I seldom write about our nonprofit work on here for various reasons, but I want to talk about homeless assistance and how to solve the homeless crisis with faithful love. For eight years or so, we’ve hosted monthly salons at our house as a maker’s day. We’ve done it every Third Saturday. If you’re in NYC, write me an email and I’ll send you an invite.

One of the early impulses — aside from wanting to offer brunch to neighbors and artists — was to create a space where everyone felt welcome. We wanted to grow up and become the kind of people who were welcoming everyone. I mean welcome for the rich and poor, famous and obscure, honored and ashamed, pleased and pained, powerful and weak. One of my favorite moments has always been the moment a fashion stylist from a major fashion industry sat across my kitchen table from the man experiencing homelessness downstairs. That’s where true homeless assistance starts.

We’ll call him Albert Galahad. He always made jokes about my first name because of his middle name. Al for short, because that’s similar to the nickname others use. Al’s half Jewish, autistic (think borderline Rain Man: great with numbers, figures, memorizing totals and terrible with basic social functioning). He has a lot of friends at the Jackie Gleason Depot.

Look, some of these guys are great to him. There’s a guy there named Mike who looks out for Al and has given him food, tents, these sorts of things. The Dispatcher welcomed Al into his home over the holidays, let him sleep on their couch. Lots of folks have helped him over the years or at the nearby bodega.

I want to be clear: many, many of the men at the Depot are incredible to Al.

But there are also terrible people. I’m going to describe why in detail below. It’s disturbing.

Originally, Al was a victim of a landlord who first refused to make repairs and then kicked him out. Dude needed AND wanted housing assistance. The details are fuzzy as to what happened originally. I don’t know exactly what happened.

However Al has stayed homeless over the last decade because of terrible people who have wanted to keep him down. Some people don’t feel good about themselves unless they have another person to stomp. For these kinds of humans, Al was their footstool. Without his back to step upon, they felt as if they were at the bottom of the totem pole. Which is rather funny because on a totem pole, the bottom is the most important figure. 

I love Al.

He’s funny. He knows a ton of Beavis and Butthead quotes. He has opinions on all sorts of city policies. He knows his way around. He can do math on the fly. He’s curious and blunt, quite like a child in many ways. 

But he stays homeless because people treat him fatalistically. I had local barbers, real estate folk, chefs, and many bus drivers tell me he was always going to be on this cycle. Always going to be in and out of lotto tickets, always going to be on the street. 

No one considered that Al didn’t want to be on the street.

That desire alone told me something needed to change. 

We started out raising through our starving artist program some homeless survival kits. (If you want to give a regular gift to our starving artists program, you can make a regular gift here. Even micro donations monthly add up to a lot in these situations.) These survival kids had MREs, they had wool socks, emergency blankets, a sleeping bag, hygiene kits, other things. Not much for homeless assistance, only a bare start. They weren’t very expensive. We were able to get several. He got not one, but two, because someone stole his first while he was sleeping.

Here’s where it gets dodgy.

The bad guys from the neighborhood and some of the bad folks from the Jackie Gleason Bus Depot regularly mistreat him, mock him, call him the “unkillable cockroach”. One of them stole his wallet and flushed it down the toilet. Another threw away his tent. Another filled a trash bag with his items. Another defecated on his tent. Someone else took the bleach he had to disinfect his camp after it was soiled and poured it all over his belongings. They shredded his sleeping bag in the midst of a New York winter. Other neighborhood folks stole his wallet once, twice, three, four–I think it ended up being something like eight times? Ten? It seemed every time we turned around, we had to get him back to a city office to replace his ID or his social security or insurance or reduced ride fare MTA card.

Remember: this is a mentally disabled man. He’s lucid on some things, but he can’t properly function in society. You can tell as soon as you talk to him. He’s smart in some areas, but the basic social competencies required to function simply aren’t there. 

When I first met him, he slept on a pallet on top of milk crates in a pseudo-cellar at the bottom of an apartment complex with a power cord and a heater. The Yemeni Muslim guys at the deli couldn’t stand the thought of him sleeping on the street, so they gave what they had access to. A friend of ours from the open house salons gave him a crockpot in which he could cook tuna surprise. 

I want you to think about that: months of scavenging in trash bins for lotto tickets and with a crockpot full of tuna surprise by his two crates in that pseudo-cellar, he went up a rung on the ladder.

Well the landlords found out about the basement and it flooded in a storm. Thank God he was out of there. But they kicked him out. Back onto the street. 

Eventually we grew tired of this back and forth. So we rallied the neighbors. He had regular income from the state and so I asked him what was stopping him from having an apartment. He said a security deposit. Of $500. He was looking WAY upstate in Binghamton but also in the neighborhood. I went personally with him to some apartment walkthroughs in some pretty shady situations around the neighborhood. None of them would rent to him, even with me there. 

So he found an apartment in Binghamton. We raised around $500 for long term housing for Al in the winter of 2020-2021. From neighbors. 

Neighbors helped us clear out what few possessions he had and drove him upstate.

He moved into an apartment in Binghamton, NY and was there until April 2021. 

One of the bus drivers he’s around often asked Al to cash a lotto ticket for him, promising a cut of the winnings. Al did so, and then those earnings were associated with his SS number as income, which meant he lost most of his income from the state (disability and the like) to pay rent! Which meant he had to leave the apartment upstate.

Which meant he was back on the street AGAIN.

By the Depot.

It was heartbreaking. I went to several government offices and appointments with Al to try and navigate the restoration of this income. Only some has come back but EVERY government agency that has looked into his case called the driver who did this “evil.”

Al was back sleeping on the street from May 2021 until a few weeks ago. 

Al and I together connected with an organization called Breaking Ground—an amazing org with a lot of opportunities for unhoused people to secure a stable living environment. One of the things you have to do is provide a proof of address. Which is continually frigging hilarious because — checks notes — HE’S EXPERIENCING FRIGGING HOMELESSNESS. 

So you know me. I said, “To heck with it, use mine.” Signed the papers for a point of contact.

There was a LOT of delays —- the org’s phone number was not going through because of a move, Al didn’t have a phone for awhile so they couldn’t contact him, no one was checking Breaking Ground’s answering machine where I was leaving repeated messages. 

But we finally got ahold of them and got something aligned.

Guess what they found?

A former hotel, with parameters he must meet, but that are more feasible than a shelter here in NYC (they won’t give away his bed if he lets them know he’s going out of town, for example). They provide three meals a day and a snack, along with other assistance as needed. 

Tara received a photo from him the other night and it’s amazing to talk to him and wish him a “good night’s sleep” KNOWING he was going to be safe and warm. Knowing no one would crap on his bed, steal his wallet and therefore I.D., or try to kick him in his sleep.

Please continue to keep Al in your thoughts and prayers as he adjusts to a different life after at least six years of experiencing homelessness. He has consistent help from the state (though now it’s MUCH lower, because of being exploited with the lotto ticket) and medical coverage, etc. We still have a long road, but here’s what it takes:

It takes neighbors.

Knowing each other.

And faithfully loving each other.

I’ve known Al for almost a decade now. Literally every long term Sunset Parker I talked to said he’d always be like this. But they were wrong. Faithful love of caring neighbors won. 

That’s how you do homeless assistance.

Get off social media. Get to know your neighbors. Love them. Invite all of them to your dinner table. Give them assistance, whether they’re poor in spirit or actually poor, whether it’s depression assistance or homeless assistance.

You might save a life. 

If you want to give a regular gift to our starving artists program, you can make a regular gift here. Even micro donations monthly add up to a lot in these situations. $500 bucks at the right time changed his life. A bit of legal advocacy changed his life forever.

More importantly: people like this aren’t homeless because they want to be. Half a million are homeless and in need of homeless assistance, but we have 16 million vacant homes. One of the easiest fixes is making it illegal to use homes as investment properties for people who own more than a couple and especially for multinational conglomerates. That would stop asset squatting and give people a fighting shot.

But I’ve met people in this city with full time salaried jobs, brilliant podcasters, families of three and five and the like who are homeless.

It’s solvable, we just don’t want to get to know our neighbors.

Be a neighbor. Be a Good Samaritan.

Don’t be a jerk.

What do you say? Tell me in the comments.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash