Off the Street and Out of the Cold

A young New York lawyer fights to shelter the homeless

Billy is 42, a full decade younger than his unshaven face and filthy, ragged clothing make him look. He has no home.

Last winter he attempted to escape the cold by sleeping at the Palace, a Bowery hotel frequented by his fellow street people, but he stayed only one night. "That's a hole," he says. "The one time I stayed there, they tried to set some guy on fire." Billy (he does not give his last name) spent most of last winter searching for shelter--in Penn Station, in the steam tunnels under New York City's streets, in abandoned buildings. Perhaps in this most vicious winter he would not have made it. There are an estimated 36,000 homeless men and women in New York City, and last winter at least 20 died of exposure.

But lately Billy has been sleeping in a bed. He is warm and comparatively safe at night because a young lawyer named Robert Hayes saw the plight of the city's homeless and decided to do something. Because of his relentless efforts, the city now provides more than 3,500 homeless people with shelter each night.

Tall and thin, with a scruffy reddish beard and glasses, Hayes, 29, "and getting older by the minute," did not come to the help of the homeless because he was appointed to the job. He simply took on the responsibility. The Georgetown University graduate first noticed the homeless when he began studying law at New York University, just a bottle's throw from the Bowery. "I shared the common myth about them," he recalls. "I assumed that they lived on the street by choice."

But Hayes talked to a few of those on the street and visited some of Manhattan's crowded flophouses. The angry young law student found that only the first fortunate few to check in each night got to sleep on bare springs. The rest slept on chairs or on newspapers spread on the floor, their shoes under their heads so that they would know if someone tried to steal them. Most of the homeless, says Hayes, "found life on the streets less degrading and safer than staying in those places."

After graduating in 1977 and joining the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, Hayes approached officials to see what could be done. But the city, he learned, was more interested in cutting services to the homeless. Reluctantly, Hayes decided to take the matter to the courts. "It was really the last resort," he explained. "The homeless had no friends in government, formed no constituency. Someone had to help." With the support of his firm, Hayes brought suit on behalf of six men, including one whose residence was a cardboard box on Park Avenue.

Filed in the fall of 1979, the suit rested on New York State's constitutional responsibility to provide "aid, care and support of the needy." It was Hayes' maiden court appearance; the judge accepted his argument and ordered the city of New York to give shelter--meaning a bed--to anyone requesting it. Continuing to find conditions "pretty bad," he went back to court a year later, charging New York with dragging its feet and doing no more than "warehousing" the homeless. The city promised in a consent decree to carry out the earlier order. And last month, the court ruled in effect that New York was now doing as well as could be expected.

Located in armories and other public buildings, the new shelters are far from commodious. But the facilities, which accommodate 50 or more people per room on cots and provide showers and even simple meals, are a big improvement over the streets. "It is a step in the right direction," says Hayes, but he believes New York really needs a network of small neighborhood shelters rather than a handful of huge warehouses.

Then there are the homeless who live on the streets of virtually every other U.S. urban center. Nationwide they number in the hundreds of thousands, and their ranks have been increasing along with rising unemployment, escalating housing costs and the spreading practice of discharging less seriously afflicted mental patients. Hayes has received inquiries from concerned people in 25 cities, including Chicago, Columbus and Portland, Me. Can he offer any help? they ask. He has decided he must go on trying. A founder of what he hopes to transform into a national coalition for the homeless, he will leave his $40,000-plus job on Wall Street in the next few weeks to work full time for the new organization and the homeless clients whom no one else has been moved to represent.

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