This past week, the New York
Post published a story about a homeless drum-seller in Brooklyn who keeps being
moved along after setting up
camp. His name is Thomas Harris, and in
the summers, when the drum circle is active in Prospect Park, this man camps [or
used to] along the edge of the park on Ocean Avenue right across from my front
window.
I wasn’t actually sure he was
homeless until this Post article. I just
thought he camped on the sidewalk all summer because he didn’t want to haul his
drums home every night and didn’t want to leave them alone at the park. Now I know.
Homeless encampments are
illegal in New York City, as is sleeping in the subway or blocking a sidewalk
or, heaven forbid, a bank ATM. It’s okay
to sleep on a bench or on the sidewalk as long as you don’t block traffic or
someone doesn’t call the police. I
suppose you could just stand up and lean against that wall and sleep if that
were possible. The homeless population
in New York City all needs to find a way to Los Angeles where they can join the
homeless encampments stretching for miles and miles downtown – or the
smaller camps under bridges in every area.
There’s a drive to house the
homeless, but how is that going to happen in the city like New York where the housing is so limited that people fight to get an apartment. A friend of mine once rented a “room” in an
apartment that had no windows.
Creepy. It was in an apartment
that the landlord had turned into a “2-bedroom” (illegally) by putting up walls in the
living room to create that second bedroom.
I know more than one person who rented an apartment in Manhattan in
which the bathroom was outside the apartment in the hallway.
So how’s this rehouse-the-homeless project going to work out, unless the landlord’s get permission to
rent out the hallways and janitor closets for homeless people to sleep? While the landlord’s would love to do this,
the regular tenants wouldn’t like it much.
There are some shelters in
New York, but they fill quickly and they are very dangerous. There are dumpsters to sleep inside –
provided they don’t get locked at night.
There are about 75,000 homeless people in New York. Where do they all sleep? And where do they get their food? Or the money for their food?
The questions about eating
and sleeping for homeless people interests me a lot because, as unbelievable as
it may seem, the death rate for homeless people in the City is lower than the death rate generally which includes all those for housed people. And drug
overdoses constitute a large percentage of the homeless death rate. The death rate for the overall population of
New York city is 6/10% while the death rate for homeless people is 3/10%. That’s ½ the regular death rate. Mindboggling.
And this statistic holds true in other cities with a large homeless population
– such as Los Angeles.
Population of NYC in 2017 was
8,615,000. Total deaths 54,000 = .6%
Homeless population of NYC
was 75,500. Total deaths 239 = .3%
Drum-seller Thomas Harris has twice the
chance of survival on the streets of NYC as in an apartment or house, as do his
homeless companions. Yet, no one is
asking what is it about their lives that creates that much lower death rate.
[Read the Post article
here: https://nypost.com/2018/12/09/two-heartbreaking-truths-about-the-city-and-street-homeless/]
