newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BEN CASE

IPS NEWS AGENCY

NEW YORK — New York City police arrested 10 people who refused to leave a vacant lot in a demonstration for homeless people's rights in East Harlem on Thursday. Early in the day, dozens of homeless people had occupied the lot, which is currently not being used, setting up tents and a makeshift kitchen.

The "tent city", a reference to the Great Depression, was intended to temporarily house the homeless, but was also a publicity tactic, designed to draw attention to the increasingly dire crisis of homelessness.

"We are here to send a message," Jean Rice, a board member of Picture the Homeless (PTH), which organized the action, told IPS.

Picture the Homeless is an advocacy group founded and run by homeless and formerly homeless people. Rice says the occupation of this vacant lot represents an escalation in the housing problem that is sweeping New York City.

Picture the Homeless is demanding that the City convert vacant lots and buildings into low-cost housing.

Homelessness in New York City has reached its highest levels since the 1930s. Precise estimates of the number of homeless in the city elude researchers, but more than 109,000 homeless people have turned to shelters over the past year, a two-thirds increase over the past decade, and many homeless people still refuse to use shelters.

"So many people feel threatened in shelters because New York's shelters are violent," PTH member Lorenzo Diggs told IPS.

"There is more control and better chances for a person in prison than there are in New York City shelters, and that is a fact I can attest to," he said.

According to PTH, there are currently more empty housing units in abandoned buildings in New York City than there are families living in shelters. They say 24,000 apartments exist in standing buildings that developers are intentionally keeping empty because of real estate prices.

"They are warehousing vacant lots like this, and then taking homeless people and warehousing them in the shelter," Sophia Bryant, head of PTH's Housing Project, told IPS. "Take just half of the 750 million dollars the city spends each year to keep homeless people in deplorable shelters and spend it on fixing up these buildings and putting up new ones."

Bryant went on to question why the city continues to award building contracts to large developers.

"These developers are supposed to reserve 20 percent of housing for poor and disabled people, but of course they don't. They sit on the empty buildings until the city isn't looking, and then they turn them into expensive apartments and condos and sell them at market rate," she explained.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg had promised to move thousands of families out of shelters and into permanent housing, but the plans appear to have stalled, while studies continue to show homelessness in New York is increasing.

"They haven't been helping people, just been warehousing them," Bryant, told IPS. "I got into this new program and then it came out they were selling people's vouchers. I got no explanation or apology, and now my voucher, which I never got, has expired."

Bryant further described the conditions of those who do get permanent housing from the city as less than livable. "The inspection process is non-existent," she said.

"The housing they've moved people into is contaminated with chemicals and has lead paint and ceilings that are falling down. The city has millions and millions of dollars in lawsuits now because so many children have lead poisoning."

After organizers took over the lot, which is owned by the bank JPMorgan Chase, they set up tents, a pair of food tables from which they offered meals to poor and homeless people as well as neighborhood passers by, and a stage. Hundreds of New Yorkers rallied to support the action, chanting "They say gentrify, we say occupy!"

"It is manifestly unjust that trillions of bailout dollars are given to Chase Manhattan, who owns this empty lot, while the ranks of the homeless are endlessly swelling," said Joshua Nessen, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), one of the many organizations that showed up to support the PTH action.