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she looks messy if he can’t take her to his aunt’s
to get her hair braided, and he special- ordered a
‘‘Little Mermaid’’ birthday cake she wanted.
That Thursday, hours passed, and still no bus
arrived. Allen went back to his shelter room for a
while, where he could watch for the bus through
the window. At 6 p.m., London’s bus fi nally pulled
up. Allen said to the driver, ‘‘Man, does this look
like 3:30?’’ The driver shrugged. ‘‘I forgot two
kids,’’ he said. ‘‘I had to go back.’’
Allen climbed the steps. London, who had
now been riding on the yellow school bus long
enough to have gotten halfway across Delaware,
made no move to get off. She sat on the brown
vinyl- covered bench, stupefi ed, the contents of
her bag scattered through the bus. ‘‘Aw, your stuff
is everywhere,’’ Allen said as he scooped up her
pink fl owered coat and an I Can Read book and
put them into her Inside Out backpack.
Allen took London’s hand as they walked down
the street. She looked completely zoned out.
Halfway down the block, she bit her father’s arm
through his leather coat sleeve, and something
about the contact and his reaction seemed to help
her reoccupy her body. She started debriefi ng him
about her day. ‘‘My teacher said I am a reader!’’ she
said, adding that she was given a new Disney book.
Ever since they had been transferred to this
South Brooklyn shelter, the bus ride often took
this long, Allen told me. For the fi rst few weeks,
London would sometimes wet her pants on the
bus or sprint down the street to try to make it to
the bathroom, he said.
Allen and London became homeless after they
were evicted from the Bronx apartment in the
summer of 2017, where they had been living for
two years with two cats, one of whom was named
Percy for the ‘‘Thomas the Tank Engine’’ series.
London had gone to pre kindergarten at a near-
by school, where a teacher suggested that she
might apply for a gifted program. London had
been notably ahead of her peers for a while, Allen
said. At age 2, she knew all her colors, senses and
numbers and spoke in full non toddler sentences.
‘‘Other kids in her preschool were barely talking,’’
Allen remembered proudly.
But Allen could not keep up with the rent on
his salary. ‘‘I couldn’t buy her clothes, shoes,
food and also cover it,’’ he said of the rent grimly.
When they were evicted, they were placed at the
shelter in Queens, and Allen enrolled London in
kindergarten at the zoned school up the block
from the shelter.
One day at the Queens shelter, Allen told me,
he left London alone in their room and walked
to the room next door to speak to someone. Lon-
don wandered out into the hall, and Allen said
a shelter staff member reported him to Child
Protective Services for negligence. London
was placed in foster care for 90 days while he
attended mandated parenting classes. During
that time, Allen went to a shelter for single men
in Brooklyn, and London’s foster family enrolled
her in a diff erent school in Queens that was close
to their house.
After three months, when the two were reunit-
ed, they were placed in a family shelter in Brook-
lyn. London had to take a 90- minute school-bus
ride to and from her school in Queens each day,
but it was workable.
Then, during fi rst grade in December 2018,
the city announced that the family shelter in
Brooklyn where Allen and London lived would
be converted into a men’s shelter, so they were
transferred to a shelter even farther from Lon-
don’s school. The commute would take an hour
to drive, but it is 2½ hours by mass transit on
a good day, and the city did not immediately
provide school-bus service. London missed two
weeks of fi rst grade waiting for the school bus to
show up at her new shelter. When it fi nally did,
it was a disaster.
Although Allen woke London at 5 a.m. so the
school bus could take her to Queens, it often
dropped her off at school an hour late, and she
would miss her fi rst period. Her teacher sent
home the lessons London missed for Allen to
review with her. But the bus ride home was even
worse, often taking three hours. By the time
she got home, did homework, ate dinner and
showered, the work from fi rst period was not
getting done. ‘‘It’s piled so high,’’ Allen told me
that Thursday in the spring of 2019. ‘‘I don’t know
when we will do it.’’
Allen was then faced with the choice that near-
ly every homeless family I’d met agonized over:
whether to continue to unpredictably uproot
their children from school every time they moved
or endure the brutal commute. ‘‘I like the teacher,
I like the principal, I like the school,’’ he told me.
‘‘I didn’t want to keep switching her. I like that
she has all these friends.’’
Allen understood the dangers of switching
schools. ‘‘Every time she changes schools, she
loses time — the teachers don’t know her, she
doesn’t know them and she falls more and more
behind,’’ he said. She started kindergarten ahead
of grade level, he added, ‘‘and I just got a letter
that this year she may be held back.’’
Allen’s experience is borne out by most
research about midyear transfers, which shows
that these changes usually cause academic set-
backs for children. There was a school down the
street from his Brooklyn shelter. ‘‘But what if I
start her there and we get transferred again?’’
Allen asked, pained. ‘‘She makes friends, leaves
them, makes friends, leaves them. It’s not good.
I don’t want her to be a loner.’’
Before the start of second grade in Septem-
ber 2019, Allen knew he couldn’t sustain the lost
hours of work and London’s missed fi rst periods
any longer, so he did enroll her in the school
down the block from their Brooklyn shelter.Then, in December, he got off the waiting list
for public housing, and he and London moved
to a building in Harlem. He used the furniture
allowance he was given to take London to her
Brooklyn school in cabs for weeks, until the bus
came to Harlem. He managed to buy London a
nice bed, but he sleeps on a mattress pad on the
fl oor and the apartment is mostly unfurnished.
For two weeks after the schools closed down
in March because of the corona virus, Allen had to
report to work in Midtown Manhattan. He hired
a babysitter to stay home with London and fell
behind on rent. Starting in April, Allen was able
to work from home on a computer while London
tried to do assignments on the iPad she received
through the Department of Education. London
had only one live online class a week on Friday.
The rest of the time, a feed on Google Classroom
would bring up new assignments. Allen tried to
get London to write them out in a notebook. At
fi rst, she would work until noon, but as time went
on, she became less and less engaged with the
new assignments. ‘‘It seems like she can’t even
read anymore,’’ Allen told me in May. ‘‘It’s really
bad. She’s moving backward. I’ve seen her watch
YouTube 24 hours a day. I have to fi nd a way to
get her back on track.’’Nearly 40 years after the city was fi rst caught off
guard by the infl ux of homeless families, the sys-
tem for placing them is still unpredictable and
haphazard. A family may be placed in one of the
new Turning the Tide facilities with better resourc-
es. More likely, though, they will be sent some-
where like Crystal’s Place or Baychester, a former
motel that is across the street from a live poultry
market in the Bronx and looks as though it were
pilfered from the set of ‘‘The Munsters.’’ Families
can be placed in cluster housing. And they are also
sent to commercial hotels, where they live, at great
expense to the city, often without a kitchen, far
from amenities most families need, trying not to
advertise their presence to the paying guests. Of
course, plenty of guests fi gure it out; in a review of
the Skyline Hotel, a midrange hotel on 10th Ave-
nue in Manhattan, one traveler complained on
Trip Advisor about ‘‘men in the lift with reheated
microwave meals’’ and noted ‘‘children coming
back to the hotel in uniforms.’’
The Department of Homeless Services has
paid as much as $549 a night to rent hotel rooms
and has also housed families at hotels that were
being used for sex work and were troubled by
violence. In 2018, the city’s Department of
Investigation published a report showing that
from January to August of the previous year,
59 prostitution- related arrests and 34 assault-
related arrests had been made at 34 of the city’s
57 commercial hotels housing homeless fami-
lies with children.
One night outside the PATH intake center in
the Bronx in April 2019, I met a mother, Elizabeth,
pushing a double stroller with two babies andHomeless
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