More Americans are poor than ever before, and the national poverty rate is at its highest level since 1994. Meanwhile, one in five New Yorkers lives in poverty. But poverty is absent from our civic discourse. Everyone is tired of talking about poverty, it seems, except poor people. Perhaps that’s because the rhetoric around the topic has rarely resembled reality. The latest issue of City Limits explores that lives of four low-income New Yorkers, including Walter Greene.

Walter Greene is, at least, set for groceries. On this drizzly Saturday morning in February, Greene has just made his first visit to the Metro Baptist Church's weekly food pantry. Every Saturday, about 150 people patiently queue up outside the century-old church, hard by a Lincoln Tunnel entrance ramp in the wasteland blocks west of Times Square, before entering and showing free membership cards that entitle them to enough food to provide three to four days' worth of meals for each household member. On this day, Greene emerges with a shopping bag stuffed with boxes of cereal, canned goods and even some fresh produce for himself and his wife.

City Limits Magazine


July-August 2011:
Remember Poverty? The Problem 1.5 Million New Yorkers Can't Afford to Forget

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Neil deMause
Neil deMause
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Now all he needs is somewhere to cook it. "We're in a non-cooking facility," explains Greene, who looks younger than his 51 years. "In the shelter, the [Department of Homeless Services] police come in there and they search everybody's rooms. Stuff that they ¬find in there that we ain't supposed to have in there, they throw it out. Like our hot plates, the spoons and forks, and stuff like that."

Greene, like the other estimated 3.3 million New Yorkers designated "food insecure" because they don't always know where their next meal is coming from, has another option: He could go to a soup kitchen to eat. Unlike food pantries, which use a combination of government grants and private contributions to supply groceries, soup kitchens serve prepared meals, at least until the food runs out.

But Greene would rather prepare his meals himself, especially since he has diabetes. "Me and my wife, I'm able to cook, she's able to cook. I just can't eat everybody's cooking." Instead, he says, he sometimes risks the wrath of the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), which runs the shelter at 317 West 45th Street where he and his wife have lived for the past year, and sneaks in a hot plate: "But we'll clean up behind ourselves, 'cause that room is very clean, the little room that they give us."

One tough year

This has been a difficult year in Greene's life. In early 2010 the moving company in Brooklyn where Greene worked suddenly shut down. "He just closed down completely—he didn't want to run it no more," he says, his southern drawl betraying his North Carolina origins. (His family moved to New York City when he was 6.) He tried finding jobs doing the same things he'd been doing in his 30-year working life—moving, roofing, driving a forklift, "working on cars every now and then"—but he says he had little luck in the current economy. Soon, he and his wife were forced to vacate their Brooklyn apartment and begin their tour of the homeless shelters run by DHS.

The move gave them membership in a recently less exclusive club. The exact number of homeless New Yorkers is a matter of intense debate. The city, citing figures from its annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate—or HOPE—in which volunteers fan out across the city each January to count people living in the streets, says street homelessness has declined 40 percent since 2005, to 2,648 individuals. Advocates for the homeless—particularly the Coalition for the Homeless, whose senior policy analyst Patrick Markee has waged an annual media war against the HOPE figures—insist that the city's count misses numerous people, especially because it's taken in the dead of winter, when many otherwise street homeless may be tempted to enter a shelter for the night.