What Stay At Home Orders Meant For People Without A Home

by Erica Strang, CUCS Program Director, Manhattan Outreach Consortium

The pandemic forced us all to find solutions to work and family life without leaving our homes, but individuals experiencing street homelessness have had to navigate an entirely different reality.

When you spend a moment thinking about simple tasks you automatically do every day, such as sleeping, showering, and eating, you may start to imagine what a day might be like for someone surviving on the streets. While we may be able to skip one of these routines, or perhaps even all three on some days, the reality is that no one can do that indefinitely.

Life is challenging for individuals who are experiencing street homelessness, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Most street homeless folks spend their day working to get their basic needs met. This can mean finding food, a safe spot to rest, or a place to use the bathroom and wash up. When the “stay at home” order was announced, what was already hard became that much more difficult when the carefully planned daily routines were entirely upended. And the shutdown made it abundantly clear that individuals living on our streets did not have enough safe places to quarantine.

Many programs they relied on shut down all together. A church that may have provided food and a warm place to eat could no longer provide that service in-person. Programs that offer showers and laundry were not able to accommodate social distancing and had to transition their operations. Drop-in centers that were able to remain open had to drastically cut the number of people they could serve to ensure adequate social distancing.

Commuters stopped traveling to and from work, the New York City subway stopped running 24 hours, and there were just less people in the city. All this made it harder for someone living on the streets to blend in and homeless individuals had to improvise and find new resources or go without.

But street homeless folks are survivors, and they worked every day to survive this new challenge.

CUCS also had to develop safe ways to help the street homeless individuals we work with in Manhattan. It has always been a puzzle to solve for outreach staff to find the right combination of conversation, coffee, emails to public assistance, time waiting on hold with Social Security, birth certificate applications sent to vital records, and patience. Now we had to do this with the added burden of keeping them and ourselves safe.

Our psychiatrists transitioned to providing care via tele-health over the phone or a computer. In pre-pandemic times it was a challenge to locate our clients, now our staff was tasked with finding their clients as well as a quiet space to conduct psychiatric evaluations needed for housing over the phone.

Once the vaccine started to become available there was a new challenge. How do we get it in the arms of those who are street homeless?

We know it is about making vaccines as accessible as possible, while providing education about their safety and efficacy. Our program provides a triad of services: outreach, medical and psychiatric care. We are employing all three to make the vaccine available to individuals experiencing street homelessness.

Throughout the pandemic we never deviated from our goal of working to move homeless folks inside. Since March 2020 the Manhattan street outreach teams have helped over 1,300 individuals to come inside, over 250 of those have been placements into permanent housing.

While we work in Manhattan, there are outreach providers in all 5 boroughs doing the same work of bringing people inside. This work has never stopped, not for one day.

We are proud of our efforts, but more resources are needed for individuals experiencing homelessness to come inside for good. The pandemic has shown us that single rooms are critical for individuals to be transitionally housed safely and we applaud the fact that many of the 1,000 stabilization beds that have been added since May of 2020 offer single rooms.

But the solution to homelessness is and always has been housing. New York City needs more affordable housing for all its residents and especially those who are experiencing street homelessness. More units of supportive housing as well as truly affordable low-income housing are critical for our efforts to bring street homeless people inside.

We still have our work cut out for us on the street.

We are committed to spending the time that is needed to sit on the cement with someone at their street spot to learn about how they got there and put the pieces of the puzzle together that will get them a key to their own home.

As the Director of the Manhattan Outreach Consortium, Erica Strang, LCSW, leads the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS) initiatives to help individuals experiencing street homelessness to move off the streets and into permanent housing. Erica has been with CUCS for 15 years.