USA: Homeless: How the Coronavirus Made New York the Wild West

Seldom before have there been so many homeless people in New York. Hundreds now live in expensive hotels. The neighbors are mad. A citizen patrol wants to ensure order.

They come in yellow school buses. You get out with a backpack over your shoulder or a plastic bag in your hand, walk across the wide sidewalk and disappear between the gold-framed glass doors of the luxury hotel Lucerne. The 283 homeless are bringing everything they have and with it unrest to the Upper West Side, one of the most privileged, liberal neighborhoods in New York. Here, on the west side of Manhattan, between Central Park and the Hudson River, almost 70 percent of the residents are white. And they are angry.

Nobody had informed them. As with the other three hotels that the social welfare office had converted in the area to relieve the overcrowded homeless shelters and curb the spread of the corona virus. More than 700 homeless people, including drug addicts, the mentally ill and former sex offenders, now live alongside families, dog owners and retirees. The homeless have moved in where the multi-lane Broadway with cafes and shops runs through the district and where sandstone houses with magnificent staircases are lined up in the side streets – and the consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak in the city are more visible than ever.

Now people want to get their streets back. With
Facebook, Chalk and hope. “This city needs a Batman,” says a local. And Curtis Sliwa is already there. With the “Guardian Angels”, an unarmed neighborhood watch that he founded in the Bronx in 1979, he is now patrolling the streets again. Like in the 80s and 90s when cheap
Drugs, Prostitution and unemployment boomed. When there were too few police officers and too many murders. When New Yorkers fled the city by the hundreds of thousands. “Now we’re moving in this direction again,” he said angrily on the TV station Fox News said.

Better not to mess with Curtis Sliwa from the neighborhood guard

Curtis meets with his team at the Central Park entrance on 72nd Street, across from the corner where John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980. Twelve people, including a woman. There are around 150 “Angels” in New York City. On this day, the oldest is a grandfather and the youngest is a student. Everyone wears a white T-shirt with the red “Guardian Angels” lettering and red berets, a flat headgear in Che Guevara style.

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Their leader Curtis Sliwa – 66 years old, red training jacket, red cap, gray beard – wants to become mayor next year. He doesn’t seem well trained, but you still don’t want to mess with him. He has already been beaten, stabbed and shot. “Thank you, Curtis,” calls a young man jogging past. Curtis smiles.

The group set off towards the hotels. Housing the homeless there, says the chief angel, should be discussed with the residents and not decided overnight. But at the moment every decision runs under “emergency”. “Why weren’t they taken out of the homes in March or April?” He asks.

At that time there were sometimes more than 5000 new infections per day in the city. Now there are an average of around 300. For weeks, less than one percent of the more than 40,000 tests reported every day have been positive.

Most hotel owners are friends of Mayor Bill de Blasio, explains Sliwa as he crosses the four-lane Amsterdam Avenue, “they are now getting endless coal” for their vacant hotels. Like the head of Lucerne, Sam Domb, who supported de Blasio with donations last year when this presidential candidate wanted to become Democrats. Curtis says Domb is selling his townhouse. “Sure, now that the drug dealers and prostitutes are coming.”

Curtis speaks with a true New Yorker accent, with stretched “A” s and “O” s. Everything he says sounds like the uncle is explaining the world to the child. Without a filter, as the Americans would say. As he speaks, sirens shrill, horns boom and people greet him. Young, old, women, men, homeless. Curtis hands out business cards, hugs, smiles, and takes photos.

Typically a room in New York costs $ 237 a night

He had offered to help on Facebook when concerned residents formed the Upper West Siders For Safer Roads group. It has more than 14,000 members who post pictures of the homeless almost every day: a man kneeling between parked cars and cleaning his bum; Spraying in playgrounds; broken shop windows and car windows; urinating, masturbating and harassing in public. The quality of life has fallen, the value of real estate has also increased, and crime has increased. “This is really the Wild West,” writes one user.

This weekend, the first homeless people should leave the Hotel Lucerne again. Where is the city taking them? Not clear. It is also unclear what will happen to the other three hotels.

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Yael B. and Estelle R. are not afraid. The mothers – tall, brunette, 38 years old – sit on a bench in a fenced-in playground 150 meters away from the hotels. “I haven’t seen anything bad. And not all homeless people are created equal,” says Yael. “The hotels are empty. So why not?” Estelle remembers an unconscious man on the street with the ambulance next to him. Her son asked if it was because of the drugs. She was amazed. “Until recently, my son didn’t even know the word drugs,” she says. But that’s part of life, part of the city.

For the people who live on the streets, the lockdown was especially tough. Where to go to the bathroom when Starbucks is closed? Where to beg when the streets are empty And those who do not have a place in the homeless shelter cannot be quartered in one of the hotels run by aid organizations. But Curtis finds that scandalous anyway: “And we pay for it?” He asks as he approaches the first hotel, the “Belleclaire” on Broadway.

A room costs an average of $ 237 per night, writes the New York Post. Including cleaning and food. 75 percent are financed by national disaster relief. The city has converted about 60 hotels to accommodate around 10,000 people, many in commercial areas. The social workers emphasize that the moves saved lives. In the homes, people lived in dormitories in which the beds were not a meter apart. You should be six feet apart
USA hold currently. 1.80 meters. Impossible. At the same time, everyone in New York has a right to housing. Also impossible.

There is a lack of affordable housing. Even those who work – which some of the residents do – cannot always afford rent in New York. It was like this long before the pandemic. Then came
Corona. Now around 20 percent of the eight million city dwellers are unemployed. Soon more could end up on the street.

Almost 60,000 people live in homeless shelters in New York

Almost 60,000 people live in New York’s homeless shelters. Then there are those on the street. During de Blasio’s tenure, since 2014, the number has risen to its highest level since 1930, reports the organization “Coalition for the Homeless”. Almost 90 percent are black and Latinos, the poorest and most severely affected by Covid-19. There are now hardly any new infections. If only that solved all problems.

The traffic rattles past the Hotel Belleclaire, the black double doors are closed. On the twenty meters walk to the next intersection, you go over colorful chalk writing. “Black lives matter” is written on the stone floor, “Everyone is welcome” and “Living is a human right”. Neighbors against racism called for the action on the Internet. It is not the time for a “not on my doorstep” attitude and “limousine liberals,” comment supporters. The neighborhood is divided.

Prison inmates were released early to contain the virus

“Hey Curtis, what’s up?” A lanky, dark-skinned man with no t-shirt grins at him. He holds his blue swimming trunks in one hand, and untanned skin peeks out from under his hip bones. “This man has already been arrested thirty times,” says Curtis, walking up to him and talking to him. Usually he sits with a group of other homeless people at the Broadway intersection. They don’t live in hotels. Men are also sitting on the steps of the church opposite. “They sell drugs,” says Curtis. A police car is parked next to it. “The cops hardly ever get out,” he says. “They don’t feel like it anymore. They think, that’s what you get out of it.”

Because in order to prevent the virus from spreading in prisons, many inmates were allowed to leave early in the spring. Suspects are often released after arrest because of bail reform. And after the death of George Floyd, protesters called for that
police to withdraw funds. In late June, the city cut its police budget by nearly $ 1 billion. Overtime? Painted.

There were 11 robberies and nine break-ins in the area in August. In the same month last year there were three and four respectively. There were also nine cases of assault, three more than in 2019. Is that something related to the homeless? Hard to say. More worrying is that gun violence is exploding. 212 shootings in the metropolis in August, almost 150 percent more than in August 2019. Two of them on the Upper West Side.

New York: There is more violence, more drugs – and no respect

Curtis has been on the streets of New York City, which has become the safest US metropolis, for more than 40 years. And now? His eyes narrow, as does the sidewalk. A landlord has put out chairs and tables. “There is more violence again. More gang crime. More drug use. No respect. And the police do nothing,” says Curtis.

The café patrons clap as he walks by. “Curtis is one of our heroes,” says a man with a stubbly gray beard and glasses who has lived in New York City since 1964. Curtis smiles. The road is his strength. The place where politicians feel uncomfortable and people don’t feel heard by politics.

Armando Mendez and Michael Alvarez know how it is. The two men, in their early 30s, live in one of the homeless hotels. Marianne Hettinger, who was born in Augsburg, gives them a voice: the filmmaker, who lives on the Upper West Side, interviewed them and uploaded the conversations to YouTube. Mendez and Alvarez look well-groomed. They want respect, a chance, and not being lumped together with those who stagger across the street and smoke marijuana; the mob and curse; who camp in front of shop windows; rummage through the garbage cans and filth the streets.

All of this has always been there in New York. Now there are more of them. And nobody can look away anymore.

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