Sun, Dec 18, 2005 page9

• A former luxury hotel transforms the lives of homeless people

  • By David Chater / THE GUARDIAN
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  At its worst, the Prince George was the largest welfare hotel in downtown New York, sheltering about 1,600 homeless people without even basic facilities such as running water. In the 1980s, conditions were cramped, dilapidated and crime-ridden, with the site linked to an estimated 30 percent percent of local crime. Weekly horror stories filled the newspapers, and local firms pooled together to provide a shuttle bus taking employees safely past the building to and from work.

  Enter the building today and your footsteps echo crisply from the mosaic floor in a pristine lobby. Dark wooden panels, decorated with gold leaf, line the walls and a large chandelier hangs from the 6m high ceiling. To the right, a grand piano sits in front of a floor-to-ceiling carved fireplace decorated with royal crests. The lobby, like much of the building, is a careful renovation of the Prince George as it looked in 1906, when it was one of the top hotels in the city.

  The building is now on the register of historic places, but it is not just the physical appearance that has changed. While it still houses New York's homeless, the Prince George is now one of the city's "supportive housing" projects, linking low-cost housing with support services.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: TANIA CHOU

  Offices dotted around the building house mental health professionals, drug and alcohol counselors and benefits advisers who are immediately accessible to the 416 residents, many of whom have large support needs due to HIV or mental ill health.

  "This place is a lifesaver," says Ed Callaghan, who became homeless when a severe illness left him hospitalized for almost a year.

  "There is all the support you could need here. It is a self-contained world that works well for a lot of people. You rarely see them more than a block away from the building. For others, like myself, it is a place to relaunch," he said.

  What is truly pioneering, however, is that only half of the residents are homeless or formerly homeless people. The other half are low-paid workers from among Manhattan's actor or restaurant waiter fraternities. Though not strictly homeless, the latter group often finds it hard to access affordable accommodation and welfare services.

  The idea is that homeless residents are not ghettoized, that there is no "them and us" between the jobless and the employed.

  Everyone, no matter how they arrive at the building, is assigned a caseworker.

  "Like a typical New Yorker, you develop a second family," Callaghan says.

  "You have a new support group. There are people on my floor I can give my key to, and I'm friends with other people throughout the building," he added.

  This approach is central to the project, and, according to the Common Ground Community, which set up the Prince George, it provides dramatic results.

  "We believe homelessness is solvable," says Rosanne Haggerty, Common Ground's president, who has gradually transformed the city's approach to homelessness over the past decade.

  Common Ground now runs 2,000 units of supportive housing throughout New York and beyond.

  "Across all of our projects we have around a 1 percent eviction rate," Haggerty says.

  "There is a two-year waiting list to get into the Prince George as a working resident. Compared to the alternative approaches to homelessness, it is also a bargain," she says.

  Despite the palatial surroundings -- Common Ground says there has been not one example of intentional vandalism or graffiti in five years -- housing someone at the Prince George costs an average of US$11,400 a year, compared with US$25,000 for a space in a city shelter or US$42,000 in a city jail cell.

  This financial argument, combined with high success rates, has given supportive housing a central role in Mayor Mike Bloomberg's plan to tackle homelessness, with a commitment to provide 12,000 units over the next 10 years, backed by an agreement with New York Governor George Pataki.

  Haggerty describes it as a move from "warehousing people to finding them homes."

  Following Common Ground's success, UK charities are now looking at ways to replicate its approach. Arlington House, in Camden, north London, is the UK's largest hostel. It has plans to become a 120-unit "center of excellence" providing training, learning and employment opportunities for homeless people, and integrating with the surrounding community. The changes will result in a 70 percent reduction in its 400 beds, but Novas Group, which runs the hostel, insists the current system isn't working.

  "At the moment, in large hostels like Arlington you can simply become lost for years," says Michael Wake, Novas executive director.

  "The new model will have 40 high-support units, including drug detox. By focusing on people's needs, we can engage with them more effectively and they can be up and out through the system in six to 18 months," he says.

  He has secured ?17 million (US$30 million) in funding from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which will be matched by Novas, and he is consulting with the local Camden municipal council over proposed plans that include a market place with cafes, shops, a high-quality hotel and an art gallery. The intention is to provide the same sort of community integration that is found within the Prince George, but within the neighborhood. Each social business will provide employment to Camden's homeless community, and homeless and non-homeless people will be shoulder to shoulder both as workers and visitors.

  "Effectively, Arlington as it is now has become a ghetto," adds Wake, who has seen the Common Ground projects first-hand.

  "It is being squeezed out of the community and back into the building. When we asked Arlington residents about its future, they said they wanted to open it up. The plans will see people literally walking in and around Arlington," he says.

  "Common Ground is very impressive, but we want to build on what they've done and integrate with the surrounding community a lot more," he says.

  Wake sees the mixed employment opportunities Arlington will create as central.

  "The most common denominator for residents is poverty," he says. "All some of them need is the opportunity to work."

  "If you have a job, you have a role in life, esteem, and you have respect. People can do a lot for themselves if they have employment and responsibility," he says.

  While Arlington is a distinct departure from Common Ground's approach, another London project plans to stay more faithful to the original model and has drawn on New York's expertise directly to help set it up. Beth Sandor, former director of services at the Prince George, has been seconded by homelessness charity Crisis -- working in conjunction with Genesis Housing Group -- to establish a ?55 million "urban village" in east London.

  "The urban village will have the same sort of mixed community as the Prince George," Sandor says.

  "With London's very specific needs, the intention is that the homes reserved for low-paid workers will be for essential [key] workers who would otherwise be priced out of the housing market," she adds.

  "The whole model relies on solving homelessness, and people leaving homelessness behind for good. Because of that, it's essential that we're part of the surrounding community and a `good neighbor' to those around us. At the Prince George, we became central to the wider community. We became a polling station during elections, and we had a relationship with an organic farmer and held a weekly farmers' market for local residents," he says.

  For some critics of the UK's hostel system, finding an alternative cannot come quickly enough.

  "The biggest hostels are like ghettoes of desperation," says Philip Burke, a trustee at homelessness charity the Simon Community.

  "They are dangerous places filled with people who have a range of unmet needs, whether that's mental ill health or drug and alcohol dependency. Having so many people with so many problems living together is not helpful. There needs to be more of a balance," he adds.

  It will take three years to transform Arlington House and the first residents will not move into the urban village until 2009. With almost 6,000 hostel beds in London, it will be some time before the Common Ground model becomes commonplace.

  Yet if New York, historically home to some of the most punitive policies against the homeless, is able to achieve the Prince George's success on a massive scale, London could within the next decade also have a genuine alternative to the homelessness hostel.
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