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Commentary

COMPASSION FATIGUE SYNDROME

The City is a Bit Player When It Comes to Meals for the Homeless

by Stanley Mieses

Every day of the week since 1982 the Church of the Holy Apostles, on Ninth Avenue and 28th Street, has opened its doors to the homeless - their "guests," as the church's ministers prefer to call them - and has provided a hot lunch that is only real meal of the day or week or month for thousands of people with no address, no job, no support and little hope.

New Yorkers these days seem bored with the homeless. Or worse, they seem unkind, at least when it comes to considering how difficult it can be to raise yourself up by the bootstraps when you have no shoes. Yes, Nuri, the man sitting on my right, at one of the many temporary tables set up by the church at lunchtime, is a three-time loser to the crack pipe. Yes, the woman sitting opposite me, scarfing down a vegetable medley, believes that the nation of France, following the French Revolution of 1789, took away her birthright to the throne. Yes, there are people at the table who bear the physical signs of alcoholism and the attendant signs of carelessness and abuse.


You have only to bear witness to a typical day's lunch to understand how overwhelming is the volume of the Holy Apostles' Soup Kitchen program.
The whole place is full of people who seem to stagger when they walk, whose speech and thought patterns seem unclear, whose attire would cause you to notice and avoid them at fifty paces. But they are citizens, after all, endowed with rights that are rarely recognized and honored even less. And to them, the Church of the Holy Apostles is essential; the City of New York, the government of their hometown, is insignificant.

You have only to sit in the church and bear witness to the process of a typical day's lunch to understand how overwhelming is the volume of the Holy Apostles' Soup Kitchen program. A hundred pounds of meat, close to fifty pounds of pasta, a thousand pounds of vegetables, eighty loaves of bread with nearly fifty pounds of butter and cheese, and gallons and gallons of milk and iced tea are prepared daily for the Soup Kitchen's guests by a mostly volunteer staff. Of the $1.8 million dollars annually required to run the program, less than $230,000 or13% of the total operating budget, comes from government grants - federal, state and city combined. Of the three agencies that supply most of the monetary assistance, that is, of the aforementioned 13% - HPNAP (Hunger Preventive Assistance Program of the NYS Department of Health), FEMA (Emergency Food and Shelter Program) and Member Initiative of the NYS Department of Children and Family Services - only one, FEMA, is associated with the City. Donated food accounted for only about 2% of income in 1998, down 60% in 1997. This 2% comes out to close to $50,000 in food supplies, due mainly to declines in donations from the USDA, which otherwise supports city agencies such as City Harvest and Food for Survival. The City doesn't even buy their homeless citizens a cup of coffee, in effect.

Government has failed to develop a big-picture strategy for dealing with the homeless. Here in New York City, this has been the case through three administrations. The politics-is-personal is business-as-usual attitude of the City - Koch moodiness, Dinkins ineffectualness and Giuliani callousness - have amounted to City-sponsored neglect. City policy has increasingly treated homelessness either as criminal or as merely unseemly, a stain on the so-called quality of life campaign that seems to be serving the interests of those who are enjoying a quality moment in time.

At the Church of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, the folks who have guided the program for the past seventeen years cannot stop to ponder all of this. Clyde Kuemmerle, the coordinator of volunteer programs at the church, knows that most of the City's involvement comes through the General Welfare Committee, whose chair, City Councilman Steven Di Brienza of Brooklyn, is on the Mayor's sworn-enemies hit list. Kuemmerle also knows that the State reneged this past year on its share of the "New York, New York" program budget for assisted-living housing and when it did its partner, the City, folded its tent, too, simultaneously leaving no homes to be built for the homeless and removing the jobs needed to build them. "It was a drop in the bucket and they shut that off,'' Kuemmerle says with a shrug.

But even assuming it was available, "throwing money at the problem from the private sector is still not the solution," says the Reverend Elizabeth Maxwell, the church's associate rector and program director of the Soup Kitchen, who took the same lunch tray to the same tables inside the church as had the legion of homeless only moments earlier.

"It makes me angry when I hear that the answer to societal ills is the church and the private sector," she said. "Homelessness is society's problem but people can't be counted on to have a moral conscience and act on it. It requires a strategy and social and political commitment. I'm glad that people are charitable and are challenged to do so, but ultimately that's not the answer."

But if the homeless have no political clout or public sympathy, what then? "Compassion doesn't sell," says Kuemmerle. "Not only do we not get a sympathetic response from the Mayor's office but I don't think we even get a compassionate response from sociologists and the medical profession. In the age of science there doesn't seem to be any room for it. More time is spent on DNA mapping than on understanding the person you're encountering on the street.

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Stanley Mieses is a former staff writer for The New Yorker and features editor of New York Newsday. He is currently is an on-air commentator for National Public Radio.

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