Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol Read Free Book Online Page A

stirred by the death of a child in a hotel in his district. He sent a telegram to John Lindsay, then the mayor of New York City, demanding that the city stop assigning families with children to hotels that he called “fleabags”—on another occasion, he called one such hotel a “hellhole”—at what he described as “Waldorf-Astoria prices.” In that year the city spent $10 million to give shelter to 1,100 families in hotels. The city now spends seven times that much to house three times that many families in the same kinds of hotels.
    A member of the New York City Council notes that universities which find themselves in need of dormitory space house their students in New York hotels for an average of $355 a month: about one-fifth the city’s monthly payments to hotels that house the poor.
    Why, in view of all this published information, does the city keep on wasting public funds to shelter homeless people in such dangerous hotels? Neither private greed nor the potential power of the hotel owners can explain this. Better explanations are much less sensational. Perhaps for this reason, they are given less attention.
    New York, like almost every major city, has seldom made provision in advance for the most elemental needs of its poor people: even, indeed, those needs that city leaders have themselves projected.
    “City policy toward the homeless,” according to a task force of the American Psychiatric Association, “is best described as one that lurches from court order to court order…. Harvests of waste rather than economies of scale are reaped when crisis management becomes the modusoperandi….” This, in the opinion of most homeless advocates in New York City, is the first important explanation.
    Reverend Tom Nees, director of the Community of Hope, a nonprofit shelter in Washington, D.C., speaks to the same point in describing the response of government officials in that city. “They’re just putting out fires,” he observes, “and picking up the bodies.” This is an inevitable result when crisis management replaces wise, far-sighted planning.
    A second explanation is provided by Kim Hopper and Jill Hamberg in a paper written for the Community Service Society of New York. Their words, although directed to the crisis in New York, apply to the entire nation.
    “The pace, form, and vagaries of contemporary relief efforts,” they write, “—their reputed ‘failures’ in short—may be read as signaling the re-emergence of an older disciplinary agenda. Specifically, they portend the return to a style of assistance that, while alleviating some distress, accepts humiliation as the price of relief and upholds the example of its labors as a deterrent to potential applicants for help.”
    Not by the malevolent intentions of one person, or of many people, but by regressive public policy enacted through the workings of municipal institutions, the disciplinary agenda is advanced. Low-income housing is not constructed or renovated fast enough to meet the needs our cities annually predict. Shelters, whether city-run or private—whether barracks, family shelters, or hotels—remain destructive institutions. Nonprofit model shelters are profusely praised but are not emulated. It is now and then suggested that the government, with private-sector help, might somehow replicate such shelters. This notion is discussed. It is proposed. In New York City, in one instance, it has even been initiated; but it has not been pursued with perseverance. Enlightened policy is not persistent. It is spasmodic. For this reason, it does not prevail.
    What does prevail is an agenda of societal retaliation on the unsuccessful. When tragedies occur, good civic leaders honestly regret them; but tragedies that have been germinating for long years have never been addressed.
    The consequence is seen in stifling of hope among poor children. People in the shelters feel that they are choking. The physical sense of being trapped, compacted, and