Up From the Gutter: Homeless Program Ressurects Lives

UP FROM THE GUTTER Homeless program resurrects lives:

HEIDI EVANS DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER. New York Daily News. New York, N.Y.: Oct 15, 2002. pg. 14

Copyright Daily News, L.P. Oct 15, 2002

For 10 years, June White was a New York eyesore. By her own account, she was dirty and drug-addicted, huddled up against a midtown building or the Port Authority bus terminal, where she begged for food, slept on the ground and often contemplated suicide.

"I used to watch people going to work in the morning, and I felt so low, like an ant," White said. "I was embarrassed to be alive."

Four years ago, she was rescued by Pathways to Housing, an innovative, not-for-profit program that has taken more than 400 of the city's most troubled people off the street.

Today, at 38, White keeps a tidy, one-bedroom apartment on W. 140th St. in Harlem, across from City College. She sees a psychiatrist and attends 12-step meetings to stay straight. She cooks for herself and pays one-third of her $670 state disability check toward the $700 monthly rent.

She earns additional money by answering phones at Pathways' Harlem office and helping people fresh off the street with their laundry and errands.

"I see a future for myself now. Before, everything was just blank," said White, who still cries sometimes when she puts her head down at night on a fresh pillow case. "I owe a lot of gratitude to this program."

The brainchild of Sam Tsemberis, a former city outreach worker with a doctorate in psychology, Pathways to Housing has won praise as a national model that rejects the traditional method of dealing with mentally ill homeless people.

Most programs require sobriety and psychiatric treatment before a person receives housing. Tsemberis offers a home, then treatment and job training.
"Once a person is housed and no longer has to worry about survival, the recovery can begin," he said.

The success of a program like Pathways to Housing is particularly relevant in a city where the number of homeless single adults in shelters - 40% of whom suffer from mental illness - now tops 7,500 each night, with hundreds more sleeping on the streets and in the subways.

As city officials and advocates for the homeless try to cope with the growing numbers, a shortage of affordable housing and a budget crisis, Tsemberis' program is an example of an approach that produces results and costs only $20,000 a year. That's less than a shelter bed or a cell at Rikers Island, where many mentally ill homeless have been sent in recent years.

"Pathways gets people housed faster and keeps them housed longer than the traditional programs," said Beth Shinn, a New York University professor and national expert on homelessness. "The program should be replicated around the country."

Tsemberis has a long history of working with the mentally ill. In 1988, during the Koch administration, he was the director of Project Help, which rounded up the mentally ill homeless and took them to Bellevue Hospital, often against their will.

"What happened more times than I cared to remember is after Bellevue, they would be back on Second Ave. and 30th St. with the same shopping bag they went in with," Tsemberis said.

He quickly grew disillusioned with the work, as people on the street kept telling him that they didn't want a psychiatrist - they wanted a landlord.

"They told me this 1,000 times," he said. "I eventually listened."

Tsemberis started his project in 1992 with 50 apartments in Hell's Kitchen and Harlem and a $500,000 grant from the state Mental Health Department.

Ten years later, his program has an $8 million budget, a staff of 70 and six outreach teams, three in Manhattan and one each in Queens, Brooklyn and Westchester County. Twenty percent of his clients work or are in school, and 70% participate in some from of substance abuse treatment.

Shinn's study of the program found that tenants successfully remained in their apartments 80% of the time after one year, compared with 24% for the group in traditional housing programs.

"I used to go around and ask them, 'You want to go to Bellevue? Now I ask them, 'How would you like an apartment of your own?'" Tsemberis said. "Of course, many don't believe us at first and think it's some kind of a scam."

That's what White thought, too, when an outreach worker gave her a card four years ago, offering her an apartment.

"I didn't pay her no mind, but then I showed the card to this cop and he said, 'Go there.' He put me on the train. I was shocked when they asked me where I wanted to live," she said.

The memories of life on the streets are so painful that White, a soft-spoken and well-mannered woman, winces as she recounts them. Her descent began when she was 19 in Jersey City, hooked on drugs and overwhelmed by her psychological demons. She moved to New York when she was 23, surviving on the streets for 10 years.

"I once snatched a kid's hamburger right off his plate," White recalled. "The father grabbed my arms, and then he flung it at me. I picked it up and ate it anyway."

Her journey back to mainstream life has been a slow but rewarding climb. She is happy to be helping others reclaim their lives.

"You realize you can give something back," White said. "You can get back your morals and the will to do the right thing."

She proudly showed off her flowered draperies, a small stereo, a black leather couch and a wooden dresser. Her living room walls are covered with framed photos of relatives. A needlepoint sampler hanging over her bedroom door reads, "God Bless Our Home."

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.