Support, Safety and Success

Care for the Homeless will soon open Susan’s Place in the Bronx. We have designed this new transitional center for homeless single women to invite them into an environment where they can be assured of support, safety, and success in moving from homelessness to a rebuilt life.

Susan’s Place will seek to serve these homeless single women, taking them from the streets, through training, counseling, and rehabilitation to long-term housing. Named for Susan L. Neibacher (1944-2004), the founding Executive Director of Care for the Homeless, whose passion for improving services for homeless women it honors, the residence builds upon the agency’s prior successful experience at the Kingsbridge Women’s Assessment Center.

Who are New York’s homeless? The great bulk of New York City’s homeless population are people in family groups (7,458 families in June 2008) made up of 14,139 children and 10,088 adults (mostly single mothers). The picture of homelessness is also more complicated. Another 4,897 are homeless single men living in shelters, perhaps the most noticeable segment of the population.

Daily census reveals that there are an additional 1,696 sheltered homeless women who are alone, with no family, and who suffer disproportionately from drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, physical health problems and debilitating poverty, and are often victims of domestic violence.

Additionally, NYC has identified another 3,306 men and women who reside in alleyways, under bridges, in the parks, in doorways and stairways.

These people, in particular elderly men and women, require specialized medical care and services. For the elderly, homelessness is associated with a shortage of affordable housing, unemployment, poverty, psychiatric disease and substance dependence, dislocation from a network of family and friends, and, often, histories of sexual abuse and other traumas.

These vulnerable persons are prey to the violence that characterizes much of street life. They are poorly suited to withstand extremes of weather, and they suffer from chronic debilitating physical and mental disease. Older men and women often are invisible to the general network of social services, including mental health care

Many elderly women have experienced physical abuse and poor treatment in the shelter system in the past. So they often refuse help, preferring to live on the streets and risk their live sleeping in parks and other public places.

The complexity of issues faced especially by homeless single women necessitates a coordinated approach to restoring them to housing stability.

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The Kingsbridge Story: Changing a Whole Environment

The largest of the assessment shelters, also known as intake, for women was lodged in the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, where Care for the Homeless had been providing primary care for many years. Bringing our knowledge of what was needed at Kingsbridge to bear, we formed an effective partnership with Tolentine-Zeiser Community Life Center, a Bronx-based agency. In June 1996, we began operating the Kingsbridge Women’s Assessment Center and turned an uncaring, often violent environment into a temporary safe refuge where homeless women found a respite, some dignity, and got a fresh start. Each year we provided food, shelter, social services, and a safe environment for 1500 to 1800 homeless single women of the nearly 4,000 women we interviewed and who entered the shelter system through Kingsbridge ‘s intake office. Over the years, we received a 99% rating from DHS and doubled DHS’s goals for placing residents in housing and in more permanent settings.

But the Armory in which the shelter was itself housed was deteriorating around us and Kingsbridge was closed in June 2000. The women were dispersed to several older, less client-friendly congregate environments.

Staying in the Bronx and Expanding Services to Homeless Women

Future site of Susan’s Place: The CFH Susan L. Neibacher Women’s Center

Having served as a vital link in the continuum of care that moves women off the streets and into shelter, Care for the Homeless and our partner agency Tolentine sought a new location whose establishment as an expanded Transitional Residence and Drop-in Center would be a sign to the community of the kind of changes we can bring about in the lives of homeless women. Strengthening our partnerships with the Citizens Advice Bureau (providing both family shelters and street outreach) and the borough’s premier hospital Montefiore Medical Center gave us even more reason to put our roots deeper into the Bronx.

Homeless single women defy many of the stereotypes the public has about homeless people. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that 57% of women identified domestic violence as a primary source of their homelessness (The United States Conference of Mayors, A Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness in America’s Cities: 1999, 94, December 1999). In addition, many suffer from emotional problems, mental illness, and self-medicate via drug or alcohol use. Even when they lack these problems, their lack of educational opportunity complicates the task of helping break out of homelessness. It requires intensive engagement and a change in their total environment. We did this at Kingsbridge and it worked.

To create this environment for change, Care for the Homeless has created a Housing Development Fund Corporation which, in partnership with J P Morgan Chase Community Development Group and the Low Income Investment Fund, will gut renovate a 39,500 sq. ft. facility located just a mile south of Kingsbridge at 1911-21 Jerome Avenue. Funds for operating the facility and amortizing the debt will be provided by a long-term contract with DHS which is committed to replacing older, less functional shelters with more hospitable and well-run facilities. These funds will provide the basics. But to put our vision for caring for homeless single women into effect at Jerome Avenue, we require further partners to help us re-create the best of what we accomplished at Kingsbridge and to improve upon it by enhancing the shelter environment.

Our Vision for a WomanCare Environment

While public funding will provide the basics, we seek to provide an enhanced environment and a program that will increase both the dignity of the clients and their motivation to take personal responsibility to plan a future better than their recent past.

Among the important enhancements to the environment we are seeking to provide are dormitory alcoves that allow an added measure of privacy with high-quality beds and customized dressers that allow women to secure their personal property and personal care items, maintain and clean their individual space, and contribute to a healthful environment.

In addition, we will complement an up-beat and colorful physical environment with sufficient program staff to provide both the social services available to all homeless people in DHS facilities and additional education, job training, and individual advocacy for addressing their often difficult life-histories. Without educational opportunities, and a therapeutic environment in which to deal with a range of abuse issues, women often drift back onto the streets and resume their self-destructive habits.

If you need more information please contact:

Ines Calnek
Director of Susan's Place
Susan L. Neibacher Care for the Homeless Women's Center
1921 Jerome Avenue
Bronx NY 10453
(718) 943-1340
icalnek@cfhnyc.org

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