Covid-19, the Great Unraveler
Revealing the Underbelly of American Inequality
Today we reflect on three different stories: one from NYC, a second from Kissimmee, Florida, and finally, we return to a story we’ve already covered that emerged last week from our hometown of Peoria, Illinois. Each illustrates specific knock-on effects of the pandemic on a significant population already precarious before Covid-19, namely the homeless. Six months on, this population has reached the point where “the rest of America” can no longer ignore it – or “be free of it.”
“Hell’s Kitchen … has long been a repository for social maladies”
Our first story, from the Times, is about a strip of restaurants – the focus is on one restaurateur, but there are many in a similar situation along 9th Street below 42nd, known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” This is a neighborhood famed for its small restaurants and ethnic shopping stops; despite gentrification nearby (Chelsea with its “$10 million condominiums” and the massive Hudson Yards development a few blocks to the west), it still retains something of its old New York neighborhood feel – it’s proven resistant to full gentrification.
The owner of the restaurant, which has received dispensation from the city to provide sidewalk seating, is upset and aggrieved because his patrons are bothered – in some cases, frightened – by the homeless who approach, touch, and attempt to interact with them when they’re dining. During the pandemic, NYC commandeered around 60 hotels to house the homeless – commendably, we should note – and several of these are on the West Side.
Nick Accardi, owner of three restaurants in the neighborhood including Tavola and Tavolino, is facing empty tables – he has only seven, and needs them constantly full just to meet payroll – while comparable eateries in TriBeca and the West Village are chockablock even during the “dead hours” between 3 and 5 pm.
“The problem in Mr. Accardi’s view was the vagrancy and disorder furthered by the city’s placement of so many people experiencing homelessness — among them addicts and those who are seemingly struggling with mental illness — in hotels on the West Side of Midtown. Their suffering was obvious and immense. But what was he to do now that his own livelihood and the fate of his workers seemed so precarious?” [Emphasis added]
His complaint:
“Why, he wondered, should his neighborhood have to bear so much of the burden of various mismanaged crises? How was it that the Upper West Side could shout and so quickly get heard? This week Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to relocate 300 homeless men from a hotel, The Lucerne, on West 79th Street, a move that followed an uproar from some in the community who galvanized, hired a lawyer and threatened to sue the city if the newest occupants of the Lucerne were not dispatched elsewhere.”
Accardi started a petition to gain support to “evict” the homeless from neighborhood hotels, but it created further backlash.
“Not long after the petition circulated, the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, in Chelsea, called out its harmful rhetoric and asked for a community-led effort to help mitigate the catastrophes of homelessness. But it also acknowledged the despair of so many who worked in the restaurant industry, some of whom were now forced to rely on Holy Apostles’ services.”
It’s not like Accardi is without compassion – he has contributed to the soup kitchen, and for years has cooked/donated food to St. Francis Xavier’s Church on West 16th Street. But now he’s hurting too – and he’s looking for someone to blame.
The reporter’s conclusion:
“The problems that have arisen there since the pandemic ultimately reveal how lost the city seems to be when it comes to dealing with quality-of-life issues. After the profound and devastating failures of broken windows policing, the city seemed to opt for resignation over a system of empathic solutions. Suddenly, that has become all too visible.”
A rather bleak conclusion, but we were struck mostly that the writer (who had previously worked as fashion critic for the Times, and is now on the “Big City” beat) seems constitutionally incapable of calling a spade a spade: “quality-of-life” issues, “empathic solutions” – hey there, we’re talking about poverty and homelessness, just call them by their name and then say it: New York City has long failed the homeless, and the pandemic has made this obvious to all.
“No one deserves to live at the Star Motel”
Our second story in the form of an 8-minute video detailing the struggles of the homeless residents of the Star Motel in Kissimmee, Florida, tells a similar story. The hotel’s residents are largely service workers in Orlando’s tourism industry, and before the pandemic they were mostly working at Disney World in Orlando or one of the big resort complexes nearby (Kissimmee is the working-class town “across the tracks” [freeway] from the resort). They were making around $13 an hour – in order to afford a two-bedroom apartment in the area, they would have needed to earn three times that – and now, they’ve been making little or nothing for several months due to the resort’s closure (it’s reopened now, but on a very limited scale). The waiting list for affordable housing is three years.
The video vignette is heartbreaking. The Star Motel (situated along a desolate strip-mall expanse of similar lodgings) was abandoned by its owner last December, and residents were left to fend for themselves. The electricity’s been cut four times in the past several months, and part of the video shows residents trying to count out $1500 – in small bills – to get it turned back on. They succeeded that day, but the city then billed them another $9,000 in back payments, and shut the power down again (apparently permanently). One family of three – a mother and her two teenage children who have been motel-hopping for seven years – couldn’t take any more, so they pooled all the money they had to move to a “real” motel – the Magic Castle – a short distance away, where there was power and thankfully, air-conditioning. The 17-year-old daughter works at a Taco Bell; it closed when a worker tested positive for Covid-19, and then it reopened; she wavers between dropping out of school altogether and going to work full-time, quitting her job and concentrating on school full-time – and utter despair. She keeps repeating the phrase “I’m so tired.”
This short video is worth watching in full primarily for the first-hand testimony of residents and an interview with Homeless Services workers (two short clips, very trenchant). Kissimmee is hopeless, literally. The local government response is hopeless, the homeless are in despair, and Disney World – the “happiest place in the world” – is very, very complicit in the general misery of their essential work force.
“Destroying a sanctuary does not solve homelessness“
Finally, we return to a story we covered last week about the unannounced razing of a small community garden run by the Renaissance Park Community Association in Peoria, Illinois. In that story, we quoted the Association’s Facebook page’s official statement on the garden’s peremptory razing by contractors working for the City of Peoria. We also quoted from 2nd District City Councilman, Charles (Chuck) Grayeb’s post and comments on his Facebook page.
When we checked back earlier this week, we were unable to locate his original post (from Friday, September 4) and its 240 or so comments despite repeated searches – it turns out he deleted it (happily, we’ve saved his original statement). Instead, he’s now commenting on the page of a community member, and there was quite an exchange yesterday.
Jennifer Fifer’s own post was short and pointed:
“I championed Charles Grayeb when he cared about and fought against the firehouse closures, but this is more than just disappointing, I have lost the respect I recently gained.”
But Fifer then went on to publish in full a letter to the Peoria City Council by a Main Street small-business owner (Jessica Stephenson, owner of Lit. on Fire Books, about a block from the razed garden). We quote Stephenson’s most relevant paragraph:
“Worse than anything else though, is that our housing crisis has only grown amidst pandemic driven layoffs and closings, and some of our housing unstable community members had found respite and safety among the garden. This was a place that citizens could rest, get some free produce to recharge, and simply avoid arrest because of how our city criminalizes the poor. We have some very important and vital community services who have been actively working with and connecting our homeless population with needed and valuable services within our district and beyond. Those services were not contacted. Instead, the night of our community sit in protest, before the event even began, one of our housing unstable community members who is well known here, was arrested yet again by police. Eugene Graves deserved a chance to be there with us to say goodbye to our garden and venue, and to grieve the loss of our neighborhood’s pride and joy.”
Grayeb doesn’t understand what he failed to do – notify the community association in advance that their garden was scheduled to be destroyed, apologize, and start the process of identifying a new and hopefully, more permanent site. Whether that was deliberate or not, we can’t venture an opinion (Grayeb claimed in his original communique that he’d assumed the organization was defunct, but it did happen just before the wedding weekend of the Association’s President and Vice-President, making it difficult to coordinate their response). Despite several commenters’ irate but good-faith attempts to explain it to him, he persists in accusing them of failing to thank the owner of the lot where the garden was located (they did so in their official statement), and of disregarding/disrespecting various city homeless outreach services (how could that be, since some volunteers were working with homeless service providers on a regular basis?).
One commenter, Chris Schaffner, knows a lot about homelessness in Peoria – as do the service providers at Peoria Homeless Continuum of Care, and the volunteers who knew all the unhoused who frequented the park, and endeavored to connect them with core services provision [shower facilities, for example]. Schaffner has multiple posts on the razing of the garden, plus comments from volunteers who worked there over the course of a decade, including the woman who co-founded the garden, Jessica McGee.
Grayeb resorts to some odd locutions and responses on Jennifer Fifer’s post (linked above). A sampling:
“…telling people who are doing work daily to help the homeless that you need their help to aid the homeless can come across like you are not seeing or understanding their existing contributions. I strongly encourage you to understand and explicitly thank them for their work when you have dialogue with them.”
“ … Love you all.” (in response to criticism which he couldn’t understand; that “Love you all” did an awful lot of performative service on this thread)
[Note: He also issued a number of dire warnings along the lines of “winter is approaching,” which in one instance became “Winter is coming.” We had to restrain ourselves from responding “What do you think this is, The Game of Thrones Peoria edition? Everybody in Peoria knows winter is brutal, no need to remind us, we’re well aware.]
A response by Renaissance Park garden co-founder Jessica McGee:
“The only people that reached out to the ‘wonderful volunteer’ who visited that site every day were the police, letting us know that the city wanted us to move all of those people somewhere else. When we asked where, there were no suggestions made. Just ‘away.’” [Emphasis added]
That’s the key to all of this: “just … away,” just “somewhere else,” somewhere other than where my family and I drive by, or check out the shops, or fill up on gas (does Grayeb understand what sort of ill will the owner of the lot has already garnished in advance of any effort to develop it?). Anywhere but here…
But in a crisis – and all three of these stories, from all over the U.S., are Covid-19 related homelessness crises– the underlying structural inequities become harder to ignore, harder to expunge from one’s line of sight, harder to reconcile with one’s own still-comfortable (or at least, tolerable) life. And so – let them be gone, somewhere, anywhere, somewhere else.
If you don’t want to have to encounter homeless people, then abolish homelessness – in Peoria, in Kissimmee, and on New York City’s West Side. Is it simple? No, it’s extremely difficult and complex. Is it doable? Yes, to a considerable degree (and those who remain unhoused can be served humanely on the streets). It’s a question of political will, and right now my hometown politicians are sadly bereft of that will. It’s disheartening and shameful.
But as Councilman Grayeb reminded his readers repeatedly, winter is coming, to be followed by spring and local elections for Mayor and City Council.