New Chelsea shelter a refuge for homeless youth

Streetworks Shelter Director Liza Zaretsky and Program Director David Nish discuss the opening of a new six-bed shelter for homeless youth in Chelsea earlier this week.

By Chris Lombardi

They live on the street, in the parks, with relatives who throw them out periodically. They report having been abused, incarcerated, arrested, harassed by cops. Nearly half are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered, and most also engage in “survival sex,” exchanging their bodies for a place to sleep and a few meals. They do not trust easily, especially when strangers approach them with a sandwich and a hello. But every year, about 15,000 of these “street-involved youth” turn to Safe Horizon’s Streetwork project, which this week is inaugurating a brand-new 24-hour shelter program in Chelsea.

The new six-bedroom crisis shelter, funded by the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, is the most recent phase in Streetwork’s 23-year history. From its beginnings in 1984, operating in tandem with Travelers’ Aid and funded by a “juvenile prostitution diversion” grant, the agency has built two drop-in centers for homeless and street-involved youth, offering everything from meals, hang-out space and counseling to a host of legal and medical services for this most vulnerable of populations.

In recent years, Streetwork has also begun to offer short-term shelter beds, first in an uptown location; the Chelsea program, for youth from 16 to 21, will be Streetwork’s first 24-hour shelter, with caseworkers on round the clock. Streetwork’s philosophy, consistent with the “continuum of care” philosophy embraced by D.Y.C.D., focuses on creating a warm, homelike environment, meeting basic needs first, while working intensively to help youth plan their next steps. In a different kind of continuum of care, local agencies involved with the project include The Ali Forney Center for Homeless LGBT Youth, the Hudson Square alternative school The Door, and Callen-Lorde Community Health Center’s Health Outreach to Teens Program.

Chelsea Now stopped by the shelter last week, an apartment in an unassuming old office building, and talked to Streetwork Director David Nish and the program’s shelter director, Liza Zaretsky. Streetwork was born, Nish said, when outreach workers from Safe Horizon, which had been running New York City’s victim-services program since 1978, went out to the West Side Highway and tried to hand out brochures.

“We found people who’d fallen completely through the cracks of the social service system, the shelter system,” said Nish. “People who’d been abused emotionally, physically, sexually by people they should have been able to trust—parents, siblings,, counselors in youth homes.... So, we set out to create a program that would serve this population.”

The New York City Association of Homeless and Street-Involved Youth Organizations defines a homeless adolescent as “a person under the age of 24 years who is need of services and is without a permanent place of shelter, where support and care are available. These individuals do not have a consistent and/or viable housing resource.”

Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, each year between 570,000 and 1.6 million young people run away or become homeless; New York City officials estimate the number of homeless youth in the city at about 15,000 to 20,000. In addition, an estimated 200,000 youth—one in six in the city—are classified as “disconnected,” defined as neither in school nor working. Disconnected youth, D.Y.C.D. Commissioner Jeanne B. Mullgrav told the City Council last May, often experience “lifelong difficulty getting traction in the labor market, periods of dependency on public assistance, as well as intermittent stretches in the City’s prison or homeless shelter systems.”

The youth served by Streetwork, said Nish, have often been experienced all three. Just as in national surveys of homeless youth, 42 to 45 percent are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered—some of whom, Nish said, aren’t ready to identify as such in public. Over half said they’d been assaulted by someone known to them, and many—nearly 60 percent of the women—reported physical or sexual assault before they were 18 years old. In addition, more than half have spent time in foster or group homes, 79 percent have been arrested or incarcerated, and 87 percent report that they engage in what Nish calls “survival sex”: exchanging sex for a meal and a roof over their heads.

The program started with a storefront drop-in center in Chelsea, funded by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), which runs New York’s foster care system, under a “juvenile prostitution diversion” grant. With that grant now broadened to include “youth at risk” and supplemented by funding from numerous sources, including DYCP, Streetwork now reaches 80 to 120 young people each day, and employs 40 staff people at two drop-in centers. (The second, on Essex Street, also offers needle exchange.)

All staff members also do street outreach, said Nish. “So, when they come into the drop-in center, they can look and see the person they first met on the street.” As one of New York City’s prominent victim service organizations, Safe Horizon has deep and close connections with the many agencies these kids may have come across, from police to district attorneys’ offices to foster care officials. But as a confidential service, Streetwork never shares information on clients with law enforcement or child protective service: Such confidentiality is essential when someone they meet on the street decides to come in out of the cold.

From the beginning, said Nish, Streetworks has strived to create a homelike environment filled with love and respect, making it perhaps the nicest place the youth have spent time in for years. In addition to meals, nice furniture and peer support, youth are hooked up with an array of services, from medical care from the Callen-Lorde Center’s Health Outreach to Teens (HOT), to massage and dental care, to Urban Justice Center attorneys running free legal clinics right there.

“We believe young people don’t access services in the community for a number of reasons,” said Nish. “Because they’ve been treated badly, because they may not read, because they may smell, any number of reasons. As much as possible, we try to bring the service to them, or escort them there.”

That holistic approach, with nice surroundings and myriad services, only intensifies in Streetwork’s shelter programs, the first of which started in 2002.

“It’s so important. Everyone who comes in, we give them enough underwear for the week, and pajamas and toiletries, and they know where these things are,” said Liza Zaretsky, who’s been shelter director since the uptown facility opened in 2002. “They’re treated with respect, and they’re very respectful of the space,” adding that these young people who may not remember, or have ever known, family meals. At her shelters, the staff cooks the meals, and everyone eats and watches movies together.

“We give them a Metrocard so they can get around,” said Nish, “but it really is a family.” At least for 30 days: By D.C.Y.D.’s definition, “crisis shelter” is a short-term solution, and the maximum stay (with extensions) is about 90 days.

In those 30 to 90 days, youth work with their case managers to come up with plans for how to move into a more permanent situation. “For some it’s about going home,” Zaretsky said. “If it is, we work with them to see whether they could work something out with their last caretaker.” If they are LGBT youth, who are often and especially targeted, they may choose services and places like The Ali Forney Center for Homeless LGBT Youth at 224 West 35th Street. Domestic violence survivors and gang-related youth can also consider programs tailored to their needs, while educating each other in the meantime. Many youth work toward entering 18- to 20-month residential programs through D.Y.C.D.’s Transitional Independent Living (TIL), designed to help move youth, age 16 to 21, to permanent housing.

The plan developed at Streetworks usually includes education, often through one-on-one tutoring or intensive small classes. “We see a large number of clients who haven’t been past third grade, who can’t read,” said Nish. “We’ll work with them one-on-one, to get them to do pre-GED work, get them into GED programs.” Others, he says, come to the streets with “quite a bit of education…we’ll work with them as they are.” Similarly, pre-job training classes include not just interviewing skills—“How do you present yourself?”—but exercises like “How do you handle it when a supervisor makes you angry?” And some youth, Nish said, will end the 30 to 90 days and go back to the streets, though many are motivated soon to return to the program and try again.

Whether going to their families, back into foster care or into a TIL, clients may also spend some time wrestling with substance abuse problems, especially if it has become all-consuming or if the program they want to enter requires them to be drug-free. Nish stresses the nonjudgmental nature of that conversation.

“Usually, drugs are for numbing,” he said. “When they get more options in their lives, the drugs usually fall by the wayside.” That same formulation goes for survival sex. “It’s not like we condone sex work, but we’re completely non-judgmental about it,” he added. “We work with them to replace it with something else, some other way to make a living.” The issue, he said, is homelessness—not drug use, not prostitution.

With the opening this week of the Chelsea shelter, Streetwork’s shelter capacity just doubled, thanks to funding and support from D.Y.C.D., which now provides nearly $300,000 to these shelters.

Nish and Zaretsky, while having “nothing but praise” for the city officials who have made this possible, are mostly consumed with getting the shelter up and running. And their mark of success, said Zaretsky, will come on the day of “graduation” — when clients “age out” of the program, at 21 or 24, and at their celebration say to the staff, “‘Before Streetwork, I didn’t know there could be a place where people cared about someone like me.’” It comes when residents come back to give back, like “Maria,” mentioned in Safe Horizon’s annual report, who took six months, at age 17, to come in off to street and into shelter, and went on to earn her GED, find permanent housing, and even marry and have a child. She has told Streetwork that she wants to return to Streetwork as a staff member.

“It’s a long process, making sure someone’s ready for work like this,” said Nish, but he hopes to eventually have many former clients on staff, since they are the best role models for kids who are still on the street. Trust, so difficult for street-involved youth, will be easier to establish with alums on staff, he said, and the bonds with clients will inevitably be stronger.

“After all, it’s through the relationships that the work begins,” said Nish.