Scrooge Alive And Well In New York
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday December 14, 1999
IT'S difficult not to get carried away by Christmas in New York. On prominent street corners, Christmas trees are massed for sale, sending the bracing fragrances of pine, fir and spruce into the air. Farmers' markets are ablaze with red and green juniper, bittersweet, holly, pomegranates, poinsettias and garlands of box and princess pine. On the streets, vendors roast chestnuts and brew spiced apple cider.
The stores try to outdo each other with lavish window displays. Shoppers jostle for space carrying glossy packages. The Salvation Army Santas ring their bells. Sometimes it even snows.
The array of trees is tantalising, though they don't come cheaply. The average 2.5-metre fir is $US80-$US100 ($125-$156) and that's before the decorations. You can't just bung on a bit of tinsel and hope for the best. People spend weeks planning their tree trimming and then throw a party for it.
New York is astoundingly prosperous right now, and the stores more crowded than ever. Given this is the year that people are discovering in a big way shopping on the Internet, the mind boggles at how much spending is actually going on.
People love to grouch about the ``holiday" season (which encompasses Jewish Hanukkah as well as the African-American Kwanza) and all the pressures of partying and shopping, but this year they have a new complaint the non-arrival of presents ordered over the Internet.
All this prosperity might add up to a jolly Christmas to be had by all. But Charles Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well and working at City Hall. Few people would be surprised if Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was this year visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past.
The mayor has set his mind to ridding New York of the homeless who clutter up the footpaths, frighten tourists and get in the way of all that shopping. Giuliani's plan is to deny access to homeless shelters to those who refuse to work, and then to take their children and put them in foster care.
Those who are on the streets for refusing to go to a shelter would be arrested.
The mayor argues that this is the only way to teach the homeless self-sufficiency. His critics argue that the criminalisation of misfortune is truly heartless when the city's coffers are overflowing and the jails are overflowing with minority prisoners, mostly young black men, in jail for drug-related crimes.
In early December, a young woman was hit on the head in full view of several people by an unknown man wielding a brick. The police targeted the homeless for the crime, arresting 226 of them. As it turned out, while the suspect was indeed of no fixed address, he was a career criminal who had been in jail more than out during his adult life. Not the typical profile of a homeless person, the experts say.
Some 77 per cent of New Yorkers disapprove of Giuliani's tactics. Research shows that even a person working full-time for the minimum wage could not afford an apartment at fair market rent in any major US city, let alone New York, where a new lease on a rat-infested hole now goes for $US2,000 a month.
Many homeless do work, though 24,000 of them live in shelters on any given night. But if you have seen a shelter in all its Dickensian glory, you might better understand why some homeless people choose a blanket on a quiet SoHo street.
Giuliani seems to think of homeless people as the scourge of the earth. He wants his city nice for tourists, even though the Supreme Court has ruled his measures unconstitutional. But he seems to be missing the point on who the homeless are and why they are on the streets.
This New Year's Eve, a family I know well are to be evicted from the apartment they have lived in for 12 years. The reasons are complicated, but they have always been good tenants, always paid their rent. They are pillars of our local community. They are not poor, simply middle class. They have been looking for months but they cannot find a single apartment, however small, within a thousand dollars of the $US1,200 a month they now pay. Their kids go to local schools and are doing well. They do not want to move out of New York City, they do not want to move into a distant, dangerous neighbourhood. They won't end up on the streets because they have family in other parts of America.
But most homeless families don't have that option. The city is prosperous, all right, and the rents are skyrocketing because wealthy individuals and corporations are returning to the city in part because Giuliani has cleaned it up, made it safer, shoved most of the homeless people out of sight so the wealthy don't suffer pangs of guilt cruising past tent cities in their limos. That's the cold, cruel irony of it.
A merry Christmas indeed.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald