30
9.13.20
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
⬤ THE EDUCATION ISSUE
disgusting,’’ Fifi reported happily. ‘‘You could
cook in that oven.’’ Prince skipped across the
living- room area, where Fifi and Manuel slept
on twin beds pushed together, to show me how
big it was. ‘‘See? I can run from this side to the
other,’’ he told me, hamming it up, and added,
‘‘There are no rats under the heater!’’ The sub-
way outside Prince’s room went directly to his
school, and the neighborhood had the stores
and laundro mat the family would need.
When Prince returned to school on Tuesday
morning, two weeks after he left, his teacher
asked where he had been for so long. ‘‘We were
moving,’’ Prince reported. The teacher, who
didn’t know at the time that the family was
homeless, found it odd. ‘‘In my mind, I had
never heard of it taking that long to move, and
I wondered, Why didn’t the parents bring him
to school while they moved?’’ she told me.
Not long after Prince returned to school was
the big math test he had been anticipating. His
teacher told him he didn’t have to take it if he
didn’t want to because he had missed the last
unit. But Prince and Fifi had been practicing the
math sheets on the class app at the PATH center,
and she wanted Prince to take the test. ‘‘In a way,
I wanted to see — is he still OK from this week?’’
Fifi told me. ‘‘How much is he aff ected?’’ When
the results came back, Prince scored an 84, lower
than his usual top grades. He knew that his moth-
er wanted to see higher scores. When he turned
over the test to Fifi , he said in a small voice: ‘‘I’m
sorry, Mama. I’ll do better next time.’’Family homelessness in New York
City at the current scale is a phenomenon of
the last several decades. For many years, thecity population of homeless families hovered
between 250 and 1,000 a year. In the 1980s,
during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a reces-
sion coincided with deep cuts in social- service
programs like job training, day care and aid for
dependent children. Perhaps most signifi cant,
Reagan greatly reduced the budget for public
housing and Section 8 housing, a voucher pro-
gram that subsidizes rent; between 1981 and
1989, budget authorizations for the Depart-
ment of Housing and Urban Development,
which is responsible for low- income housing,
fell to $6.9 billion from $32.2 billion. In 1970,
there were 6.5 million subsidized rental units
and 6.2 million low- income renter households;
by 1985, there were 5.6 million units and 8.9
million low- income renter households.
During this period, families in New York
started showing up in unexpectedly large
numbers at Emergency Assistance Units in
each borough, which were the precursors to
PATH. Ralph da Costa Nunez served as deputy
commissioner of social services 40 years ago,
when Ed Koch was mayor. He remembers that
when the population of homeless families went
from 950 in 1982 to more than 5,000 in 1988,
he and Koch at fi rst thought it was a temporary
bump. But as the years dragged on, it became
clear that stagnating wages, cuts to public pro-
grams and a lack of aff ordable housing had per-
manently dislodged a segment of low- income
earners from the housing market.
Homeless families slept on metal cots in
gyms and auditoriums, in wards at the Bellev-
ue psychiatric hospital and in ‘‘welfare hotels’’
with deplorable conditions. During his ten-
ure, Koch announced a 10-year plan to create150,000 aff ordable- housing units, later revising
this to 252,000 units, and to allocate 15,000 of
them to homeless households. He also began
developing shelters for families, which were
assumed at the time to be an interim measure.
When Mayor David Dinkins took offi ce in 1990,
he added social services to family shelters and
continued to off er priority for public housing
to homeless families. The homeless- family
population grew, and a theory developed
among some policy experts that the practice of
off ering homeless families priority placement
in aff ordable housing provided incentives for
people to enter the shelter system; this the-
ory was later refuted. But when Rudolph W.
Giuliani became mayor, he sought to discour-
age people from entering the shelter system.
Although Giuliani continued the practice of
placing shelter residents in public housing and
in Section 8 housing, he did not invest in shel-
ter infrastructure and made it harder to apply
for placement. He started the cluster- site pro-
gram in 2000, paying market rates to landlords
of apartments that were often of poor quality
to house homeless people with little oversight.
Michael R. Bloomberg came into offi ce with
a pledge to cut homelessness by two-thirds. He
initially stopped off ering homeless families pri-
ority placement for public housing and Section
8 programs and established a rental subsidy
called the Advantage program, and at fi rst the
homeless population dropped. Advocates for
the homeless were critical of the program’s
work requirements and temporary nature and
lobbied against it; Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo
withdrew funding, and the program ended in- As a result, tens of thousands of families