Emergency Assistance Unit

Adults and children can spend day after day sitting in enforced inactivity and hanging around the building on four-hour passes. At night, people sleep on benches and on the floor of the intake office. In the past, families often spent the entire night there. Others say they slept there until their turn came—sometimes as late as 4:00 AM—to carry all their belongings onto the bus and to a hotel where they had a bed for a few hours. Then, before the sun was up, they were bused back to the office. 

On this night, Destiny, nine, Raymond Jr., seven, and Miguel, six, hang around with their parents, in the dim light of the only street lamp at adjacent Franz Sigel Park, where there’s more trash than trees. The three children won’t go to school tomorrow because they have no clothes, say their parents Marisol and Raymond Rodriguez. Their mother says they cannot afford to pay $2 for boys’ clothes and $3 for girls’ at a nearby charity shop. 

The Rodriquez children have spent 12 days in and around the EAU office. The family has been found ineligible to live in a shelter—they have an address in Florida, according to EAU investigators—so they have just reapplied. You need to be a family to apply at the EAU: a legally married couple, a single parent with children, a pregnant woman, or an unmarried couple with a municipal license. EAU administrators decide if a family is eligible to live in a shelter within 10 days. They turn a family down if they decide it has another place to stay—even temporarily, even with relatives. But when turned down most families re-apply. Of more than 27,000 applications received last year, half were from families re-applying, according to Department of Homeless Services (DHS) records. Of the approximately 9,000 families declared eligible for shelters, 32 percent had applied twice or more. So they keep going through the process again and again. It becomes a way of life. 

Twenty years ago, homeless families represented by the Legal Aid Society sued the DHS and the mayor—David Dinkins, initially—for forcing them to sleep on benches at the EAU office. Last year, DHS authorized payment of approximately $5 million in fines to 16,000 families housed overnight between 1991 and 1994. The city is paying each family $150 dollars for the first night spent in the office and $100 for each subsequent night. In 1995, under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York City paid another $5 million in fines to families, covering the years 1986 to 1991. Hundreds more people still wait to be paid, says Eva Landeo, a Legal Aid staff attorney. “The city has told us that they are in the process of compiling a new list of families that are owed fines,” she says. By last summer, the DHS claims nobody slept overnight at the EAU, but 25 people have signed a petition, circulated by the non-profit association Picture the Homeless, stating that they did. 

The EAU application process damages homeless people, says Jane Bock, Legal Aid staff attorney: it’s too difficult to get passes to seek medical help, to go to work or to school. Passes allow applicants to stay outside the office for up to four hours, but if they don’t return on time, they must restart the entire application process. 

“The current intake model is not working as well as it could,” concedes James Anderson, spokes- person for DHS. “DHS is working to identify long term reforms to improve the process for families and staff.” In a report published in November, the department said that EAU investigations are now conducted more quickly and announced that a welcome packet explaining the office’s services will be distributed to applicants. 

A panel of three experts, established last January by a Supreme Court judge to evaluate the DHS programs for two years, has not yet issued specific findings on the EAU, says Legal Aid attorney Landeo. A November preliminary report, however, recognizes the DHS overall efforts to prevent homelessness, but also criticizes the EAU staff as small and insufficiently trained, unable to help families obtain public assistance or emergency grants to help pay their rent. In its own report, the DHS admits that the re-organization of the EAU staff has fallen “behind schedule.” 

The EAU, designed as a placement system to support impoverished families, actually makes it more difficult for parents to keep their children in school. Returned to the EAU from overnight placement at 5:00 AM on a Wednesday, after lining up for 2 hours to get passes, Ivette Colon and Frances Gonzales, mothers in their 20s, take 15 minutes to cross the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Each pushes a baby stroller stuffed with sheets, medicines, and documents. They are escorting the oldest ones to elementary school PS1. It’s their thirteenth day at the EAU. 

PS1 principal Lillian Garcia, says “homeless children are not an issue”—they’ve always been there and they are treated as equals. Teachers are not even told which children are homeless. “We do the best we can,” Garcia says.  

There is no data available on where EAU children go to school, if they do, or on their attendance, says Partnership for the Homeless education specialist Kristen Woolf. DHS keeps no records on EAU children and it says it doesn’t poll school enrollment of children in families seeking shelter. It’s also difficult to compare records from DHS and the Department of Education, because the computer systems used by the two departments are different from each other, Woolf says. 

But each EAU child has the right to be educated, as stated in the federal McKinney-Vento Act, a law protecting not only children in shelters, but also “migratory children,” who sleep in public or private spaces where they’re not supposed to. The federal law also says that if a school district refuses to accept a child, he or she has the right to receive a written explanation. But not all homeless families know that. Michael, 13, who was kicked out of his aunt’s apartment with his mother Ernestine, arrived at the EAU at 4:00 AM on a Sunday. He would like to go to school on Monday, but he’s not “on the list.” Lynn Lewis, an advocate from Picture the Homeless, thinks that the EAU needs an independent advocate to tell applicants about their rights. The Department of Education doesn’t have personnel there.  

When children spend days in crowded office rooms, lacking playgrounds, kitchens, or private spaces, their emotions suffer, if not their physical health. Crowded environments interfere with sleep and the lack of daily schedules creates anxiety, says David Goldberg, child psychologist at Lincoln Hospital. When home routines get disrupted, children can’t pay attention in classrooms, he says. 

In the same hospital, Dora Alvarez, chief of pedriatric pulmonology, enters her office holding a minuscule bright-colored suitcase: “Zoey Asthma Care Kit.” In one year, she’s treated 50 homeless children with respiratory problems, from week-old infants to 19-year-olds. Both Alvarez and Goldberg ignore whether their Lincoln Hospital patients come from the EAU and know little about the place. Picture the Homeless advocate Diomaris Rosario thinks that the hospital and schools should be better informed and put pressure on the DHS to change the conditions. 

There aren’t specific studies on the effect of the EAU (or of a prolonged stay in such an environment) on children’s psychology, says Beth Shinn, professor of psychology at New York University. Children are likely to feel depressed and unhappy at the EAU, she thinks, but probably without long term consequences. Descriptive research shows that when families are re-housed, children recover from the disruptions they suffered, Shinn says. She points out that homeless families in New York live better than anywhere else in the country and better than in the past. 

EAU “clients” insist that virtually every child there is sick with chicken pox, pneumonia, and ear infections; that the place is dirty with cockroaches and rats climbing over kids sleeping on the floor. But on Monday night at 10:30, a reporter who managed to go inside (technically off-limits to the press) noticed few children lying around—they were playing in the showers. Both female and male bathrooms were clean, apart from a used diaper thrown into one of the showers. So, maybe the place is better than it was a year ago, when a photo of a mold-covered sandwich, now hanging at Picture the Homeless, was taken. 

Advocates say that school-age students should be screened more quickly at the EAU, that school staffs have to be better trained on the rights of homeless children, and that the coordination between DHS and the Education Department must improve. Some, like Lynn Lewis at Picture the Homeless and Kristen Woolf at Partnership, think that decentralizing the EAU by having an intake center in each borough—as they were before Giuliani, as DA in the 1980s, modified the EAU —would cause less disruption. That would keep families in their community and children in their schools, they say. But the DHS doesn’t agree. “Decentralizing intake would only replicate the existing process in other locations,” said spokesperson Anderson. “Our goal is to reform intake, not reproduce a process that isn’t working as well as it could.” 

Meanwhile, 400-600 families crowd the EAU every day.