.
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Comments
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good, informative article on something that needs dire attention, thx
— Jerry Nelson - Jan 26, 01:47 PM - #