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The city-run shelter the family lives in is “a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers,” Andrea Elliott, the reporter, writes. “It is no place for children,” but 280 children live there—280 of the 22,000 homeless children in New York, the most since the Great Depression.
Families have languished in shelters longer in recent years. Elliott attributes this to a decline in affordable housing and in jobs that pay a living wage. She notes another view, however, voiced in 2012 by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: residents were staying longer, he said, because the shelters were offering “a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before.”
Beth Cunningham, a staff attorney for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, told me this afternoon that “Invisible Child” made her think “about children I’ve worked with who have had very similar experiences.”
