31Illustration by Hokyoung Kimwere evicted. During Bloomberg’s tenure, the
shelter population grew from 37,000 in 2010 to
nearly 61,000 by the end of 2014, 70 percent of
whom were families.
When de Blasio was elected, he walked
into a storm. He had campaigned on reducing
income inequality and had promised to lower
the homeless population. He initially instituted
anti- eviction measures and rental subsidies,
which moved many people out of shelters
but couldn’t stop the fl ow of others into the
homeless system. In 2017, de Blasio unveiled
a second plan, Turning the Tide on Homeless-
ness, to invest in shelter infrastructure, reduce
the reliance on hotels and cluster housing and
mitigate some of the worst impacts of family
homelessness. The plan calls for the construc-
tion of 90 shelters, including family shelters,
39 of which have opened, according to the
Department of Homeless Services. These
shelters have social- service providers and
off er things like after- school programs. They
are unusual in that they are in neighborhoods
that have never had shelters; the hope is that
by increasing capacity, more families can be
placed near ‘‘anchors of life,’’ especially schools.
Today, no one imagines that family home-
lessness in New York City is a temporary emer-
gency; it is a tacitly accepted part of the picture
of what it means to be poor here. According to
an analysis by the National Low Income Hous-
ing Coalition, New York and its surrounding
metro area currently has 950,673 extremely-
low- income renter households; the number of
units for such households is 321,000. Even if the
goals of Turning the Tide are met, the city will
still have a population of some 65,000 homeless
families, according to the Institute for Chil-
dren, Poverty and Homelessness, a nonprofi t
research- and- advocacy organization. Last year,
the city spent roughly $3.2 billion on homeless
services, more than double what it spent in
2014, according to a comptroller report. The
average length of stay in a shelter is 474 days.
Steven Banks, one of the original Legal Aid
Society lawyers who went to court to fi ght for
a right to shelter, is the city commissioner of
social services and oversees the Department of
Homeless Services. Banks told me that the right
to shelter has ‘‘transformed lives’’ in New York
City, and he also pointed to Los Angeles, where
many more homeless people live in unsheltered
situations. But, he said, if he could have brought
the case as a right to housing in addition to shel-
ter, he would have. ‘‘Temporary versus perma-
nent housing and other resources is equivalent
to having a debate in the health care sector over
funding emergency rooms or just preventative
medicine,’’ he said. ‘‘Of course you need both.’’
Nunez, who is now the president and chief
executive of the Institute for Children, Poverty
and Homelessness, says that ‘‘after years and
years of growing the shelter system, it’s time to
call it what it really is: a surrogate for aff ordable
housing.’’ But unlike the aff ordable- housing pro-
grams of the past — rent- regulated apartments,
federally funded Section 8 vouchers — the
shelter system is, in Nunez’s words, ‘‘creating
a whole class of poverty nomads, a generation
that is getting accustomed to nomadism.’’
The consequences of this nomadism go
beyond education. The norms at many home-
less shelters can be jail-like and put a heavy
social burden on children. Families are not
allowed to have any visitors in their rooms
and have to be present at nightly curfew. They
must sign in and out every time they come
and go. Some families told me that they were
not allowed to bring in furniture, including
air- conditioners, microwave ovens, TVs or a
mini- trampoline if an autistic child requires
one to calm herself. I was also told by residents
at various shelters that nail clippers, scooters
and fl ip-fl ops were forbidden. And some fami-
lies said that shelter personnel used the threat
of calling Child Protective Services as a way to
enforce their rules.
One afternoon in September 2018, after
school let out, I met Angel, who was from a
Puerto Rican family and was 17 at the time. He
was wearing Vans and earrings. He, his moth-
er and his little brother, RJ, had been evicted
from their Bronx apartment in December 2017
and were living in a family shelter in Brooklyn.
(To protect their privacy, only their fi rst names
are being used.) RJ had switched to the school
near their shelter, but Angel was old enough to
make the daily three- subway commute back to
the Bronx to continue at his high school. After
school, Angel said, his friends would go home,
have a snack and play video games, talking on
their headsets, until they met up later.
Angel wanted to stay in the Bronx to play
basketball with his friends when they went out
later. So he would walk around the neighbor-
hood near school, killing time, maybe stopping
at his grandmother’s house before her shift as a
subway conductor began. ‘‘I just wait for some-
one to text me where they decided to meet up,’’
he explained as we sat on a bench near the sub-
way stop in the Bronx. Angel ate a foot-long
marinara sub and drank a blue Gatorade. The
move had taken an academic toll — Angel said
that there was no desk or comfortable place to
do homework in the shelter and that he had fall-
en off the honor roll — but there was also a social
toll. ‘‘People always ask why I have to go home
so early, why I never stay over,’’ he told me.
Angel was stoic when he told me about a
pool party that he couldn’t go to because of the
shelter curfew. But he became agitated describ-
ing a weekend morning when his mother let
him sleep in while she took RJ to football prac-
tice in the Bronx. ‘‘A shelter supervisor came
out, and she screamed at my mother in front
of everyone that they’re going to call C.P.S. if
she ever leaves me sleeping in the room again,’’
he said, his face seared with shame. ‘‘I didn’tmind that I will now have to get up at 7 a.m. on
a weekend, but I minded a lot that they yelled
at my mother in front of everyone. They made
her cry. They threatened her.’’
In April 2019, the family was able to move
to a shelter back in the Bronx, where RJ, who
was 8 at the time, started his third school in 18
months. RJ, who has chubby cheeks and soft
black hair, showed me a swimming pool at a
nearby housing project and excitedly said his
mother had promised to teach him to swim
there. Then he paused and added the quali-
fi cation: ‘‘If we still live here in the summer.’’
(They did not live there by summer.)
Over a snack at McDonald’s, I asked RJ,
who was repeating fi rst grade, if students in his
newest class knew that he was homeless. He
looked at me as though I were crazy. ‘‘I don’t
tell anyone I’m homeless,’’ RJ said. ‘‘Everyone
else has a house or an apartment.’’ His mother
pointed out to him that another child in his
class also lived in the shelter, a fact they dis-
covered one afternoon when the boys returned
from school at the same time. I asked RJ if he
played with his classmate at the shelter, and
he again looked at me with utter baff lement.
‘‘No one can come in your room, not even your
cousins,’’ he said. ‘‘And if we played in the hall-
way, the security would yell.’’One Thursday in May 2019, I waited
with a father named Allen on a street corner
in South Brooklyn, near the homeless shelter
where he lived. He was waiting for the school
bus carrying his fi rst-grade daughter, London.
(To protect their privacy, Allen and London are
identifi ed by their middle names.) She was com-
ing home from her school in Queens, where she
had enrolled when they lived in a shelter there.
The driver had said the bus would arrive at 3:30.
Though the bus was often late, Allen had to leave
work early and be there just in case; if he missed
the bus, he worried that he might be reported
to Child Protective Services.
Allen, who is Black, is tall and wears a base-
ball cap slightly cocked to the side and holds
a steady, gentle gaze. He is 32 and works for a
city agency as a mentor for young fathers in the
foster- care system. He told me that he spent
time in the foster- care system as a child and
served time as a minor for selling drugs. He
got his high school equivalency diploma while
incarcerated on Rikers Island, and some years
after he was released, London was born. She
lived with her mother, but when she turned
2, Allen said, her mother told him she could
no longer take care of her. Allen, who had
been living on Long Island, didn’t have a suit-
able apartment for London to move into. He
entered the New York City shelter system, he
said, and the city later placed him in an apart-
ment in the Bronx and paid the moving costs.
Allen leaned into parenting London; he fusses
over her, worrying that (Continued on Page 60)