New York City homeless crisis results in deaths of two toddlers

New York City homeless crisis results in deaths of two toddlers

New York City homeless crisis results in deaths of two toddlers

By Steve Light 

10 December 2016

Two children of a homeless family living in temporary 

housing provided by the City of New York died from steam 

burns last Wednesday when the valve of the heat radiator 

blew off and steam at 212º Fahrenheit scorched them.

While Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio described the tragedy as “freakish,” the lack of affordable, decent housing and a growing homeless population in underfunded, unsafe shelters creates accidents waiting to happen.

The parents, Danielle and Peter Ambrose were sleeping in the living room and their daughters, Ibanez, 2, and Scylee, were asleep in the bedroom with the door closed.

They were awakened by the valve blowing off the radiator in the living room at 6 a.m. releasing steam which Peter replaced holding an oven mitt. Danielle went out to do errands while Peter went back to sleep. When Danielle returned at 11 a.m. and opened the door to the bedroom, she discovered the burned children and they ran outside from the apartment, each carrying a child and screaming for help but it was too late.

A previous resident of that apartment, Charlene Jackson, told the Daily News that the valve popped off the same bedroom radiator in August 2015, spewing scalding water and steam, which fortunately spared her two sons the same fate. She moved out the next month.

Neighbors and city officials describe the couple as attentive and loving and their Facebook pages demonstrate that. They had moved to New York from a small town in Maine. Peter found work sometimes as a tattoo artist and house painter while Danielle found employment as a security guard and, being a musician, was reported to have played guitar at Grand Central Terminal for donations to raise some cash, according to the New York Times.

The Department of Homeless Services contracts with non-profit organizations to provide temporary shelter in privately owned buildings for about 3000 families in the city. These buildings are part of the cluster-site program.

The program has in the last three years placed dozens of homeless families in buildings owned by at least five landlords who are among the 100 landlords with the highest numbers of building code violations, according to Public Advocate’s office.

The owner of the building where the two sisters died, Moshe Pillar, had reduced his violations after being among those “worst” landlords in 2014 and 2015 but his two cluster sites in the Bronx had racked up 66 open violations each as of Thursday. “Officials said they had not checked the ‘worst landlord’ list before placing families in these buildings through nonprofits they hire to handle the cluster site program,” the Daily News reported.

The Ambrose family was part of the record number of homeless in various types of housing in the New York City shelter system – 60,686 people last week, which is 9,216 more than when de Blasio became Mayor in 2014. Almost forty percent are children.

The Bronx, where the Ambrose family was living, is the city's poorest borough, with a median income of $32,688. Almost 30 percent of the Bronx’s 1.4 million residents live at or below the poverty line. The borough came in last in a statewide ranking for health and education. Only18 percent of working-age Bronx residents have a college degree.

“The median price of single-to-three-family homes, co-ops and condominiums was about $317,000 in the last three months of 2014, $8,000 less than 10 years ago,” Jonathan Miller, a residential-property appraiser told Bloomberg News. “Rents also are compelling. For $1,650 you can find a three-bedroom apartment in Mott Haven, the trendiest part of the Bronx, the price of a studio in the eastern-most end of the Upper East Side.” These are still prices that would eat up more than half the annual income of a family of three having an official poverty income of $20,090.

Omega Bullock, a homeless, single mother in a cluster housing shelter in Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, spoke to the WSWS about the recent tragedy. She has three children ages two, five and eight.

“These deaths were terrible and it is the City’s fault,” Bullock said. “The radiator was complained about several times. No one fixed it. I have a similar situation. My ceiling, which is the roof of the building, fell in during the summer. They have had to come and plaster it six times. It fell in again two weeks ago. They need to spend to fix the roof. I even had to call 311. Recently I had no hot water for three weeks straight.

These problems would be fixed if the landlord was renting to higher-income people. I have been trying to get them to give me a voucher for a Section 8 apartment but they say there are too many people asking for vouchers,” she concluded.

Mayor de Blasio has been bouncing between various promises to terminate the short-term programs for the homeless that have proven ineffective and even harmful. Lack of funding for building sufficient shelters designed to adequately aid families and individual has resulted in overcrowding that has even driven many homeless to prefer to stay on the streets in the cold, in fear of their safety. In addition, those sheltered face requirements that do not allow them to be in the shelter during the daytime. The building of shelters have also been the subject of resistance in some neighborhoods with claims that shelters will lower real estate values and bring drug trafficking.

Meanwhile, the cluster-site housing, which actually takes affordable housing off the market, serves to line the pockets of greedy landlords who profit while not maintaining their buildings, as witnessed by the ghastly death of the two Ambrose sisters. Additionally, the cluster-site program buildings are scattered in the city to cheaper locations where it is more difficult for the city to provide services for those homeless.

City officials have felt forced, by a state law requiring the provision of shelter, to putting up homeless in hotels, which on average can cost $6,570 a month, compared to $2,740 for a cluster apartment, which includes the amount charged by contractors providing services, even if non-profits. These hotel rooms do not have kitchens for the residents. Individuals sheltered in hotels are usually required to double up with strangers. The city is providing almost 6,000 people with 2,418 rooms in hotels, with plans to expand that number by 436 rooms.

Positive feeling toward de Blasio, who touts himself as a leader of progressive Democrats, has begun to sour. He has claimed to be fulfilling a promise to build 200,000 affordable apartments in the city within ten years, using market forces and government incentives to solve the city’s housing crisis. Aside from the inadequate response to a need that has been calculated to be at least 600,000 apartments, more rapidly, the intensifying building of high-rises in the outer boroughs as well as Manhattan has spread gentrification into many low income neighborhoods.

Tenant rights attorney discusses housing crisis behind Oakland “Ghost Ship” tragedy

Tenant rights attorney discusses housing crisis behind Oakland “Ghost Ship” tragedy

By David Brown 
12 December 2016

On December 2, a warehouse in Oakland, California that was being rented out as artist studios burned down, killing 36 people, making it the worst building fire in the US since 2003. The “Ghost Ship” warehouse was rented by an artist collective known as Satya Yuga that hosted music shows and sublet studios that artists would also live in.

The antiquated building only had a permit for use as a warehouse. Public records show it had not been inspected for building code violations in over 30 years. The building was not even listed in the fire safety inspector’s database, despite state law requiring yearly fire inspections for all commercial buildings.

Without basic safety measures, like sprinklers, exit signs, or even working fire extinguishers, the maze of informally built live/work studios quickly became a death trap when the fire broke out. Investigators have not yet determined the immediate cause of the fire, although they suspect electrical failure.

The broader cause of this tragedy is the economic crisis, which has resulted in the slashing of public funding for safety inspections. At the same time, housing prices have skyrocketed as part of a speculative real estate bubble while median incomes have declined. Increasingly working-class and lower middle-class residents in high rent regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Oakland, can only afford substandard, informal and, in many cases, unsafe shelter.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Laura Lane, the Housing Practice Director at the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), which provides free legal work for low-income residents in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley. Lane has worked at the ECBLC since 1997 and has been a director there for almost 15 years.

While a lot of the media has focused on the issue of artists moving into old industrial spaces, Lane explained that the problems with informal housing were much broader. “There are a lot of low-income people living in converted basements, and converted garages, and converted storage units,” she said.

“The housing costs are so high, people with ordinary jobs can’t afford market-rate housing. They have to live close enough to public transportation to get to their jobs. They don’t have the choice to move out to the Central Valley, so they have to live where they can. We see a lot more people living in smaller units, a lot of 4-person families living in one or two bedroom units. Then the landlord at some point says it’s too many people in the household.”

While tenants may have an oral agreement with the landlord, Lane said, they put up with hazardous conditions “because they’re in a position where if they complain, if they try to get the landlord to make any repairs or do anything to make the unit safer or more habitable, then the landlord will turn around and say ‘Oh, you’re not supposed to be living there’ or maybe will stop accepting their rent.

“I have a case right now,” Lane explained “where it’s clearly a residential rental agreement and the landlord is trying to evict the tenant saying ‘it’s a storage unit.’ It is a converted storage unit but it has a kitchen and a bathroom in it so it’s clearly not rented out for storage. It’s typical for the landlord to turn around and say ‘I had no idea you were living there,’ even though it’s clearly been prepared for residential use. We see that a lot.”

These tenants are also unable to get the city to fix unsafe conditions. “They’re afraid to call Codes and Compliance because the building inspector could red-tag the property and then they would have to leave. But they can’t actually afford to leave so they’re in a very precarious situation.

“The clients I see, there’s no place for them to go. They’re either moving far out of the area, which if they’re employed at all they can’t do, or they’re going to be homeless. So every case is high-stakes because tenants have to fight to keep their tenancy because they’re not going to get another one. If they move out of that unit that’s been subject to rent control into a market-rate unit, they might be going from $800/month to $2000/month and that will be more than their family’s monthly income.”

In Oakland, the median monthly cost for a new rental is $3,000 a month, according to Zillow.com. That is equivalent to the median monthly income for households that rent in Oakland, which is also $3,000. A rental is generally considered “affordable” if it is a third or less of a tenant’s income.

“The majority of our work involves defending low income tenants who are being evicted. But it’s changed many times over the years. After the foreclosure crisis what we’re having is what I refer to as the ‘investor crisis.’ Investors have bought all of these properties and they are trying to push people out and get properties out from under rent control.

“What we’re seeing more and more is that they’re buying the properties and deliberately making them uninhabitable by doing a lot of demolition work in the property to force the tenants to vacate. Or they’re deliberately allowing the property to become red-tagged by the city so tenants will have to vacate.”

California law makes it illegal for cities to restrict the amount that rent can be increased for new tenants. Therefore landlords have a financial incentive to evict long-term tenants who are paying below market rates because of rent-control measures.

Lane described one of these cases. “I challenged an eviction of an elderly Cantonese man from an SRO (Single Room Occupancy residence) on 8th St. in Oakland. In June the case went to trial. The landlord bought the property, which had 40 units. In an SRO tenants share bathrooms and kitchens. So on each floor there were three bathrooms and one kitchen for 20 units and there were two residential floors.

“The landlord demolished one of the kitchens and four of the bathrooms, so then you had 40 households sharing one kitchen and two bathrooms. My client withheld his rent. He was the only tenant who did because everyone else was too scared. The landlord tried to evict him for nonpayment of rent and we won that case.”

Although the housing crisis is expressed sharply in cities like Oakland, it is a nationwide phenomenon. A study by Harvard University showed average rental prices in the US increased by seven percent between 2001 and 2014, while median household income declined by nine percent. That growing gap pushes more and more people into the housing gray market that produced the Ghost Ship fire.