As Pope Francis visited uptown Manhattan with messages of support and tolerance, especially for the poor, a Harlem neighborhood struggled over how to respond to a persistent homeless population, many of whom have been evicted from an underpass in the neighborhood.
Police removed an encampment from under a train overpass about one month ago, residents said. It was a change for which local residents lobbied for more than one year.
But the homeless didn’t receive homes – they’ve only been vacated. And residents, despite their sympathy for the mentally ill and drug addicted that made up the encampment, were not unhappy to see them moved.
“They used to be right here,” said Charlie Goodwin, an employee from the nearby DDM Development Services. He stood across 125th Street from the Metro North railroad station and under raised train tracks and near the street’s bustling commercial district between Park and Lexington avenues.
“They use the garbage can for a toilet,” he said. “Sometimes people didn’t want to walk on this side of the street because they [were] here all night.”
Just more than 10 city blocks away, Pope Francis went to visit Our Lady Queen of Angels elementary school, also in East Harlem. Francis has preached tolerance and support for the marginalized since landing in the United States on Tuesday. In a speech to the United Nations on Friday, the same day he visited the school, he scolded world leaders for ignoring the poor as part of a growing “culture of waste”.
“The poorest are those who suffer most from such offenses, for three serious reasons: they are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment.”
Even before his arrival, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced new housing for the homeless, an effort to advance a progressive platform on an issue that has festered under his administration.
On the eve of the pope’s arrival, he announced 150 more beds would be available for the homeless through coordination with religious organizations by winter, and the mayor earmarked an additional $1bn to combat homelessness in the city this year.
De Blasio came into office under promises for affordable housing, but homelessness has ballooned since he was elected, now the worst since the Great Depression, according to Coalition for the Homeless’ last count in July 2015. More than 58,000 people, including 13,000 families, slept in New York shelters then. Thousands more are believed to live on the streets, though no firm count exists.
At this Harlem intersection, buses from a shelter on Wards Island drop off those who stayed overnight. Long, ribbed sculptures bolted to the sidewalk along Park Avenue serve as benches, despite police officers’ best efforts to shoo sitters.
Even the homeless don’t blame the pope’s arrival and the following spate of city self-consciousness for their removal.
“They [are] usually just doing their job, but they harass us a lot,” said George Aviles, a man who said he had been living in a shelter in Brooklyn for about two months.
“What about this shit? What about our rights?” said Aviles. He said he was schizophrenic and bipolar, but had been taking his medication.
“They won’t let us sit down on these things out here,” said John Brown, who said he was a Harlem resident. He was sitting with two other homeless men. He said police have “been doing it” for a while, when asked about clearing homeless people. Several people interviewed in the surrounding neighborhood said the crackdown began in the last couple months.
“You couldn’t stand right here last year for the smell,” said Dionne Layne Morales, the market manager for New Harlem East Merchants Association. She sat at a booth among several small cafe tables, a sitting area set up by the association that now fronts a fresh blue, crimson and canary mural of a cityscape.
Morales said she has sympathy for the homeless, because most people are “one paycheck away”, from homelessness.
But she still called the homeless “dangerous”.
“A lot of them have psychological problems,” she said. “Two months ago one of them attacked me.” She recounted another incident where a homeless man killed another person who was living on the street during a fight over an umbrella.
The police, she said, “have to protect the people”.
“When you come in you can see seven, eight people here, sometimes they make a caca,” said Umar Sheikh, a maintenance man at Apple Bank for Savings, as he pointed to the bank’s granite stoop.
Tim Laviola, a hocker wearing a sign for Casa de Empeña, a pawn and watch repair shop on 125th Street with a clear view of the former encampment, said that the homeless are harassed “basically on a daily basis”.
“Not necessarily for the pope, I mean that was a big part of it, that was a big factor,” he said. “They sweep the dirt under the rug.”
Another man, social worker Anthony Palmer from a nearby methadone clinic where opiate addicts receive treatment, said: “Most of them are bordering on some kind of mental illness.” He added, “I don’t see how they can just move them from block to block.”
