Hotels Without Hope

Faced with a desperate shortage of low-cost housing, New York City in 1965 began locating homeless families on welfare "temporarily" in hotels. What started as an emergency measure has burgeoned into a monstrous problem, a squalid way of life. Since January, 1969, the number of welfare families housed in hotels throughout the city --many for periods of one year or longer --has risen from 262 to close to 1,120, and their numbers are increasing at a rate of 10% a month. TIME Correspondents William Friedman and Robert Anson visited a number of such hotels in the city and found the conditions universally deplorable. Their report:

The signs of human decay are everywhere in the welfare hotels of New York; they contaminate the very air. At the Hamilton Hotel on Manhattan's West Side, junkies, prostitutes and gaunt young toughs haunt the vomit-stained hallways in search of a fix or their next mugging victim. Though classified as "temporary" by the Department of

Social Services, Mary White and her eight children have been living in two rooms on the fourth floor of the Hamilton for two years. The apartment is a horror. In the bathroom, peeling paint drips leaking water from the toilet in the bathroom above; a film of water containing feces gleams dully on the floor. Roaches and other bugs swarm over the walls, the bathtub and sink. A rotting pipe in the corner has a dual purpose: it doubles as the children's "tree;" because Mary is afraid to allow the children outside, the youngsters' occasionally exercise by climbing the pipe when it is not too hot.

The remainder of the apartment is no better. Large gaping holes pattern the plaster, and broken windows are boarded over with plywood. The Whites have four single beds for the nine of them, and there are four chairs and a small table in the entrance way, where the family eats in two shifts. The kitchen is dim and terribly hot. Mary keeps the stove burning all day because the central heating rarely works. "The gas is leaking just a little," she says, "and the doctor says we've got to keep the stove off. But if we did there wouldn't be no heat." For Mary White's two rooms, the City of New York pays the Hamilton Hotel $600 a month.

When the practice of placing emergency welfare cases--victims of fires, tenants of heatless buildings, or those who had been evicted for failing to pay rent--began five years ago, the average family's stay before moving on to permanent quarters was 4 1/2 days. Then came urban renewal, which in the past three years succeeded admirably in clearing large tracts of slum dwellings (45,000 units in 1969 alone) but failed woefully to put low-cost housing in their place.

Catastrophic Results. To add to the burden, an almost equal number of housing units--many of them tenements before the turn of the century--were abandoned by their owners. Last year, their number totaled 38,000 units. Consequently, the poor increasingly found themselves unable to obtain housing.

For those on welfare, which puts an administrative ceiling of $166 a month on rents, the result was catastrophic. Hotel cases began to climb, and the length of stay stretched out. It is now an average 4 1/2 months. Many fatherless families live in places like the Hamilton Hotel, where they huddle in one or two filth-encrusted rooms, some of the children dull-eyed and incoherent from illness, the adults too confused and helpless to ward off the misery or the rats.

One mother at the Hamilton explains that she spent nights last summer riding the subways with her children because she was afraid of the hotel at night. Another, Judy Irby, says that "the kids sleep with their clothes on" because addicts set fires, often two or three a night, hoping the alarm will drive people from their rooms, which can then be looted.

An even greater problem is health. Degeneration and disease among hotel children is beyond imagination. There is, today, a near crisis involving upper respiratory infections, and chicken pox is spreading rapidly. There has been a large number of middle-ear infections, as well as gastrointestinal infections. Lead poisoning, caused by hotel children eating the peeling paint from the walls, is also a severe hazard.

Much of the blame rests with the hotel owners, who saw a bonanza coming and were quick to cash in on it. Charging by the head rather than by the room and packing as many as 13 people into an apartment, they were able to get as much as five times the normal rental per room. If an owner was unscrupulous enough he could push up his profits by cutting down on or eliminating such services as maids, linens, hot water and other simple maintenance. Most welfare residents hesitate to complain for fear of eviction.

Mayor John Lindsay has already condemned the hotels as "exploitive," and in November announced a series of reforms. Among other measures, plans were announced to station case workers in hotels housing 50 or more welfare families; provide "adequate" education and health facilities to the families; open a day-care center and regularly inspect the buildings to see that they live up to fire, building and health codes.

Obstacle to Reform. While Lindsay's sudden concern is commendable, it is slightly misplaced and diversionary. For the fact is that without the cooperation of city machinery, welfare hotels would not exist as they do. The health department, charged with the task of inspecting the hotels regularly, looks the other way. Welfare has asked the department to shutter two hotels in the past three years, for example, but both are still very much in business. Also, city housing officials have traditionally discriminated against welfare families applying for low-cost housing.

Ironically, the law is also a serious obstacle to reform. One way for the city to cut expenses would be to rent blocks of rooms, thereby eliminating the head charge. State law says no. State law also prohibits the city from issuing a second check to a family that has squandered its rent allowance and faces eviction. Thus, for lack of a small advance subsidy to a family to stave off eviction, the city is often forced to put the ousted family in a far more expensive hotel. Currently, the city puts the average room rental for each member of a welfare family at $4.34 per night, and officially admits to having to pay as much as $1,200 per month in rent for some welfare families. All told, it will pay out more than $7.5 million to hotel owners this year.

Says Ronnie Eldridge, special assistant to Mayor Lindsay: "Because of the law, a welfare family can be evicted from a $160-a-month apartment and be forced to live in a two-room hotel suite that costs the city $500 a month or more. It's crazy."

Crazy and pathetic, for the real cost, of course, is to the people forced to live in welfare hotels. Says Gordon Davis, an aide to the mayor: "This system is creating a whole new population of families that have totally disintegrated socially and psychologically. They have lost the ability to cope." Adds Simeon Golar, New York City Housing Authority Chairman: "We are stacking up social dynamite."

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