NEW YORK - At an hour when most people in the city are snug in their beds asleep, an army of exhausted little children and their mothers are loading into yellow school buses on a desolate corner in the Bronx, clutching pillows, plastic bags and one another as they shuttle in the dark to a city shelter for the night.
Shielding an infant and 2-year-old under her sweat shirt as a hard rain fell outside the city's Emergency Assistance Unit, Shantay Jones wept.
"Please, I need help, I have nothing," the 21-year old mother said. "I sat here till 3:30 a.m. until they gave us a bed last night. My nerves are shot."
These families - destitute and with nowhere to turn - are driving an exploding homeless population in New York City, setting records each week. Unlike the deranged sidewalk mutterer, the image New Yorkers are most familiar with, the truer - but hidden - face of homelessness in this city of riches is a child's.
16,384 children
On Oct. 9, the city set a record, sheltering nearly 37,000 people. A stunning 16,384 were children, and 13,072 were their parents. An additional 7,524 were single adults, the majority of them men, housed separately from families.
The crisis has grown rapidly for families in the past few years, with an 80 percent increase - to 8,931 from 4,954 - from June 30, 2000, to Oct. 9. Just 18 months ago, there were roughly 10,000 homeless children in shelters, compared with more than 16,000 now.
Overwhelmed city officials scramble daily to shelter these families, as required by law. To those on the front lines, it feels like a permanent emergency.
"Right now, I don't know whether the tidal wave is about to hit me or if I am in the tumult of it, or has it passed," said Linda Gibbs, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services. "I know there is a lot going on and we are responding on a daily basis, but I don't know where we are on that curve."
Why?
Why the increase?
It's not exactly clear, although experts cite the poor economy and rising unemployment.
One certainty: Rents in New York City have climbed steadily in recent years, making it nearly impossible for poor families - defined as earning less than $18,602 a year - to find housing. Most homeless families are headed by a single mother who earns much less than that.
From 1993 to 1999, the number of apartments in the city with rents less than $600 a month fell 20.6 percent to 650,600 from 819,300. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which does an annual survey of rental housing costs for the poor in American cities, a New Yorker earning minimum wage - $5.15 an hour - must work 142 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the market rate of $1,000 a month. Put another way, a person would have to earn $18.24 an hour in a 40-hour-a-week job to afford that rent, if spending 30 percent of his salary on rent, the federal standard.
Studies also cite a variety of social ills such as domestic violence, substance abuse and grinding poverty that force families to double-up or triple-up in apartments. Ultimately, it is no longer tenable to live in such cramped quarters and relatives and friends are sent packing with no place else to go.
"Now we have the worst of both worlds," said Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless. "You have more people seeking shelter because of the economic downturn and fewer people leaving the shelter system because there is not enough affordable housing for them."
Many families now are staying in shelters for nearly a year, compared with an average of five months in 1990. Most are welfare recipients and some are newly arrived in the city.
The cost to the city has skyrocketed. From June 30, 2000, to July 1, the budget for sheltering families more than doubled, to $257 million from $123 million, city officials said. The agency's total budget is about $583 million. "We continue to add beds on demand," said James Anderson, a spokesman for the city's homeless agency.
On top of this, a layered city bureaucracy frustrates and delays efforts to find permanent housing for the homeless, advocates say.
Gibbs said the city has enough rental subsidies set aside to house 9,200 families - enough to empty the 150 family shelters - but it takes three city agencies to sign off on an apartment.
The city Housing Authority, for example, is required to inspect every apartment rented with federal Section 8 funds to ensure that it meets federal habitability standards. Advocates say it routinely takes inspectors up to two months to get the job done - or worse, they lose families' applications. Landlords then end up renting to someone else.
"Regrettably," Gibbs conceded before a City Council committee last month, "the [city] did not make use of the scarce resources devoted to homeless families. One thousand of the Section 8 rental subsidy vouchers committed to homeless families last fiscal year went unutilized."
Bureaucrats faulted
Advocates also point to the city's Human Resources Administration, which they say mistakenly terminates or suspends welfare benefits for families on the verge of getting Section 8 units, sending them back to square one in their housing search.
At the same City Council hearing, Mary Brosnahan Sullivan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said, "Addressing the bureaucratic failures of city agencies ought to be a high priority for the administration, and it could begin by setting hard-target timeliness for inspection of apartments and application processing."
The sharp rise in homelessness is not unique to New York City. The numbers are growing across the country, from Cincinnati to San Diego. What is unique is that New York is the only city legally required to shelter anyone in need.
Other large cities, such as Los Angeles, Denver and Phoenix, report turning people away when they run out of room, leaving people to sleep in their cars or on the streets, according to an annual survey of 27 cities released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
"It's a delicate equilibrium between incentives and disincentives," said Nancy Wackstein, director of the office of homelessness during the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins in 1990-1991. "If it's too easy to get housing, as we learned in the Dinkins administration, then you open up the floodgates of the pent-up demand for housing. But if it's too hard, then you are punishing people for being poor. We have been living for the last 20 years with this crazy system."
Officials and advocates say the majority of people seeking shelter here are native New Yorkers, but hundreds of poor and down-on-their-luck people do travel here from other cities and countries to try to restart their lives.
On a recent visit to the EAU, as the Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx is known, Renee Grosso, 37, said she and her 3-year-old daughter, Reilly Marie, arrived Sept. 6 by Greyhound from Ohio, where she had lived for 13 years. Grosso, who has worked as a waitress, said she was put out by an abusive husband and was not welcome at her sister's house on Long Island. So she went straight to the Bronx agency, the city's sole shelter application office.
"One of the workers inside asked me, 'Is there something on the Internet about New York giving people places to live?' " Grosso said, cradling her daughter, whose eyelids were heavy from a bout with fever.
Another young mother said she just arrived after a 20-hour bus ride from Georgia, after her grandmother kicked her out. She said she used to live in New York and hoped to find help here, although she had no family or friends to help her and her two small children.
'I feel very sad'
Marvin Martinez, one of the bus drivers who shuttles these nomadic families to their nightly shelter beds, said that in the seven years he has been driving, this is the worst he has seen.
As a rain fell on Walton Avenue, just blocks from Yankee Stadium, Martinez waited at the wheel for 20 more bone-tired parents to hoist their strollers, their belongings and their little ones into the yellow school bus. It was after 10 p.m. before he turned on the motor to make the nocturnal journey from the Bronx office to a shelter on Manhattan's upper West Side.
"I feel very sad, driving children at 3 or 4 in the morning," he said. "Sometimes the children who are still awake ask me, 'Where are we going? Is it very far?' They are happy to get inside."
In the meantime, as the numbers continue to swell, and the Bloomberg administration has pledged to do better, tensions remain between the city and advocates for the homeless.
The city will be back in court Nov. 8 seeking permission to evict homeless families from shelters if they engage in gross misconduct or fail to seek or accept suitable apartments offered to them. Steven Banks, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, said he will contest the request, adding, "There are other ways to sanction vulnerable families other than putting them back out on the street."
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Helen Freedman, who has presided over the 20-year struggle between City Hall and the Legal Aid Society over sheltering homeless families, also will consider Legal Aid's motion to find Gibbs in contempt for allowing young children to spend nights on the Bronx office's floor and benches over the summer and busing them to different shelters each night.
Both practices are illegal based upon a 1999 court order that the Giuliani administration agreed to and a 2001 court order, which it did not appeal.
"We have never disputed that if someone sleeps on the floor of the EAU overnight they are entitled to compensation," said Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo.
The city admitted last month it was in contempt, and agreed to pay families $100 to $150 for each night they spent sleeping in the office or were bounced from shelter to shelter. Although no family is likely to receive more than $300, the agreement - which covers incidents dating back to 1995 - will likely cost the city more than $10 million.
Just two weeks ago, Jessica Rivera, 26, and her 6-year-old daughter, Julianna, were among those who found themselves bused nightly from one shelter to another while intake workers tried to determine whether they were eligible for permanent housing. "My daughter wakes up and says, 'Mommy, I'm tired.' It's 6 o'clock in the morning when they bang on our door at the shelter, and they didn't find a bed for us until midnight, 1 a.m. These babies got to get their hours.
"Then we wait all day here at this office," she added, referring to the Bronx office.
'I wish I was rich'
Julianna, a smiling first-grader in the Bronx, said she missed school twice last week because the shelter bus brought her back late.
"I just told the teacher my mommy and I had to go to the shelter," she said, hugging her mom. "I wish I was rich."
Striking it rich for now would be to hear the phrase every homeless family covets from city case workers: "You're eligible." In the 1990s, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani enacted strict eligibility requirements to ensure the city wasn't being scammed by people looking for a quicker route to affordable housing - something that occurred in the previous administration.
Each family has to provide a two-year housing history so investigators can check family ties and whether other housing alternatives are available. The Bloomberg administration has continued applying those strict eligibility requirements. Last year, 14,000 families applied for shelter; 7,000 were deemed ineligible and turned away.
"We have to look at every one of the applications and figure out, is this a person truly in an emergency and needing temporary shelter," said Gibbs. The agency's judgment to turn away 7,000 families last year was appropriate, she added, "demonstrated by the fact that we don't have 7,000 homeless families living on the city streets."
If granted eligibility, families are eventually placed in so-called Tier 2 shelter units - a private room with a bathroom, cooking and child care facilities - until a permanent apartment is found. Unfortunately, there are only about 4,000 of these units, and more than 8,900 families who need them.