HOW MANY COFFINS

The Potential Impact of Westchester's Dismantling Its Safety Net Shelter System and Implementing a New Homeless Sleep Deprivation Policy

The following is a recreation of remarks given by Karl Bertrand at a meeting held by White Plains clergy and advocates on 10/12/07 to discuss Westchester County’s new homeless sleep deprivation policy.

My name is Karl Bertrand. I have worked with Westchester’s homeless for 24 years, beginning when I helped organize Yonkers’ first homeless shelter in 1983. That makes me one of the graybeards in this field. I’m here now because Westchester’s system of care for the homeless has just taken its biggest step backward in 24 years.
Westchester’s Giant Step Backward
What is this giant step backward? Since August 6th,

• The number of safety net shelter beds in Westchester has plummeted from 134 to 40 as
• Westchester closed White Plains’ only safety net shelter AND
• Westchester simultaneously forbid other shelters from accepting the overflow demand for safety net shelter - even if they had empty beds available.
• As a result, Westchester has gone from having a system of safety net shelters scattered throughout all its major cities to a system where the only safety net shelter available is in Yonkers.
• Westchester has dismantled its decades-old system that transported homeless people at night to safety net shelters from anywhere in the county - the key element of the safety net system for Westchester’s smaller communities where the volume of homeless people is too low to justify opening a separate safety net shelter.
•  Westchester has proposed to replace the lost safety net shelter beds with what it calls “warming centers” but what should more accurately be called “folding chair centers”. Westchester Department of Social Services (DSS) officials have asked religious groups to open these new centers as a way to help the poor. In fact, helping the county implement this policy will actually hurt the poor by:
• helping the county take beds away from the homeless and replace them with chairs, and
• helping the county turn a year-round system of safety net shelters into one that operates only 6 months per year.

Who Uses The Safety Net Shelters?
Westchester has a wonderful system of 24-hour shelters that offer a wide array of services, but it has become increasingly hard for homeless people to establish and maintain eligibility for these shelters. Westchester will deny homeless people access to these shelters for many reasons, e.g.:

• They don’t have all their paperwork. (For example, one woman in White Plains had been recently evicted but was denied shelter because she had no written eviction notice.)
• They’re afraid to see a psychiatrist.
• They relapse and drop out of substance abuse treatment.
• They won’t turn over all but $45/month of their SSI check for the privilege of sleeping in a shelter.
• They miss a recertification appointment, even if it has been scheduled 10 miles away, they have difficulty walking, it’s pouring rain, and they have no money for bus transportation.
• They miss a recertification appointment because they were notified by mail but never received the letter.
• A DSS worker makes a mistake and denies shelter for a reason that would be overturned by a formal DSS “fair hearing” (if the homeless person understands how this appeals process works or has a social worker or lawyer to advocate on his or her behalf).

In other words, we need safety net shelters because people fall through the cracks of our 24-hour shelter system. Every rule DSS makes to motivate homeless people to help themselves results in some of our most vulnerable residents being denied shelter. The ones most likely to fall through the cracks are the ones who are confused, frightened, and alone.
Picture Your Mom
The phrase “the homeless” is so impersonal. Like statistics, phrases like this mask the real humanity of the people affected by these harsh new policies. Let’s try to restore the human face.
How many of you have an elderly relative or friend who has trouble living alone? Maybe they are right on the edge of needing a nursing home. There’s probably one or two people in the world - maybe you or maybe a social worker - who are helping them make it, someone who helps make sure they take their medications, pay their bills, keep their appointments. Picture what this vulnerable person is like. For convenience sake, let’s call this person “Your Mom”.
Now picture what could happen if “Your Mom” didn’t have anyone to look after her. How easy would it be for her to lose her home? How easy would it be then for her to miss an appointment, and wind up thrust out on the streets?
Years ago I knew a homeless man in Westchester named Grant. He was so brain-damaged that he couldn’t remember the names of his own children. Nonetheless, DSS would cut him off welfare and throw him out of the 24-hour shelters whenever he missed DSS appointments. As a result, he wound up having to have several fingers amputated due to the frostbite he suffered while wandering Westchester’s streets in the snow.
We need safety net shelters to make sure that people like Grant and “Your Mom” don’t fall through the cracks and have to wander our streets looking for a place to hide and sleep.
Westchester’s New Homeless Sleep Deprivation Policy
County officials say that they are taking away beds because they want to motivate the homeless to follow all their rules. They say that of course they want homeless people to sleep but I ask you: If you want someone to sleep, do you take away their bed?
How many of you have ever tried to spend the night sleeping in a chair, say, in a hospital waiting room? How many of you got a good night’s sleep? Can you imagine trying to sleep every night in a chair for a week, a month, a winter? Picture how you would feel and act if you were forced to go for weeks without sleep. Now imagine that condition forced on someone who is old, confused, brain damaged, senile, or off their meds.
I know something about sleep deprivation because I’m a grantwriter. I often push the envelope of sleep deprivation when I have big deadlines. After missing even just one night of sleep, people become irritable and have difficulty concentrating and remembering. After several days, it’s hard to keep your balance and carry on a simple conversation. Scientists have shown that after a week or two, sustained sleep deprivation causes hallucinations, even in otherwise healthy adults.
We should be trying to bring homeless people in off the streets and then engage them in services. Instead, Westchester’s new homeless sleep deprivation policy will take dozens of Westchester’s homeless people (including the senile, the demented, those trying to stop using alcohol or drugs, the mentally ill not taking their meds, and disabled vets suffering from post-traumatic stress), deprive them of sleep for days on end (making them agitated, irritable and forgetful), and then send them out onto the streets of our major cities looking for a place to hide, sleep, and urinate.
People who are concerned for the welfare of the homeless and those who are afraid of the homeless should all agree on this: Westchester’s new homeless sleep deprivation policy is bad social policy and it is morally wrong.
People Don’t Just Freeze When It’s Dark
There are other problems with the folding chair centers. They will be open only at night, and only from November to May. The idea is that these hours of operation will keep people from freezing on the streets. That is simple-minded. People obviously don’t just freeze when it’s dark. In fact, the last person who froze to death in White Plains was found 7 hours after the overnight shelter closed. Overnight safety net shelters need to be integrated with day-time drop-in centers to provide a 24-hour safety net.
Are We Really Going To Make Our Most Vulnerable Poor Sleep Outside
from June to October?
Last night (on October 11th) the temperature was in the low 40s, it rained all night, and it was windy. It is now the official policy of Westchester County that, on a night like that, any homeless person who doesn’t follow every rule and have every piece of paper and keep every appointment can sleep outside, because they don’t plan to open the warming centers until November 1st.
There is an 83-year-old homeless woman wandering the streets of White Plains because she fell through the cracks when her adult home closed in August. Is Westchester County and the City of White Plains really so harsh, so cruel, that they will continue to make this woman sleep outside until she manages to jump through all the hoops required to enter the 24-hour shelter system? And if she refuses to enter those shelters, do they really insist that she have no place to go at night until the proposed “folding chair centers” open on November 1st?
Again, this decision is inhumane, immoral, and wrong-headed social policy.
Why Westchester Has Safety Net Shelters
Jews use Hebrew letters as numbers, and as a result, numbers can spell out words. The number 18 spells out “chai”, which means life. Westchester has had a system of safety net shelters for 18 years, and they were created to save lives.
Eighteen years ago, Westchester County started the winter with no safety net shelters, ignoring the calls of Westchester’s homeless advocates. Within a few months, three homeless people died of exposure on the streets of Westchester. One died right here in White Plains. The Journal News reported that on February 10, 1989 the “partially frozen body” of Jorge Menendez was found in the basement of a burned-out beauty parlor in White Plains.
After the third person froze to death, the public finally mobilized. Advocates including Anthony Wynne and I carried three empty coffins to a candle-light vigil at the county office building.
That was the winter that Westchester County began creating safety net shelters. Ironically, the county had opened the first safety net shelter five days before Jorge Menendez died, but it wasn’t located in White Plains. Perhaps Jorge didn’t know the new shelter existed or perhaps he missed the bus. At any rate, White Plains had no safety net shelter and Jorge paid the ultimate price for their indifference.
When the county opened its first safety net shelter in February 1989, DSS’ Assistant Commissioner for Housing, Joel Levy, succinctly described why it was needed: “We’re not trying so much to get people in from the cold but into the system” he said, but later added that the safety net shelter’s operation and ground rules “were based on the county policy that ‘nobody shall freeze on the streets when they are seeking shelter.’ ”
That county policy has now changed. Homeless people will be left to freeze on the streets, particularly here in White Plains, where Mayor Delfino has decided that he’s more concerned with pleasing Mulino’s Restaurant than he is with saving the lives of White Plains’ homeless.
Why White Plains and Westchester County Are Being So Harsh on our Vulnerable Poor
I think that White Plains and Westchester County are being so harsh on the homeless because they think that’s what you and I want. They are instituting these harsh policies in our name. Who can blame them for thinking this is what we want. Whenever there are public meetings about the homeless, only those screaming with fear and rage show up. You and I stay home.
We haven’t really needed to speak up. For 18 years, Westchester’s policies toward the homeless have been improving. We’ve begun to identify the chronic homeless, developed new outreach mechanisms for veterans and the mentally ill, and we have over 80 units of new supportive housing coming on line for the chronically homeless.
Suddenly all that falls aside when the county and the city decide to start dismantling the safety net we’ve built up over the last 18 years, the safety net that has been so successful in keeping homeless people from freezing in the streets of our major cities.
Now it is time for the silent majority - the moral majority - to speak up. We need to tell County Executive Andy Spano and White Plains’ Mayor Delfino that we want Westchester County to have a real safety net - a safety net with beds - so that poor people don’t wind up literally freezing to death on the streets of this, one of America’s wealthiest counties.
The City of White Plains has found room for Trump Tower. It has found room for the Ritz-Carlton of Westchester, Wal-Mart, Target, and Legal Seafood. The City of White Plains should be able to find 5,000 square feet somewhere in this city for a safety net shelter so that homeless people don’t have to sleep - and die - in its streets.
“Déjà Vu All Over Again”
As Yogi Berra said, “This is like déjà vu all over again.” Westchester’s giant leap backwards has us rehashing the same discussions we had back in the early 1990s.
For example, back in 1991, Westchester County was hoping that religious institutions would take over its responsibility for providing shelter. A young firebrand named Tony Hoeltzel was the Executive Director of The Sharing Community. In November 1991 he told the Journal News:
“The government says it should be charity while the religious institutions say there’s a right to shelter and it’s the county’s responsibility,” he said. “Meanwhile, we’ll have people sleeping in snowdrifts.”
Even the county’s position that it is taking beds away from the homeless for their own good is nothing new. Every time the county adopts a harsh new requirement that threatens the safety net for our poorest citizens, it claims it is doing so for their own good. As President of the Coalition for the Homeless at the time, I wrote an editorial in the Journal News back in February 1989 after Jorge Menendez died. The words are still true and apply equally well to the county’s current plans to create “folding chair centers”:
“Some have tried to justify the structure of the county’s overnight shelter as an incentive designed to motivate people to help themselves. We at the Coalition for the Homeless recognize the need for structural incentives for behavior modification. We believe that the way to accomplish that goal is to offer a range of emergency housing with the most attractive going to those who appear willing to help themselves. However, we also believe passionately that people do have a right to the bare necessities of life and that punishing people for minor offenses such as missing appointments in a way that threatens their very life is wrong.”

The Bottom-Line Moral Question
The bottom line question that confronts us now is a moral one: How many coffins will it take this time? How many coffins will it take until dozens of people call County Executive Spano and Mayor Delfino to demand that they restore the system of safety net shelters.
White Plains’ safety net shelter is gone. Dozens of homeless people are sleeping on the streets of White Plains, hidden in doorways, parking garages, parks, and alleyways. (You’ll hear more about this in a minute from the people who work at Project Trust, White Plains’ federally-funded daytime drop-in center for the homeless.)
Winter is coming. The danger is obvious. A city this rich should not let poor people freeze on it streets, in the shadow of the new Trump Tower.
If homeless people freeze to death on the streets of Westchester this winter, it will only be because we let it happen. All it takes from each of us is a phone call or two. If we are silent now, when the safety net is dismantled, there will be blood on our hands.

Click here to see members of WestCOP making a difference in this photo gallery