Shelter Skelter

It's been almost a year since Shantel Watson first visited the city's Emergency Assistance Unit in search of a place for herself and her three sons to live. After two years of navigating around the gaping holes in the floor of her Crown Heights apartment, she reached her limit when a closet door crashed down on her 5-year-old, breaking several bones in his face. Trips to the hospital to deal with swelling in his eyes and a broken sinus are now routine, and scouting out a permanent and affordable apartment is the only job she has right now.

Last April, to buy time until Watson could find a long-term situation, the city Department of Homeless Services moved her family to a one-bedroom in the Mount Hope section of the Bronx. The city paid the landlord $100 a night, or $3,000 a month--six times the median rent in that neighborhood--to take the Watsons in.

Not all of that went into the pockets of the owner, 1101 Holding Corp., which is registered at the office of attorney Morris Barenbaum in Borough Park. Manager Kalman Tabak was required to hire a caseworker to make sure the kids got to school and to help Watson with one of New York City's greatest challenges: hunting for an affordable home.

But that's not what Watson got. The caseworker showed up the mandated once-every-two-weeks, but never offered a word of advice on how to find a permanent home. Watson didn't have much need to have her hand held, she says now; "I just thought someone was going to be there to help me find an apartment."

Instead, her stay in Mount Hope, which the city says was supposed to last no more than 30 days, extended to seven months, and cost the city about $21,000.

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The Watsons' high rent was no accounting mistake. New York City is currently housing more than 1,300 homeless families in private apartments, and paying the owners of more than 250 buildings handsomely for the service. With record numbers of families seeking shelter--December saw 6,800 families in the city's emergency shelters, up 25 percent since last winter--the Department of Homeless Services is desperate to find a place to put them all.

At the places where the city has long sheltered homeless families, demand far outstrips supply. "Tier II" shelters, most of which are run by nonprofits and offer a bedroom along with on-site services such as day care and job training, have room for about 3,500 families. In late December, the city placed 1,900 families in hotels, which the city resumed using for shelter in large numbers in the late 1990s, reversing a much-heralded Dinkins administration effort to phase them out.

One reason Tier IIs are so full is the increasing difficulty their residents are having in finding permanent housing to move into. Under Mayor Giuliani, city efforts to house the homeless focused on continuing federal subsidies to private landlords, but in a tight housing market owners choose to avoid the bureaucratic hassles.

As a result, say Tier II operators, the families are staying in the shelters for longer and longer periods of time. A year ago, the average length of stay at Tier IIs was about seven months; today, it's nearly a year. "There's no place else to put them," says Colleen Jackson, director of the West End Intergenerational residence in Manhattan, a Tier II that houses more than fifty 18- to 24-year-old single mothers and their children. Jackson's shelter in Manhattan recently welcomed two new tenants to fill the first vacancies she has seen in several months.