Homelessness in the City
New York City Five Boroughs released a collection of photography and video archives about the NYC homeless population captured between 2013 and 2020. The collection aims to start a dialogue around a harsh reality hitting the most populous city in the US.
Homelessness in the City, video teaser. Foto and video by Pablo Herrera. Music by Nils Frahm.
Seventeen out of every 10,000 people in the United States were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2019. These 567,715 people represent a cross-section of America. They are associated with every region of the country, family status, gender category, and racial/ethnic group, according to the National Alliance to End Homeless.
New York City was in the midst of a record homelessness crisis even before the coronavirus hit. Some 60,000 people were filling municipal shelters across the city every night. Nearly a third of that number was living in dorm-style facilities for single adults, sharing bathrooms, dining areas and sleeping facilities.
“When COVID struck, we recognized very quickly this was a recipe for disaster,” said Jacqueline Simone, of Coalition for the Homeless, a New York charity.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the Coalition for the Homeless and other advocacy groups, asked the city to find new shelters for the homeless to protect them from the coronavirus outbreak. Using hotels, which were lying empty across the city due to the pandemic, were seen as a perfect solution. But in the Upper West Side, where the median house price is more than $1.8m, some residents have started a Facebook group to express their displeasure over the use of three high-end hotels in the area. “Our community is terrified, angry and frightened,” one member of the ‘Upper West Siders For Safer Streets’ group told the New York Post. Another community group board member from the same area reportedly told the Post that “it feels like the 1970s. Everyone who can move out is moving out.” Richard Hall wrote for The Independent.
The response from these residents to a temporary solution to protect the homeless in a pandemic has prompted a backlash from charities and city officials. “It’s incredibly disheartening and yet not necessarily surprising that people are reacting to poor people of color with all of the same stigma and bias that has marked many of these debates for years,” said Ms Simone.
The debate around homelessness always circles around the consequences, mostly focused on city shelters and mental illness, but it rarely goes further in analysing the root causes. Homelessness is a structural problem in a developed country reporting exceeding large disparities between the rich and the poor with high levels of income inequality. Homelessness is largely avoidable, or at least could be less painful, by guaranteeing affordable housing, education and universal health care. We can, and must, address the most immediate consequences and have a debate about city shelters and mental illness, but we can also go further by pressuring our political leaders to pass legislation to address the root causes of homelessness and disparities in the US.
NYC Five Boroughs is produced by Colectivo Piloto and curated by Pablo Herrera.
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