Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol Read Free Book Online

class. I follow everything: her lessons, homework, and her grades. For these children I have the highest hopes. I tell the principal I want my son to go to college and become a doctor. I tell him that I want my daughter to become a nurse. He says to me: ‘Well, Mrs. Abington, certain children can adjust to this and certain children can’t.’ I do not know if they should adjust to something if it’s bad.
    “That’s my Bible on the bed behind you. My daughter has her Bible too. I know the Bible very well. The Bible is what taught me how to read. When I read those ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s,’ I have this dream: God comes to me. He calls me ‘thee.’ I call Him ‘Thou.’ I tell myself that God is speaking to me. Yes. I do believe in God. I am a Catholic. There is a Franciscan church on Thirty-first Street. I go there when I’m feeling scared. On Sundays I prefer to go back to my church in Queens. It was my mother’s church and I was baptized in that church. My mother is buried in the cemetery there.”
    * Infant mortality is 9.4 per 1,000 live births for white Americans, 10.8 per 1,000 for the nation as a whole, 16.6 per 1,000 in New York’s low-income projects, 24.9 per 1,000 in New York’s welfare hotels.

2
Grieving for a Lost Home
    G wen’s voice lingers in my mind. For the money spent to keep her here she said that she could buy a home and lead a normal life. The room is costing almost $20,000 every year. Is it necessary for the city to spend all this money to keep families here?
    City officials say that they are powerless to strike a better bargain with the hotel owners. “It is,” says the mayor, “a question of supply and demand.”
    What is the power that the hotel owners hold? Research by the
Village Voice
and other New York papers has elicited some information. Total costs for giving shelter to the homeless families of this city are about $150 million. Almost half, $72 million, is spent to house over 3,000 families in hotels. Of this total, $14 million goes to a business partnership, identified with a man named MorrisHorn and several others, who own or operate seven hotels. *
    Some, but not all, welfare hotel owners make large contributions to political campaigns in New York City. Mr. Horn and his partners, who receive the largest business, make the largest contributions.
    One of their hotels, the Jamaica Arms, was selected by the city to house ninety families with sick children. This building
belonged
to the city in 1982; it had been seized from former owners in default of taxes. Instead of keeping the site to operate a humane shelter, the city sold it to a private corporation for $75,000. It was then resold to its present owners for $200,000. “The city,” writes the
Voice
, “now pays about $1.2 million a year to house families in a building it owned four years ago.”
    Since 1980, the owners of this building have contributed over $100,000 to the electoral campaigns of city officials, several of whom determine housing policy.
    The sums of money paid to these and other hotel owners have been reported widely. The second-largest partnership—that of the Sillins family, owners of the Martinique—is reported to have grossed $11 million in the year in which this narrative takes place. The Martinique alone received at least $8 million. The owners of a smaller hotel, the Holland, grossed $6 million the same year. It is not known how much is paid to the Prince George Hotel. What
is
known is that this hotel, which houses more homeless families than any other in New York, is operated by South African investors.
    Journalists in New York City have repeatedly unearthed reports of influence wielded by, or favors grantedto, some of these owners. These matters, while disturbing, are tangential to the housing crisis. A matter that is not tangential is that so much money has been paid to so few people to provide such wretched housing for poor children.
    In 1970, when Mr. Koch was still in Congress, he was