Homeless Women on the Rise in New York

New York, NY —

In New York City since the 1980’s the number of adult single homeless women looking for shelter each night has grown more than six fold. In 1980 roughly five percent of the homeless individuals looking shelter from the city each night were female—these days it is closer to one in four. WNYC’s Bob Hennelly has a look at one faith based effort to combat the trend.

REPORTER: From the outside of this well appointed Upper East brownstone there is no hint of the fact that it is transitional housing for homeless women. Women like single mother Lisa Gonzales.

GONZALES: I had been working for a very long time and I just lost it about two years ago. And I spent an entire year looking for a job and just could not find a thing….and just I was waiting for people to come and padlock the apartment and you know the eviction people to come in I heard about this place so I came here instead of a New York City shelter.

REPORTER: Dinner is over in the posh upper east side building. It’s time for the communal clean-up of the kitchen and spacious dinning room which looks like a photo shoot for a Williams and Sonoma catalog. The building belongs to the Mennonites and was renovated, funded and run by the Bowery Mission, a Christian organization.

Melissa Alcorn is the executive director of the The Bowery Mission Women’s Center

ALCORN: We wanted for the women to have a sense of dignity so than when we thought about the inside of the house... it is just perfect. These women are going to look for jobs and they are already you know on the Upper East side so they have all the trains available and the resources available….In terms of the inside of the house we made sure that every single painting, and even the colors inside really reminded the women that they are really beautiful in God’s sight and it gave them a sense of dignity that they are worth being surrounded by beauty.

REPORTER: She says having the prerequisite of a shared faith in common is crucial to her program. Their structured day that includes daily worship but also work, housekeeping duties and career counseling

ALCORN: It is really a holistic program in that we just don’t want them to have a job. We want them to grow spiritually. We want them to have their financial needs met. We want them to have a job that they thrive in not just a job to pay their bills but something that will use their God given abilities. And we want to give them life skills so that they can manage the challenges of life and not fall back into bad patterns.

REPORTER: Program participant Monique Hicks is in recovery----drug free for a year this month. Hicks is a very youthful looking 40 year-old grandmother.

HICKS: Because of drugs I have lost my mother, my children, my self esteem, my self worth, my dignity....

But I have five beautiful children. I have not seen three of them in almost ten years. I have just recently spoke to my baby girl and she just turned fifteen this year--- I mean last year. And she set me pictures and a letter. I wish I had them with me so you could see it. She is so beautiful. She spoke to me on the phone and all I could do is cry and in the letter she said she waited so long just to hear your voice. She prayed for that day. She doesn’t know how long I prayed for that day.

REPORTER: Hicks says both of her parents were heroin addicts. But she holds herself accountable for the choices she made that saw all five of her children removed from her custody and placed with great Aunts in South Carolina. Hicks worked the streets of East New York trading sex for drugs and shelter.

HICKS: Just when you think you have a paying date you get to the spot right and they will pull out a weapon and threaten you and I said well if it is my time to go than it is just my time. I have been raped twice. The same thing walking with a date to a spot and instead of getting money getting hemmed up by the throat almost passing out and him raping me right there in an abandoned building. It is not a good thing it is not. A lot of my females I used to hang out with have been found in dumpsters with their throats cut. I just thank God I wasn’t one of them.

REPORTER: For program participant Lisa Gonzales it was not drug abuse but ever escalating rents and single motherhood that left her without shelter.

GONZALES: I am forty- six, a young forty six.

REPORTER: Gonzales believes she has an insight into why there is a six fold jump in homeless women.

GONZALES: I venture to say it is all the women who have entered into relationships or formal marriages and their spouses or boyfriends have left them and the women have found themselves either ill-equipped to deal with society and all it’s demands—especially financially. And if on top of that you are ill-equipped educationally or vocationally your chances are slim for survival.

REPORTER: It’s a story she knows well. It is hers.

GONZALES: I personally myself came to the Bowery under those type of circumstances. I was a single mom for most of my life. I was married and at a young stage of our marriage we broke up and I was left to raise my child by myself.

REPORTER: In 1980 just 129 women on average sought shelter from the city each night. Last year that number was closer to 2,000, or a quarter of the census of daily homeless single adults.

Deputy Commissioner of Policy and Planning Maryanne Schretzman says the number of older middle aged homeless women is also on the increase.

SCHRETZMAN: That group of 45 to 64 years old—- they have gone up from fiscal year 02 to now by about nine percent.

REPORTER: Next month Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health will open up a new Center dedicated to Homelessness and its Prevention with a 5 million dollar grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. The growth of the ranks of displaced women will be high on the center’s agenda.

Carol Caton the Center’s director.

CATON: I do think that homeless women –because they have been sort of a silent phenomenon as they have increased over the years. And we are only very recently now beginning to realize the significance of their numbers and the importance of trying to help them.

REPORTER: The Bowery Mission Women’s Center currently has ten beds available. Homeless women or women at risk can apply directly. The faith based project will graduate its first group this spring. The hope is—they have developed enough faith in themselves to live independently.

For WNYC I am Bob Hennelly.