GIRL IN THE SHADOWS: DASANI’S HOMELESS LIFE United States has the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania. Link Here Editor’s Note: Dasani is one of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York City. The New York Times began following her in September 2012, when she was 11 years old and living at the Auburn Family Residence in Brooklyn. Her last name is being withheld to protect her identity.
NEW YORK — She wakes to the sound of breathing. The smaller children lie tangled beside her, their chests rising and falling under winter coats and wool blankets. A few feet away, their mother and father sleep near the mop bucket they use as a toilet. Two other children share a mattress by the rotting wall where the mice live, opposite the baby, whose crib is warmed by a hair dryer perched on a milk crate.
Slipping out from her covers, the oldest girl sits at the window. On mornings like this, she can see all the way across Brooklyn to the Empire State Building, the first New York skyscraper to reach 100 floors. Her gaze always stops at that iconic temple of brick, its tip pointed celestially, its facade lit with promise.
“It makes me feel like there’s something going on out there,” says the 11-year-old girl, never one for patience. This child of New York is always running before she walks. She likes being first — the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to make the honor roll.
Even her name, Dasani, speaks of a certain reach. The bottled water had come to Brooklyn’s bodegas just before she was born, catching the fancy of her mother, who could not afford such indulgences. It hinted at a different, upwardly mobile clientele, a set of newcomers who over the next decade would transform the borough.
Dasani’s own neighborhood, Fort Greene, is now one of gentrification’s gems. Her family lives in the Auburn Family Residence, a decrepit city-run shelter for the homeless. It is a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers.
It is no place for children. Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.
Nearly a quarter of Dasani’s childhood has unfolded at Auburn, where she shares a 520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings. As they begin to stir on this frigid January day, Dasani sets about her chores.
Her mornings begin with Baby Lele, whom she changes, dresses and feeds, checking that the formula distributed by the shelter is not, once again, expired. She then wipes down the family’s small refrigerator, stuffed with lukewarm milk, Tropicana grape juice and containers of leftover Chinese. After tidying the dresser drawers she shares with a sister, Dasani rushes her younger siblings onto the school bus.
“I have a lot on my plate,” she says, taking inventory: The fork and spoon are her parents and the macaroni, her siblings — except for Baby Lele, who is a plump chicken breast.
“So that’s a lot on my plate — with some corn bread,” she says. “That’s a lot on my plate.”
Dasani guards her feelings closely, dispensing with anger through humor. Beneath it all is a child whose existence is defined by her siblings. Her small scrub-worn hands are always tying shoelaces or doling out peanut butter sandwiches, taking the ends of the loaf for herself. The bond is inescapable. In the presence of her brothers and sisters, Dasani has no peace. Without them, she is incomplete.
Today, Dasani rides the creaky elevator to the lobby and walks past the guards, the metal detector and the tall, iron fence that envelops what she calls “the jail.” She steps into the light, and is met by the worn brick facade of the Walt Whitman projects across the street.
She heads east along Myrtle Avenue and, three blocks later, has crossed into another New York: the shaded, graceful abode of Fort Greene’s brownstones, which fetch millions of dollars.
“Black is beautiful, black is me,” she sings under her breath as her mother trails behind.
Dasani suddenly stops, puzzling at the pavement. Its condition, she notes, is clearly superior on this side of Myrtle.
“Worlds change real fast, don’t it?” her mother says.
In the short span of Dasani’s life, her city has been reborn. The skyline soars with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age. More than 200 miles of fresh bike lanes connect commuters to high-tech jobs, passing through upgraded parks and avant-garde projects like the High Line and Jane’s Carousel. Posh retail has spread from its Manhattan roots to the city’s other boroughs. These are the crown jewels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long reign, which began just seven months after Dasani was born.
In the shadows of this renewal, it is Dasani’s population who have been left behind. The ranks of the poor have risen, with almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line. Their traditional anchors — affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage — have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.
Long before Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose to power by denouncing the city’s inequality, children like Dasani were being pushed further into the margins, and not just in New York. Cities across the nation have become flash points of polarization, as one population has bounced back from the recession while another continues to struggle. One in 5 American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.
This bodes poorly for the future. Decades of research have shown the staggering societal costs of children in poverty. They grow up with less education and lower earning power. They are more likely to have drug addiction, psychological trauma and disease, or wind up in prison.
Dasani does not need the proof of abstract research. All of these plights run through her family. Her future is further threatened by the fact of her homelessness, which has been shown, even in short spells, to bring disastrous consequences.
Dasani’s circumstances are largely the outcome of parental dysfunction. While nearly one-third of New York’s homeless children are supported by a working adult, her mother and father are unemployed, have a history of arrests and are battling drug addiction. Yet Dasani’s trials are not solely of her parents’ making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline.
But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani’s found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”
Just three days before the mayor made that comment at a news conference in August 2012, an inspector at Auburn stopped by Dasani’s crowded room, noting that a mouse was “running around and going into the walls,” which had “many holes.”
“Please assist,” the inspector added. “There is infant in room.”
Dasani was about to start sixth grade at a promising new school. This would be a pivotal year of her childhood — one already marked by more longing and loss than most adults ever see.
A tangle of three dramas had yet to unspool.
There was the question of whether Dasani’s family would remain intact. Her mother had just been reunited with the children on the condition that she and her husband stay off drugs. The city’s Administration for Children’s Services was watching closely. Any slips, and the siblings could wind up in foster care, losing their parents and, most likely, one another.
The family’s need for a home was also growing desperate. The longer they stayed in that one room, the more they seemed to fall apart. Yet rents were impossibly high in the city, and a quarter-million people were waiting for the rare vacancy in public housing. Families like Dasani’s had been leaving the state. This was the year, then, that her parents made a promise: to save enough money to go somewhere else, maybe as far as the Pocono Mountains, in Pennsylvania.
Dasani could close her eyes and see it. “It’s quiet and it’s a lot of grass.”
In the absence of this long-awaited home, there was only school. But it remained to be seen whether Dasani’s new middle school, straining under budget cuts, could do enough to fill the voids of her life.
For children like Dasani, school is not just a place to cultivate a hungry mind. It is a refuge. The right school can provide routine, nourishment and the guiding hand of responsible adults.
But school also had its perils. Dasani was hitting the age when girls prove their worth through fighting. And she was her mother’s daughter, a fearless fighter.
She was also on the cusp of becoming something more, something she could feel but not yet see, if only the right things happened and the right people came along.
Dasani is a short, wiry girl whose proud posture overwhelms her 4-foot-8 frame. She has a delicate, oval face and luminous brown eyes that watch everything, owl-like. Her expression veers from wonder to mischief. Strangers often remark on her beauty — her high cheekbones and smooth skin — but the comments never seem to register.
What she knows is that she has been blessed with perfect teeth. In a family where braces are the stuff of fantasy, having good teeth is a lottery win.
On the subway, Dasani can blend in with children who are better off. It is an ironic fact of being poor in a rich city that the donated garments Dasani and her siblings wear lend them the veneer of affluence, at least from a distance. Used purple Uggs and Patagonia fleeces cover thinning socks and fraying jeans. A Phil & Teds rain cover, fished from a garbage bin, protects Baby Lele’s rickety stroller.
There were plenty of homes for sale in the USA at ultra low prices but no one could or would buy. That's the tragedy of a banking collapse and an asset price crash.
We should be grateful that it didn't happen here. I can't find any country where a crash has benefitted the average guy on the street. It just seems to have placed all of the real estate assets into the hands of the wealthy. I'll bet that the eventual outcome is the same in Spain and Ireland as well.
Specifically on this story, perhaps a homeless girl in New York City could be unrelated to housing, but it seems like it's caused by the hard times in the USA to me, at least to a degree plus a little self inflicted drug abuse. Would the drug abuse happen if they had more hope? I don't know the answer to that.
It looks as if capitalism has lost it's way and is no longer presenting opportunities to the people except for the sons and daughters who attended ivy league colleges. That takes us back to the sheer luck of winning a sperm lottery. In a strong rich and powerful nation of over 300 million people luck should be a little more evenly spread.
Overpopulation. Idiots having 10 kids with no intention of supporting then properly. End thread.
stinkbug omosessuale Frank Castle is a liar and a criminal. He will often deliberately take people out of context and use straw man arguments. Frank finally and unintentionally gives it up and admits he got where he is, primarily via dumb luck! See here Property will be 50-70% off by 2016.
no you moron, it's the result of the house price crash fuckwits like you wish for.
and all so you can satisfy your own sense of entitlement.
No its not Timmy.
Its the result of the US morphing into a plutocracy since the 1970s and particularly since the Reagan revolution.
Here is the key chart:
Its not about equality of opportunity, its about equality of outcome. Because equality of opportunity is a lie when so many start behind the eight ball.
Property acquisition as a topic was almost a national obsession. You couldn't even call it speculation as the buyers all presumed the price of property could only go up. That’s why we use the word obsession. Ordinary people were buying properties for their young children who had not even left school assuming they would not be able to afford property of their own when they left college- Klaus Regling on Ireland. Sound familiar?
The evidence of nearly 40 cycles in house prices for 17 OECD economies since 1970 shows that real house prices typically give up about 70 per cent of their rise in the subsequent fall, and that these falls occur slowly. Morgan Kelly:On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices, 2007
no you moron, it's the result of the house price crash fuckwits like you wish for.
and all so you can satisfy your own sense of entitlement.
But you lot created the bubble, all so you could satisfy your own sense of entitlement. So it's your fault. Kiddie murderer.
If all these houses are going for $10k or whatever what's their problem anyway?
stinkbug omosessuale Frank Castle is a liar and a criminal. He will often deliberately take people out of context and use straw man arguments. Frank finally and unintentionally gives it up and admits he got where he is, primarily via dumb luck! See here Property will be 50-70% off by 2016.
Its the result of the US morphing into a plutocracy since the 1970s and particularly since the Reagan revolution.
Here is the key chart:
Its not about equality of opportunity, its about equality of outcome. Because equality of opportunity is a lie when so many start behind the eight ball.
and a house price crash makes this gap bigger, not smaller
ffs what is so hard about this for you?
themoops
9 Dec 2013, 04:09 PM
If all these houses are going for $10k or whatever what's their problem anyway?
talk about an own goal.
house prices crashed in the USA, and people are poorer and can't even afford houses for even 10K.
what is that telling you about the impact it would have here???
and a house price crash makes this gap bigger, not smaller
ffs what is so hard about this for you? talk about an own goal.
house prices crashed in the USA, and people are poorer and can't even afford houses for even 10K.
what is that telling you about the impact it would have here???
Timmy,
Dear me.
The house price crash in the US was the logical and only possible conclusion of a gigantic heist perpetuated on the American people by a small elite in the US financial industry and its agents in Government.
Its totally untrue btw to blame the crash, inequality in the US has been growing for decades, the crash was the logical conclusion of a FIRE economy on roids that contained the seeds of its own destruction.
You are confusing cause and effect quite spectacularly.
Property acquisition as a topic was almost a national obsession. You couldn't even call it speculation as the buyers all presumed the price of property could only go up. That’s why we use the word obsession. Ordinary people were buying properties for their young children who had not even left school assuming they would not be able to afford property of their own when they left college- Klaus Regling on Ireland. Sound familiar?
The evidence of nearly 40 cycles in house prices for 17 OECD economies since 1970 shows that real house prices typically give up about 70 per cent of their rise in the subsequent fall, and that these falls occur slowly. Morgan Kelly:On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices, 2007
Its the result of the US morphing into a plutocracy since the 1970s and particularly since the Reagan revolution.
Here is the key chart:
Its not about equality of opportunity, its about equality of outcome. Because equality of opportunity is a lie when so many start behind the eight ball.
Wall Street is a huge machine that is 40% of the American economy. It's devoted to making the rich get richer...............it's succeeded. Last heard the wealthy of America want more wealth not less!
More like trickle up than trickle down?
The next trick of our glorious banks will be to charge us a fee for using net bank!!! You are no longer customer, you are property!!!
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