Melvin

Melvin Brown hurries to set up his bookstall on a spot of Broadway near Columbia University. It is past two on a July afternoon and he is late in displaying his collection of second-hand books. But even as the 46-year-old gets his boxes out of the safekeeping of the neighboring food-cart owner, he knows that this delay is a welcome part of his life. It is visits to his social worker like the one he made this morning that reassure Brown – perhaps more than anyone else – that he is “going in a positive direction.”

Brown has been in the Bronx apartment that he got through Section 8 for the past two years. He says that he has only had around four visitors in this time period. “I am overprotective about my place. I have vowed never to lose it. My landlord can never say that I play my music too loud or that I get too much company,” he explains.

This sense of ownership may have something to do with the remark from a counselor that first made him feel homeless: “If your name isn’t on a lease, you are homeless.” Brown had regarded homelessness to be about having a shopping cart and sleeping in the parks. He never did that. Instead, he divided his time between his parents’ house in Brooklyn, hotels, and at his worst, movie theatres. And when he was not in these places, he was serving prison terms for commercial burglaries. The cause of all this: heroin addiction.

The first casualty of Brown’s drug habit was the Channel 7 job that he had obtained after completing high school. He started at ABC Television as a messenger and went on to work in its graphics arts department for eight years. When he lost this position, Brown began doing odd jobs to support his addiction. These obviously did not prove financially adequate and he found an easier way out robbing stores.

The thefts not only supported Brown’s heroin supplies but also helped him pay $47 a night for hotel rooms. In 1989, Brown got arrested for the first time. “I have six felony convictions,” he says. “I would come out and start the cycle all over again. Every day, I was living to steal to pay for my addiction and my shelter.”

After he completed his last five-year term, his sister pleaded with him to return to the brownstone that their mother had left to them. “There was something inside me that could not do it. My brother and sister are successful public servants. I am the only one in the family who has used drugs or been to prison or hasn’t been to college,” he says. So Brown decided to go into his first shelter in 2001. And this proved to be “worse than prison.” As he elaborates: “There was violence, rivalries, disrespect, noise. I couldn’t deal with it because I thought it was going to take me to a violent state.”

Fortunately, Brown was able to get himself transferred to another shelter that had fewer residents and far more services. Though he points out that many homeless people prefer to be on the streets because they are scared of the kind of insecurity that he encountered, he strongly supports the shelter system. According to him, “It’s the only way to get Section 8. If you don’t go through that to get off the street, you don’t want to get off the street.”

He also believes that homeless people have all the services that they require. It is more a matter of getting the right information at the right time. He met Megan DeWitt, a social worker with the Institute for Urban Family Health who is affiliated with Care for the Homeless, after his public assistance was discontinued when he failed to keep his appointments. He did not have Medicaid at the time and was unable to get his medication. DeWitt not only helped him with his medical needs, but also informed him about other services that he had been unaware of earlier.

These services have helped Brown stay away from heroin, crime and the streets. But assistance from agencies, he asserts, has to be combined with personal determination. “It is up to the individual also to be diligent and adamant because nobody is going to work as hard as you for the things you want,” he says. That’s the way he managed to get Section 8 housing in spite of being told that he could not do so because of his convictions. Or the way he found work as a building superintendent, construction worker and restaurant help even with a prison record. Or even the way he now sits smiling behind his bookstall, attending to his customers and planning his next career move when the cold will shut down his pavement store.

See other stories at "Homeless Voices."