March 7, 2013 6:54 pm
Don’t forget that sunset moment
This was a week for milestones in New York. The Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a record high – and so did the number of people sleeping in city shelters for the homeless, according to a new report.
The Dow’s advance past its 2007 peak of 14,164.53 points got a ton of attention in the press and stirred considerable controversy around town. Many investors don’t believe stocks can remain so high when the economy is so weak, and they fear that prices will fall when the Federal Reserve stops buying bonds to keep interest rates low and thereby stimulate business activity.
By contrast, the news that our shelter population had passed 50,000 for the first time seemed less worthy of the front pages, and that tells you a lot about today’s New York. For all the prosperity in this global financial centre, pockets of poverty remain. And for all the supposed willingness of New Yorkers to face facts, the presence of so many people without shelter – even in the dead of winter – remains an uncomfortable subject.
It’s tempting to simply turn away from reports like the one issued this week by the Coalition for the Homeless. The group found that the number of people in city shelters on an average January night in 2013 rose 19 per cent from the year before to 50,135 – even without including the thousands of families displaced by hurricane Sandy in October. To put those numbers into context, consider that more people sleep in New York homeless shelters every night than live in the capital cities of something like a dozen US states.
Families accounted for the overwhelming majority of our shelter residents, the report said. Roughly 40 per cent of the people were children – 21,034, up 22 per cent from a year ago. The average shelter stay for a family with children rose 10 per cent to a record 375 days. For families without children, the average stay was 484 days.
The reaction to the report in local policy circles hardly raises hopes of a brighter future. Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, has blamed the sharp rise in the shelter population on New York state’s decision in 2011 to stop funding for a programme that helped people pay rent for two years. Advocates for the homeless have disagreed, saying that the old programme was insufficient and served as a “revolving door” to the shelters. If finger pointing could put roofs over people’s heads, we might be getting somewhere.
I also doubt we’ll see politicians come under much public pressure to do more about the problem because New Yorkers devote so much psychic energy to ignoring the homeless. I know I do. I regularly see suffering people lying on the street or bedding down at the Port Authority bus station – and my reaction is so well honed by now that it’s reflexive. I avoid eye contact. I pick up my pace. I carry on, as the British say.
I can even remember the night in the winter of 1979 when I earned my stripes in big-city obliviousness. The moment came in a fast-food restaurant, where I was grabbing a bite on the way to a concert at the Symphony Space theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The show may have been one of the wildest in the history of jazz – a performance by trumpet-master Lester Bowie’s Sho’ Nuff Orchestra, a 59-piece big band that included many of the leading figures in the New York avant-garde of that time.
But the burger joint was farther out. Each of the four tables adjoining mine was occupied by a solitary human being conducting a conversation with an imagined companion or companions (it was hard to tell, as I’m sure you understand). I didn’t know if all these people were homeless, but they were all clearly lost. Perhaps they had been turned out of mental hospitals looking to cut costs. Perhaps they were just all alone in the world. All I knew is they were all there talking to themselves.
The most memorable soliloquist was an elderly woman who spoke with the accent of my foreign-born relatives and liked to sing “Sunrise, Sunset” from the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof. In her stripped-down version of the song, the lyrics consisted of only two words – “sunrise” and “sunset” – but that nonetheless gave her a cogency missing from the other tables.
I was still in my teens and unsure how to react to such things. So I kept my eyes peeled on my food and finished my hamburger. It was a New York thing to do – like worrying about whether the long bond is due for a fall or if price-earnings ratios can be sustained. It keeps you from thinking about sunrises and the inevitable sunsets.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013
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