Homelessness

St. Nicholas Housing Projects in Central Harlem

If there's one thing that one cannot avoid stumbling upon in New York, it's the presence of homeless people. They sit on the edge of sidewalks to ask for money, sleep in cardboard houses at church entrances at night and dig for food in garbage bins. Most of the time the homeless we see are men, black and range from middle age to old. To some extent, these are images we are accustomed to from other cities - just think of the homeless man that slept in front of our building in Lausanne throughout summer or of the Romanian groups that always ask for food, if not for money, at the entrance of Coop Grancy and Migros Closelet.

Nonetheless, things are different in New York, where homelessness has a dimension we would never have been capable to think of had we stopped our attention at the somewhat obvious signs of poverty one finds in every big city. The staggering truth about New York is that most of its homeless are invisible most of the time.

Fact is that almost 1% of New Yorkers are homeless. Each night some 60000 people, including many children, experience homelessness. Homelessness is not a phenomenon that concerns only social misfits, but families and kids just as well. During the day, homeless kids go to school, their parents search for jobs or work for salaries far from what a living wage would look like . During the night, these kids and their families often sleep in one of the many municipal or private shelters scattered over the city, which offer food and basic accommodation to people in need.

These homeless remain invisible if one doesn't try to look hard enough. Once grown sensitive, however, one often encounters mothers with tired kids carrying lots of strange bags in the subway at dusk, or people in worn out training pants fast asleep on subway seats in the early morning. What is more, I have recently discovered the coalition for the homeless van that serves food to homeless people every night at seven just one street north from where we live (which is to say in a neighbourhood inhabited for its most part by upper middle class people). 

Probably it would be easier to look away were it not for the strange feeling that this city's logic somehow builds on the availability of ridiculously cheap labour - a logic which becomes blatant in shop opening hours, cleaning service costs, prices for fast food products, and so on. It translates into the existence of vast neighbourhoods with median wages per household below 35'000$/year (Bronx) or 25'000$/year (Spanish Harlem) and into extreme feelings of foreignness whenever we happen to come across neighbourhoods of this kind (although we have never actually been to either the Bronx nor Spanish Harlem in particular).

Poverty and inequality of chance have long engaged me on a theoretical level.The unease I feel about it, however, has never been as concrete before coming here.