27Illustration by Hokyoung KimBut working minimum- wage jobs, she was
never able to save enough to aff ord New York
City rents, and over the years she and Prince
bounced from shelter placement to shelter
placement. In 2015, she met Manuel, and they
moved to Florida, where they hoped to fi nd
better housing and work opportunities. But
after about a year and a half of diffi culty fi nd-
ing jobs, they came back to New York, and
eventually the three of them ended up in a
shelter in East Harlem.
In February 2019, Fifi suddenly started to
see a relative of Prince’s biological father on
the street near the shelter. She and Prince’s
father are from a tight-knit community of
fi rst- generation Bangladeshi immigrants in
Queens, and news often travels fast. She was
terrifi ed that if the relative saw her, Prince’s
father would fi nd out where she was and would
come for them. Over the years, police reports
show that when Prince’s father has found Fifi ,
he has at various times beaten her (slamming
her against a wall) and locked her in his apart-
ment. He also kidnapped Prince, when he was
a toddler, from a family barbecue, she said.
But those events happened a while ago; the
restraining orders Fifi took out against him
after each one had expired.
Fifi stopped going to her job at Whole
Foods to avoid seeing the relative. She asked
for a shelter transfer but was told it would take
up to six months. On the informal advice of a
worker in the East Harlem shelter, Fifi decided
to have the family stay away from the shelter
for two nights, which would mean they were
logged out and offi cially homeless again.
She and Manuel packed whatever belong-
ings would fi t in their shopping cart and the
two crates the homeless shelter had previ-
ously given them, she said, to protect their
food from the shelter’s mice. They left Prince’s
math posters, stuffed animals and other
belongings, vowing to replace them when
they were settled in a new shelter. Prince at
this point was used to losing things in moves;
the only toy he really missed was a jumbo Nerf
gun he got for Christmas one year.
The family walked with their shopping cart
to Manuel’s father’s one- bedroom apartment
in public housing in East Harlem. It was already
overcrowded, with six people staying there.
The bathroom had a broken door that would
not fully close, and there was mold on the walls.
Fifi helped Prince shower in the bathroom for
school, but she could not bring herself to use it.
Prince, Fifi and Manuel slept on the fl oor
of the apartment for two nights, but when
they went back to the PATH center, they were
told that they had not been offi cially logged
out, so they had to spend another two nights
on the fl oor. On Thursday morning, having
fi nally logged themselves out, they hoisted
their metal shopping cart up the subway stairs
to go to PATH.
Prince had switched schools every time
his family’s shelter placement changed, so he
had never completed more than one year in
any school in New York. That year, he startedasking his parents if he would be able to stay
with his friends at his school in East Harlem.
Fifi was happy with the instruction and the
school culture. ‘‘I think it is my favorite school
of all the ones he went to,’’ she told me. She
was hoping that they would be placed close
enough to the school to keep Prince there.
The Department of Homeless Services says
it takes into account the neighborhood where
the family’s youngest child attends school
in its placement, and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s
administration has made this a policy priority.
Nonetheless, according to the 2020 Mayor’s
Management Report, only some 50 percent
of city shelter placements in 2019 were in the
same borough as the youngest child’s home
school, a percentage that rose in the fi rst four
months of this year to 60 percent. Of the fam-
ilies I spoke to, only one had actually been
placed close to their child’s school.
According to the department, this is partly
because the vacancy rate in shelters is so low
that it is hard to make precise placements. It’s
also partly because families fl eeing domestic
violence are not supposed to be placed in a
shelter in the same borough as the abuser; 40
percent of all homeless families have some
history of domestic violence.
After some 13 hours at the PATH center
that Thursday, Fifi and Manuel received a new
shelter placement: Crystal’s Place, a family
shelter at 555 Hutchinson River Parkway in
the Bronx. As they waited for the Department
of Homeless Services van to pick them up,