Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen Page A
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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plummeting property values to soaring crime. Mr. Brown says he was “scared to death” of opposition when the parishioners opened their little place in the community of Glendale, which is where Archie Bunker was said to have had his home. Last Sunday Mr. Brown took up a collection to pay for food for shelter guests. At the end of the day there was $1,100 in the baskets. Last month he called for more volunteers. Fifty people put their names on the list.
Surely there are more churches and synagogues out there that could do this. Surely a shelter in the basement would do more to teach the values that are supposed to inform the holidays than a hundred sermons.
Surely there is more connection with Christmas in setting up cots and serving stew than in the frenetic round of the season, which is habitually cited as exhausting and rarely as satisfying. Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders’ cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.
We question the efficiency of government, and with good cause. We say that something permanent needs to be done, and that is true. And if we agree that government has done a rotten job reducing the quotient of human misery, Mr. Brown has an alternative: Do it yourself.
“I work in midtown,” says Mr. Brown, who is a vice president in futures and options at Dean Witter, “and I saw these poor souls on the subway grates. We’re just trying to do what Christ asked us to do.” That is, to do good. Boy, does that seem distant from the white noise of modern life. “If I am for myself alone, what good am I?” said the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago, around the time that his coreligionists Mary and Joseph found themselves homeless in Bethlehem. And if the time to act is not now, when will it be?
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
May 20, 1992
Homeless is like the government wanting you locked up
And the people in America do not like you.
They look at you and say Beast!
I wish the people would help the homeless
And stop their talking.
—F RANK S. R ICE ,
the
Rio Times
The building is beautiful, white and beige and oak, the colors of yuppies. The rehab of the Rio came in seven-hundred-thousand dollars under budget, two months ahead of schedule. The tenants say they will not mess it up, no, no, no. “When you don’t have a place and you get a good place, the last thing you want to do is lose it,” said one man who slept in shelters for seven years—seven years during which you might have gotten married, or lost a loved one, or struck it rich, but all this guy did was live on the streets.
Mayor David Dinkins has announced that he will study parts of the study he commissioned from a commission on the homeless, the newest in a long line of studies.
One study, done in 1981, was called “Private Lives, Public Spaces.” It was researched by Ellen Baxter, who now runs the nonprofit company that has brought us the Rio and four other buildings that provide permanent housing for the homeless in Washington Heights.
Another study, done in 1987, was called “A Shelter Is Not a Home” and was produced by the Manhattan Borough president, David Dinkins, who now runs the city of New York. At the time, the Koch administration said it would study Mr. Dinkins’s study, which must have taught Mr. Dinkins something.
Robert Hayes, one of the founding fathers of the movement to help the homeless, once told me there were three answers to the problem: housing, housing, housing. It was an overly simplistic answer, and it was essentially correct.
Despite our obsessions with pathology and addiction, Ms. Baxter has renovated one apartment building after another and filled them with people. At the Rio, what was once a burnt-out eyesore is now, with its curving façade and bright lobby, the handsomest building on the block; what
Surely there are more churches and synagogues out there that could do this. Surely a shelter in the basement would do more to teach the values that are supposed to inform the holidays than a hundred sermons.
Surely there is more connection with Christmas in setting up cots and serving stew than in the frenetic round of the season, which is habitually cited as exhausting and rarely as satisfying. Parents have railed against shelters near schools, but no one has made any connection between the crazed consumerism of our kids and their elders’ cold unconcern toward others. Maybe the homeless are not the only ones who need to spend time in these places to thaw out.
We question the efficiency of government, and with good cause. We say that something permanent needs to be done, and that is true. And if we agree that government has done a rotten job reducing the quotient of human misery, Mr. Brown has an alternative: Do it yourself.
“I work in midtown,” says Mr. Brown, who is a vice president in futures and options at Dean Witter, “and I saw these poor souls on the subway grates. We’re just trying to do what Christ asked us to do.” That is, to do good. Boy, does that seem distant from the white noise of modern life. “If I am for myself alone, what good am I?” said the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago, around the time that his coreligionists Mary and Joseph found themselves homeless in Bethlehem. And if the time to act is not now, when will it be?
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
May 20, 1992
Homeless is like the government wanting you locked up
And the people in America do not like you.
They look at you and say Beast!
I wish the people would help the homeless
And stop their talking.
—F RANK S. R ICE ,
the
Rio Times
The building is beautiful, white and beige and oak, the colors of yuppies. The rehab of the Rio came in seven-hundred-thousand dollars under budget, two months ahead of schedule. The tenants say they will not mess it up, no, no, no. “When you don’t have a place and you get a good place, the last thing you want to do is lose it,” said one man who slept in shelters for seven years—seven years during which you might have gotten married, or lost a loved one, or struck it rich, but all this guy did was live on the streets.
Mayor David Dinkins has announced that he will study parts of the study he commissioned from a commission on the homeless, the newest in a long line of studies.
One study, done in 1981, was called “Private Lives, Public Spaces.” It was researched by Ellen Baxter, who now runs the nonprofit company that has brought us the Rio and four other buildings that provide permanent housing for the homeless in Washington Heights.
Another study, done in 1987, was called “A Shelter Is Not a Home” and was produced by the Manhattan Borough president, David Dinkins, who now runs the city of New York. At the time, the Koch administration said it would study Mr. Dinkins’s study, which must have taught Mr. Dinkins something.
Robert Hayes, one of the founding fathers of the movement to help the homeless, once told me there were three answers to the problem: housing, housing, housing. It was an overly simplistic answer, and it was essentially correct.
Despite our obsessions with pathology and addiction, Ms. Baxter has renovated one apartment building after another and filled them with people. At the Rio, what was once a burnt-out eyesore is now, with its curving façade and bright lobby, the handsomest building on the block; what
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