NEW YORK — On a rainy recent afternoon, a man in his late 60s with a noticeable limp stood in the middle of a normally busy intersection in downtown Manhattan holding a handwritten cardboard sign.
"The elderly and vulnerable have been forgotten about during the virus. Nobody cares,” said the sign. "Please help. We are hungry.”
But the street was mostly empty of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and over the span of 20 minutes, no one stopped. He had risked his life to ask for help from passersby who weren’t there, so he could buy food from restaurants that weren’t open.
The man lives in a facility known as a single-room occupancy, or SRO, on East 12th Street in Manhattan, where each month he and 90 other tenants pay roughly one-third of their $850 Social Security checks in rent. The facility is run by Volunteers of America of Greater New York, an affiliate of the national housing-focused nonprofit headquartered in Alexandria, Va., and subsidized by government agencies. Like others in the facility, the man, who will be known as Rich, asked not to be identified even by his correct first name because he feared retaliation from site managers.
The New York division of Volunteers of America promises on its Web site that it’s “committed to doing everything we can to slow the spread of the virus and keep our clients, staff and volunteers safe” during the covid-19 outbreak.
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But that has not been in evidence at the facility in recent weeks. According both to tenants and images viewed by The Post, sanitary conditions are poor, social-distancing has been lax and food is scarce. Residents described their situation as a ticking coronavirus time bomb, with even basic protective tools absent; never mind gloves and masks, there has not even been soap or toilet paper in the shared bathrooms.
On Saturday, their fears seemed to have been realized. A man, believed to be in his early 60′s, was found dead in his room by another tenant, according to a resident who was present on the site. An empty ambulance could be seen idling outside the building Saturday afternoon; by evening, it had been replaced by a city-morgue van. No cause of death was immediately available, but the man had been complaining of trouble breathing in recent days, said one tenant. He added that the man had not received any medical attention, and was seen as recently as Thursday mingling with other residents in the facility’s common area.
"We are being forgotten and left for dead,” said a resident of the SRO, who like many agreed to talk to a reporter on the promise of anonymity. “This place doesn’t care about us.”
Asked for a comment on the death, a VOA spokeswoman, Colleen Roche, provided a statement from Tere Pettitt, VOA-GNY’s president and chief executive. “Any death of a client is a cause for deep sorrow for the entire VOA-GNY family,” it read. It said the man was a member of a “wellness check” program at the facility, which involved a twice-daily check by phone or in person, and that “during two [in-person] check-ins yesterday the individual expressed no complaints and appeared to be well.” Pettitt declined to elaborate further, citing HIPPA guidelines.
Though just one of what advocates say is a litany of problem spots in the New York area, the 12th Street SRO illustrates how coronavirus is endangering a whole class of people. The scene lacks the dramatic optics of a hospital lobby filled with patients on ventilators. But a closer look at its images — an elderly woman without food, a cancer patient deprived of basic cleaning necessities — tells both of the forsaken vulnerable in a besieged city and the people who have left them behind.
The 12th Street SRO stands just west of First Avenue in Manhattan’s historic East Village. (VOA-GNY runs it under a contract with the city’s Department of Homeless Services.) It is filled with former lawyers and veterans, stockbrokers and city workers, each with their own story of how they fell on hard times to end up here.
It is here that the residents, many of whom have medical challenges like cancer or heart disease, share a goal with all others residents in this embattled city — avoid joining the 131,000 people who’ve already been confirmed with covid-19 or the nearly 9,000 who’ve died from it.
And it is here they say they have been abandoned.
A food shortage
Food was one service the residents hadn’t previously needed to worry about. They’d long been provided three meals daily, thanks to a nonprofit that operates at the site called the Educational Alliance. But when the coronavirus outbreak began in early March, the food stopped. New York City had ordered all meals to facilities like this halted to discourage gathering.
In the last month, food packages — containing four turkey-based meals and some snacks — were delivered sporadically by the city’s Department for the Aging. But residents say it was impossible to predict when the boxes would arrive, and many said they didn’t receive them because they were told they were not on “a list,” with no instructions how to join it. At most, the boxes, with four meals, would arrive once a week. It has driven many residents to find food elsewhere.
One afternoon, Adele, a tenant at the 12th Street SRO, was walking, slowly, up Second Avenue in the rain. She was determined to get to a KFC, one of the last affordable food options left in the neighborhood. She didn’t know if it was open during the outbreak. She had a few dollars in her pocket and could buy a chicken sandwich, maybe even a small bucket.
In her 90′s and disabled, she had no easy way to eat; this was her best shot. She had gotten about halfway there, going about two blocks in 20 minutes, when she encountered a Post reporter, who told her that, sadly, the KFC was not open.
She turned and walked back to the SRO. The only food she ate that day was an egg-salad sandwich given to her by a stranger. One week later, another resident, Nick, encountered her visibly hungry in a common kitchen area. “I have nothing to eat,” she told him. He went to his room and made her a bologna sandwich from a small stash in his fridge.
“She was so down and out, what else could I do?” he said.
Alan van Capelle, president and CEO of Educational Alliance, said the food conditions are unacceptable.
“The City took over meal distribution and we have been frustrated and concerned to see the gaps in service that have occurred since,” he said in an email. “If it were up to us, we would continue to manage the preparation and distribution of healthy meal options...We share the frustration of older adults who feel they aren’t getting the support or services they need and deserve.”
Rich, the man panhandling in the street, says he has gone down several waist sizes since the outbreak began. Other residents also look emaciated, a jolting image, particularly in the East Village. The neighborhood is home to some of the city’s trendiest bars and restaurants; average monthly rent is $4,230.
A spokeswoman for the Department for the Aging (DFTA), Dina Montes, declined to comment. Alerted to the issue by The Post, Jane Meyer, deputy press secretary for Mayor Bill de Blasio, referred the question to Joshua Goodman, a spokesman for Kathryn Garcia, New York City’s emergency food czar during the pandemic.
Goodman said that the 12th Street SRO would now be moved to a new program in which the food office is taking over deliveries previously handled by DFTA. The current meals, he acknowledged, have been sporadic and insufficient. He said under the new program, residents would receive the four-meal box every other day, part of a larger citywide transition in response to queries from The Post and other journalists. A four-meal box arrived for the SRO residents Friday afternoon.
Safety concerns
On a typical day before coronavirus, the center beehived with activity. There were ceramics on one floor, exercise classes on another and programs in the auditorium, all run by the Educational Alliance for tenants and outsider seniors. Those have all been halted now.
What hasn’t stopped is the gathering. The kitchens on the residential floors are all open, and tenants, not always attuned to social distancing, continue to convene. Daniel, one longtime resident, said some tenants grow angry when you ask them to sit far apart. "Nobody is here to make sure we keep apart, to tell us why we have to keep apart,” he said.
No further isolation measures appeared to have been taken as of mid-afternoon Saturday, three hours after the man was found, with no senior staff besides the live-in superintendent, Rudolph Peart, on site.
The man who died, who according to public records had previously lived in Brooklyn, was known as a friendly personality. He enjoyed playing basketball, said one tenant who knew him.
Residents noted they’d been given nothing in the way of protective gear until Friday, when repeated inquiries from The Post prompted a change that had staff members providing two paper masks to each tenant.
Before that the few masks that could be seen were on people who got them elsewhere — a cancer patient had been handed one by nurses at his chemotherapy-treatment center. Residents also cited the health risks of a lack of toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms, which they said rendered moot the hand-washing signs posted at the facility. They also complained of a lack of trash receptacles in hallways, which force them to risk contagion at street bins outside.
Roche, the VOA spokeswoman, declined to make Peart or the site’s manager, Abigail Crawford, available for interviews this past week. On Friday, she provided a response from Mariel Cruceta, sector director of supportive housing services for Volunteers of America-Greater New York.
“VOA continues to monitor aggressively, to communicate with clients, to identify signs and symptoms to look out for, and to connect anyone who needs it to hospital care," it said. Cruceta said, in response to inquiries, that soap dispensers would be added; she also cited the hiring of a temporary custodian.
She said the goal was “to make sure our clients are safe, well-cared for; and do not fall through the cracks.”
But a letter distributed by VOA just 12 days ago appeared to downplay the risks and contradict the current medical consensus.
“The Centers for Disease Control have advised that being in the same indoor environment (e.g. a classroom, a hospital waiting room) as a person with symptomatic laboratory-confirmed covid-19 for a prolonged period of time is considered low risk for transmission of this virus.” The letter was signed by Noelle Withers, “VP/Quality and Program Services” for VOA-GNY. It was dated April 6.
Nationally, VOA provides housing to an estimated 25,000 people and also runs facilities for those with addiction challenges, learning disabilities and other issues. Founded in 1896 as a faith-based splinter group of the Salvation Army, it operates in a decentralized way; each geographic unit functions independently, part of an affiliate charter with its own executives. That has given regions more flexibility but has made a single policy difficult to impose.
A spokesman for the national VOA in Alexandria, David Burch, referred questions about the 12th Street SRO to the New York group.
Advocates say the challenges at the 12th St SRO shine a light on the public-private partnerships that support the most vulnerable in the country’s biggest city. Ideally, these unions are a perfect symbiosis, each side providing what the other cannot. But in a crisis every issue becomes outsized as each entity relies on someone else to solve it, multiple outfielders pointing at each other to catch the same fly ball.
“There are currently huge lapses in the people responsible for the homeless and in supportive housing,” said Giselle Routhier, policy director for the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group. “Money comes from the city or the state, and there isn’t always enough of it. And not everyone [at a nonprofit] takes responsibility on their own.”
She said that, given the health dangers, advocates were pressing for residents of supportive-housing and shelters to be moved to hotel rooms and dorms but have been frustrated by a slow response from the city.
Meyer, the de Blasio spokeswoman, said some SRO and shelter residents could be eligible for a move but would need the approval of the health department. “This global pandemic has sent shockwaves through our system," she said of the situation at the SRO generally. "As we grapple with our new reality, we have had to work swiftly to adjust city services to protect our most vulnerable neighbors, and we are collaborating with our non-profit partners to strengthen our systems every day.”
Asked about the SRO, Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services that contracts VoA, said the agency is“coordinating closely around the clock with our providers and agency partners to protect the New Yorkers we serve." He said the agency “continue[s] to adapt and improve, committed to supporting our city’s most vulnerable residents,”
Last week, before Saturday’s death, a buzz had rung through the halls of the 12th Street SRO: a different tenant had tested positive for covid-19.
The news came via a letter from Quality VP Withers. It noted that someone had tested positive and was now “off-site,” believed to be the hospital. Anxiety began to course through the center.
“If it’s who I think it was, I was in the elevator with them last week.” Nick said.
“How do we stop each other from getting it?” Daniel asked.
No news followed. Roche, the VOA spokeswoman, confirmed on Friday to The Post that the patient was in the hospital but said they would soon be taken to a rehab center.
The tenants, meanwhile, tried to focus on their health.
“We hear talk about food. We see de Blasio talk about it," said Rich, noting the daily televised press conferences. “We don’t see much of it,” he added.
He said he was preparing to pick up his sign and go back into the street.
