The entrance to the Auburn Family Reception Center, a homeless shelter, at 39 Auburn Place in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Photo by Aby Thomas/BI

It may be hard to believe that Michael Jordan was born in the imposing, 10-storey brick building at 39 Auburn Place in Brooklyn 48 years ago. The building, which was once Cumberland Hospital, has no celebratory indication of its link to the basketball legend.

Instead, there is a grimy plaque under a dull grey arch stating that the 59-year-old building is now the ‘Auburn Family Reception Center’.  It houses homeless people.

But the Fort Greene shelter has become a legend of sorts. Neighborhood organizations, advocacy groups for the homeless and seven interviewed residents say that it is infamous as one of the worst shelters for homeless families in the city.

Auburn’s reputation grows from long-standing complaints of poor heating, unpalatable food and bad guards at the shelter, including unconfirmed complaints by four women of some guards asking for sexual favors from residents.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeless Services said that they have received no reports of sexual charges and would take immediate action if it did.

“Auburn has always been a difficult place—it has a reputation of being not a good place to be sent to,” says Dr. Georgianna Glose, executive director of the Fort Greene Strategic Neighborhood Action Partnership, a community advocacy organization.

SNAP has been monitoring the complaints of Auburn residents for nearly five years, and has been actively chasing DHS to provide better conditions at the shelter. More than 100 families reside in the city-run shelter, a small slice of the nearly 8500 families currently using New York City’s municipal shelter facilities for the homeless.

The heating issues at Auburn have been the subject of much worry in the past. The heating system at Auburn is shared with the nearby Cumberland Diagnostic Center and as a result, shelter residents have complained about not having a dedicated heating system of their own.

DHS had a capital budget item to replace the drafty windows as well as the heating system at Auburn a few years back. Although new windows got installed, the heating system was never replaced after the budget got rescinded.  While replacing the windows has certainly helped, the partial fix is not enough, says Dr. Glose.

“The heating appears to still be an issue,” says Rob Perris, District Manager of Brooklyn’s Community Board 2, echoing Dr. Glose’s sentiment. “At this time, DHS is essentially saying the replacement of the windows has solved the problem, and if there’s a continuance of problems in individual units, they’ll move the people out of these rooms and into someplace else where it is warmer. But that seems very much a stop-gap kind of response.”

M, (all names of Auburn residents in this article have been withheld by request), has been living at the Auburn shelter for almost a year with her daughter. She admits that the heat has gotten better at the shelter with the arrival of the new windows, but agrees that the heat ‘needs to be a little bit more.’

M, however, wholeheartedly agrees with the issue of unpalatable food that is usually served at the shelter. At a Thanksgiving lunch thrown by the SNAP office, she seems exhilarated seeing the food that is served, and packs some for her daughter as well. “We don’t really like the food at Auburn. They need to change that,” she says.

J. N. and her daughter N. N., Auburn residents since February, shake their heads angrily when describing the food at Auburn. “The food, forget it, you don’t want to know. Like, a month ago, there were maggots in the food,” J. N. says. “Maggots,” she repeats, pounding her cane on the ground furiously.

“If we could get a camera in there, the first thing I would capture would be the kitchen, because it’s so disgusting,” J. N. says. She says that they have been served old or expired food many times, a statement that has been repeated by six other residents interviewed for this article.

Then there is the question of how the food arrives. Since it is cooked at another location, it usually arrives cold at the shelter and families have to use a microwave to heat it up. However, there is only one microwave for the 100-plus families to use.

“What is terribly disturbing is that the residents have one microwave… but every administrator in that building has their own private microwave,” says Dr. Glose.

The community board along with SNAP had brokered a donation of an additional microwave to Auburn, but Perris called the process an extremely harrowing one. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of hoops we had to jump through to get them to accept it,” he says. And then shortly afterwards, the first one blew up, and so they are back to one again, says Dr. Glose.

Dr. Glose says that another common complaint is regarding the inappropriate behavior of the guards at the shelter.  “The attitude of the guards towards the residents is abysmal, it’s horrible. We’ve been after the DHS to train the guards and to keep them under supervision. They say that they are adequately trained—but that still hasn’t happened,” she says.

“Prisoners, that’s what they treat us like. We’re not convicts, we’re only homeless!” says M. W., who lives in the shelter with his wife and children. Fingers were pointed at the DHS police in the shelter, who were accused of being rude and playing favorites.

“It’s not the security guards, it’s the DHS police,” says N. N. “They think they are the police. They play favorites in there. And it’s obvious. There’ll be certain people they won’t check or they don’t care. And that’s not how it supposed to be.”

A few residents have also accused guards of asking for ‘favors’ in exchange for relaxation of the rules. T. M., a young woman who has been living in the shelter for about a month, accuses the guards, both male and female, of not doing their jobs properly.

“The girls, they come in and sleep all day. The boys they come, they sleep and they want to have sex with you, and if you don’t want to have sex with them, they act all crazy with you,” says T. M., with two of her friends nodding their heads in agreement.

When asked to comment on these allegations, Heather Janik, press secretary at DHS, replied saying there had been no reports or evidence to indicate that the charges alleged by the residents took place at the Auburn residence. “Homeless Services takes all criminal allegations very seriously and were such a complaint to be made to the Agency, immediate and appropriate steps to address the situation would be taken,” says Janik.

Although Janik urges any resident with information about such incidents to report them, chances of Auburn residents actually doing that seem pretty slim.

When asked why they haven’t tried complaining to the shelter officials, T. M. says, “When you complain, they’re going to treat you dirty, and they’re going to f**k you over.” This was the worry of almost all residents interviewed for this article—complaining was not an option as they were afraid of being treated worse than they are now, or being sent to a far worse shelter scenario.

“There are a lot of people who would like to stand up and talk to someone. But they’re afraid. They’re going to find out it was us and they’re going to retaliate on us,” says J. N.

N. N. tries to explain the strife between the guards and the residents. “The workers like to complain about how we all have nasty attitudes and we don’t want to comply with anything. But it’s because of the way they act towards us,” she says. “It’s the whole ‘get respect, give respect’ thing. If you’re going to be nasty with us, we’re not going to want to sit there and be polite to you.”

Despite the resounding number of complaints, there were a few residents who put in a good word for the shelter. Z. N., a young mother with a baby son, did not have any problems with heat, the food or the guards and seemed particularly happy about ‘parties that were organized in the shelter for the holidays.’ Another young mother, S. R., said that while she doesn’t have problems with the heat or the guards, she, however, doesn’t eat any of the food served at the shelter. “The food’s spoiled, you see,” she explains, while holding her young son.

Since entry to the Auburn shelter is allowed only to the residents, assessing resident complaints and inspecting shelter facilities have proved to be difficult, say community activists. “They [DHS] point to privacy issues [when we ask for an inspection], and those are certainly important,” says Perris. “But it seems that they use that as a wall to hide behind, so that no one can see the facility, or see it fully.”

Although state inspections are periodically done at the shelter, residents say they are not much of a help.

“Every time somebody’s coming to visit, they cover everything up.  That’s how they do it,” says J. N. “And then it goes right back to being the same thing. We already got that—we know when someone’s coming in now, because that’s when they start painting a little bit, telling us to do your room this way, that way…”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and service organization, says that although shelters that are run by DHS tend to have poorer conditions than those run by private contractors, Auburn has been considered particularly bad for some time.

“Auburn is probably one of the family shelters we’ve received the most complaints about. It’s unconscionable that the DHS hasn’t done what it needs to do to address the issues there. It’s not even a question right now about the severity of the problems, and it’s been documented by multiple independent sources,” says Markee. “The city itself has acknowledged the problem—they just are not fixing it.”

Dr. Glose says that the rise in the number of homeless people may be the reason why the city seems to be overlooking the issues at the Auburn shelter. But she says that doesn’t excuse the low standards of the shelter, since the DHS are rigorous in their scrutiny of shelters run by non-profits.

“If there was one thing wrong, they’d shut them down. And this doesn’t happen to their own shelter. And that’s an issue,” says Dr. Glose.

J. N. looks forlorn when asked if she expects change at the Auburn shelter. “I want to get out of here. As long as we are not here; that’s all that matters,” she says. “People would rather be on the streets than be here.”

For related stories see: Next Step Shelter Uses Punitive Measures

For related stories see: City’s Transitional Housing for Homeless Lacks Oversight

Although they were promised union membership and jobs in exchange for taking a 15-week apprenticeship course in 2010, the workers claim they were never hired on Ratner’s $5-billion mega-project.

“This was the biggest bait-and-switch in the history of Brooklyn,” said Councilwoman Letitia James (D-Fort Greene).

Students say that the courtroom brought their lectures to life.

Fort Greene’s city councillor, Letitia James, will be at the school today to celebrate the launch of the mock courtroom.

For more on the story, go here.

Darrell Issa (R-CA) current ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, is taking over the chairmanship from Edolphus Towns (D - NY) as part of the new Republican congressional leadership. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

By Miranda Neubauer

Brooklyn’s clout in the new U.S. Congress will be greatly diminished come January. Despite easy victories in November, the borough’s three most powerful congressional representatives will be removed from leadership posts in three House committees when the new Republican majority is sworn in.

Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D), who represents Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bushwick and Sunset Park, among other areas, will lose her chairmanship of the House Committee on Small Business that she has held since 2007.

One organization that is set to receive $750,000 in federal funding this year through Congresswoman Velazquez’s position is the Brooklyn Kings County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The money will fund a not-for-profit business incubator program.

The loss of her position on the committee “will be a detriment to the aspiring entrepreneurs and to the small business community in general, ” said its President Rick Miranda.

The organization, which has existed since 2005, also offers loans through the Small Business Administration, helps minority owned businesses obtain certification to do work for the city and hosts educational and networking forums.

“Someone like Congresswoman Velazquez, who came from a pretty poor background herself, … she realizes that the middle-class citizens that contemplate and dream about opening up a business can never take the plunge because they never have the money or the savvy or the education,” said Miranda. Miranda also pointed out that the group’s business incubator could sponsor six businesses per quarter, amounting to 24 a year. “A huge mouthful in this economy.”

Without Velazquez, said Miranda, he fears such funding for small business might dry up. The new Republican majority “should take a real hard look at what is available and continue to assist those programs that are doing well and not just say we need to cut our spending on these programs.” The new majority should not “choke us in our ability to execute services to the small business community.”

The weakening of the power of other Brooklyn congressmen will have more national effect.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D), who represents Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville and East New York, among other areas, will lose his position as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee—a position he has held since 2009.

The change in chairmanship of the committee has a national impact, Julian Phillips, Towns’ spokesperson said. “The congressman was such a strong ally for the president … now that he will more than likely be taking a lesser role, obviously the kind of power and influence he was able to wield as chairman will no longer be the case.” Over the summer, Towns held a hearing in Brooklyn to examine a case of fraud at a Brooklyn census office, after two managers were fired for fraudulently filling out census forms.

As chairman of an investigative committee with subpoena power, Towns has also investigated the BP oil spill and the Toyota recall, among other major issues. “The new chairman may have a different agenda,” Phillips said. While Towns will be able to serve the community as Congressman and as ranking minority member, “his powers will be less than what they were.”

In fall 2009, Director of the National Urban League Marc Morial testified at an Oversight Committee hearing about the impact of the economic crisis on minority communities. With the change in leadership, Morial said, “you’re not going to have as much of an examination of policies and solutions [related to] the disparities of the recession and the disparities of the subprime crisis.”  Foreclosure rates have been highest in areas with high minority populations, such as Bushwick.

Jerrold Nadler (D), representing Coney Island, Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge, will go from high ranking to minority status in the Judiciary and Transportation and Infrastructure committees.

Nadler’s spokesman Ilan Kayatsky also said it is too early to tell how the new majority will play out. “We will still be fighting for the same transportation reforms, such as seeking more funding for mass transit and high speed rail.”

Kayatsky added that “more debates and disagreement on how much and where and why” would be expected with Republicans in the majority. Democrats, he said, will no longer be “driving the house agenda” as negotiations get underway. With a new six year transportation up for reauthorization, Kayatsky said that for Nadler, “it’s really about funding mass transit as much as possible.” The congressman’s priority, he went on to say, was increasing sustainable transportation options and expanding rail freight with “less focus on cars and roads.”

Last July, Nadler helped to secure $ 450,000 for a Brooklyn Waterfront Transportation Study, which will explore the transportation improvements necessary to develop a container port at South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. According to the congressman’s summer press release, “the development of deep water port facilities in New York Harbor will create tens of thousands of jobs in New York City and the region, and will protect New York’s position as the East Coast’s major gateway to global trade.”

The party, hosted by Ron Kellman, 40, swelled up to 80 attendants by the time shots were heard outside the house of which the party was held. No arrests have been made.

Inspector Anthony Tasso addresses residents at the recent 88th precinct council meeting (Sanya Khetani/ The Brooklyn Ink)

By Sanya Khetani

Fort Greene residents are about to see a larger police presence than usual on their neighborhood’s streets. At its last community meeting, the 88th police precinct announced an increase in foot patrols and overtime officers on duty in the neighborhood’s “problem areas.”

This police action is partly in response to pressure from a recently formed citizens’ block association, which was organized after a female resident was attacked and robbed last month while walking home from work.

The incident inspired residents of Adelphi Street, where the victim lived, to become more involved in their own safety. “I feel the police are doing the best that they can, but I also feel that they are overwhelmed,” says Sharon Ng, who lives on Adelphi Street.

At this month’s 88th precinct community meeting, Inspector Anthony Tasso said crime had risen sharply by 70 percent in recent months. He also reminded the residents that he did not have the manpower the precinct used to have, a common consequence of budget cuts in the NYPD.

Residents feel that an association would help the police keep more eyes on the street. “I think a block association would be a success!” says Ng, who plans to go door to door to sign more people up to be a part of the association.

So far the group has had an impact. The residents put together a list of demands such as increased police presence, and sent it to Councilwoman Letitia James, who forwarded it to Inspector Tasso, who incorporated the newly-formed association’s needs into his new safety and security measures for the area.

Some residents had also advocated the idea of a neighborhood patrol, but according to the 88th precinct, these are no longer sanctioned by the police.

As part of the New York Police Department’s ‘Civilian Observation Patrol’ program, neighborhood patrols were trained by the precinct and patrollers could anonymously report a crime on 911. However, the new 911 system accesses the personal information of callers, so maintaining anonymity is impossible. Until a new system is developed, neighborhood associations will not receive official assistance from their precincts.

Alfred Chiodo, Urban Affairs Director for the 35th district (which includes Fort Greene) in the City Council says Adelphi Street, particularly the block between Greene Avenue. and Fulton Street. is a magnet for crime. “Not only is this block at the edge of the neighborhood, but it is bordered by Fulton Street, which doesn’t have too many retail stores. This makes the area lonely, so it’s easier for someone to escape without being spotted,” he says.

Inspector Tasso also identified Adelphi Street as being part of a “problem area” from Fulton Street to Fort Greene Park, and Fort Greene Place to Vanderbilt Avenue, where a number of assaults and robberies, almost all involving an African-American male perpetrator and a Caucasian female victim.

But it is not only its location that makes Adelphi an easy target. More than 20 residents who attended an impromptu and informal block meeting testified about issues such as insufficient street and stoop lighting, and broken motion detectors, all of which made it difficult for even the most alert to spot someone hiding in the shadows.

Despite the precinct’s official stance on civilian patrols, Inspector Tasso believes that a good police-community relation is important. “You are our eyes and ears,” he told residents at the recent precinct meeting. So the residents of Adelphi have decided to form an unofficial alliance and watch for the time being.

Chiodo says that forming even an informal union is a step in the right direction to improving neighborhood safety. He explains that since it would help people get to know their neighbors, it would be easier to “spot someone who doesn’t belong.” John Wise, another Adelphi resident says, “Our block isn’t the most sociable, but I hope this will help… We can take not only small tangible steps, but also larger community steps.”

Meanwhile, those at the neighborhood meeting have already begun to pay better attention to the upkeep of the neighborhood and have exhorted landlords to improve the lighting on stoops.

No new incidents have been reported in the neighborhood since the incident in late September. Lawrence Young, a resident of 405 Adelphi St., succinctly sums up the block’s new motto, “We want people to know that this is our block and we’re keeping an eye on it.”

Ghita Schwarz, the Fort Greene-based author of historical fiction novel "Displaced Persons." (Courtesy Ghita Schwarz)

In many ways, Fort Greene writer Ghita Schwarz shared many similar experiences with other children in her neighborhood as she grew up on West 82nd Street in Manhattan. She had supportive, generous parents who put their kids first probably more than they should have, she said. From an early age, they always encouraged her to do well in school and incorporate arts into her curriculum. As she grew older, her parents never interfered with her professional goals or political opinions and constantly pushed her to choose her own path in life.

At the same time, Schwarz also knew that her family was quite different from those of other kids: her Jewish parents both came to the United States after growing up in the midst of World War II and experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand. Schwarz’s mother, a small child at the beginning of the war, was born in Poland. After her family fled to Russia, they were deported to Siberia and then into the far east of the Soviet Union. Upon being repatriated to Poland, her mother’s family realized that they were not safe there and decided to go to a displaced persons camp in Germany before relocating to Israel in 1949. Her mother eventually came to the United States in 1959 on a scholarship to Juilliard in New York.

Schwarz’s father, on the other hand, was born in Germany but also grew up in Poland since the borders were changing in Europe at that time. After surviving concentration camps, he, too, resided near a displaced persons camp after the war had ended and eventually immigrated to the United States a few years later. While Schwarz’s mother’s family had survived the war, her father’s family had not been so lucky.

Throughout her childhood, Schwarz said that she remembers marveling over the many people in her family photo albums whom she had never met before.

“It does shape your consciousness a little bit,” said Schwarz. “Bad things happen in the world. Sometimes they’re stopped, and sometimes they’re not. Of course, if you grow up already knowing a lot about how political forces can shape your personal life, it shapes how you think of your career or what you want to study or what you want to write about.”

Schwarz, a Fort Greene native since 2000, was able to incorporate some of these memories into her first novel, entitled Displaced Persons, which was published by HarperCollins last August. The book, which is a work of historical fiction, tells the story of a group of Polish Jews who meet at a refugee camp during the liberation of Europe in May 1945. Unlike other books on the Holocaust that focus on the torments that people faced as they lived in the concentration camps, Schwarz instead decided to portray the ways in which these people tried to re-build their lives after the war had ended.

“I hadn’t really seen that part of history represented very much, at least in fiction,” said Schwarz, who attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and later studied law at Columbia University. “I liked the idea of not doing something directly about the wartime but about how people manage afterwards and how they manage in this atmosphere of really extreme grief.”

Maurice Samuels, one of Schwarz’s close friends who also attended Harvard and read several drafts of the book as Schwarz was writing it, said that the writer was always fascinated by the way in which society talks about the Holocaust and how that discussion has changed over time.

“That’s one of her main interests in the novel,” said Samuels, 42. “The novel takes place in several different time periods, and she’s interested in how people tell their stories differently and how people perceive those stories differently right after the war in the 1960s and then in the 1990s. That does follow something that I think was very personal for her.”

According to a book review in the San Francisco Chronicle that came out the same month that the novel was published, Displaced Persons also shows how the characters are able to “build lives largely incongruous with those they left behind,” as well as “endure the judgments of those who don’t understand their experiences.”

After the characters initially meet at the refugee camp, the book continues to chronicle their lives as they arrive in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. In this section of the book, Schwarz said that she wanted to show how people rarely discussed their memories and experiences of World War II publicly. The final part of the book takes place in the 1990s, when all of the characters have grown up. The end of the 20^th century marked a period in history in which it became very popular to discuss Holocaust testimonies in the public realm, Schwarz said. At this point, the characters learn how to negotiate their experiences and express themselves to others.

Schwarz’s interest in the immigrant experience is present not only in her writing, but it is also incorporated into her career as a civil rights lawyer in Tribeca. She currently works with immigrants throughout New York City for a Latino organization called Latino Justice. She handles a myriad of cases each day involving anything from people who are suing the immigration service because of delays in the naturalization process to First Amendment issues that involve day laborers.

Most recently, Schwarz said, she has been working on a case where the immigration service came into people’s homes at 4 or 5 a.m. to try to find undocumented immigrants without warrants – “a very basic thing that Americans who were born here feel that they’re entitled to,” she said.

Samuels noted how Schwarz’s work as a writer and lawyer go hand-in-hand.

“The novel is very much about the struggle of immigrants, and that’s her job – to defend immigrants who have had really horrible things happen to them,” he said. “She’s very interested in both her legal work and in her writing and what it means to change cultures – what elements of your past you can hold onto in the present, the sort of day-to-day struggles that you have in between two cultures and trying to make it in this new world.”

Since the publication of Displaced Persons, Schwarz said that she has begun to work on her second book. Set in a fictional suburb of New York, the book continues to touch upon the immigrant experience – this time in the form of oral history.

“One of the things that is very interesting about the work that I do now is that I go to a lot of places where I represent, on occasion, undocumented immigrants or very low-income legal immigrants,” she said. “I go to a lot of places that are extremely wealthy, but there’s this whole population in those same areas like East Hampton or South Hampton that are very, very poor. They’re serving the more well-to-do people. I wanted to explore that dichotomy.”

Read more about literature in Brooklyn:

Red Hook Plays the Muse for Acclaimed Novelist

Read a Book, Book a Date

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Residents at the Auburn Family Shelter in Fort Greene have experienced poor living conditions for over six years, said SNAP officials. (The Brooklyn Ink/Caitlin Kasunich)

Last July, a 25-year-old victim of domestic abuse packed up her belongings, left her apartment with her two children and arrived at the Auburn Family Shelter in Fort Greene in hopes of starting a new life. She had just lost her job as a result of the abuse and thought that she could quickly get the help that she needed to find adequate work and move her family out of the shelter.

Now, three months later, the woman and her kids, ages 4 and 6, are still living in Auburn, a housing development in the midst of the Walt Whitman Houses at 39 Auburn Place that is run by New York City’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS).

According to the woman, her family shares a filthy bathroom with other residents in the building. The room that she shares with her children is also mice-infested. She even eats spoiled sandwiches for lunch every now and then since “some people don’t get to eat.”

“I feel like I’m in a jail,” said the woman, who did not wish to give her name for fear of getting into trouble with the shelter. “I’ve never been in a situation like this.”

Beginning about six years ago, officials from the Fort Greene Strategic Neighborhood Action Partnership (SNAP) at 324 Myrtle Ave. began to take steps to improve conditions for Auburn residents. As residents started to come into SNAP to do work in the organization’s open-access computer lab, they began to talk about the poor conditions in the shelter, and SNAP officials immediately took notice.

Besides addressing the issues of cleanliness, rodent infestation and low-quality food, Fort Greene SNAP has also dealt with a range of other problems in the shelter over the years, including the lack of housing specialists and local daycare opportunities near the shelter, inefficient heating in the building and several citations of asbestos and lead paint hazards, said Georgianna Glose, executive director of SNAP.

“For families, it was a terrible situation,” said Glose, 63. “So, we began to organize the residents.”

Within the last year, residents have even complained to SNAP officials about a case manager who allegedly reeked of alcohol while he was working, and the shelter has since launched an investigation to find out more, said Glose. To make matters worse, DHS also recently decided to move more residents into the shelter since the building was currently half full, said an official from DHS.

As of Oct. 5, the shelter, which can house up to 180 families, was only housing 79 families, so DHS converted the seventh and eighth floors of the 10-story brick building into beds for singles. According to the official, DHS brought in 24 additional single women between these floors at that time.

Although the DHS official stated that this is not a permanent arrangement, the shelter will not be hiring any additional staff members for the new residents, which means that the existing caseworkers will have more tasks to juggle.

To further research residents’ experiences at the shelter, SNAP officials also began to obtain both city and state inspection reports through the Freedom of Information Law. Reports filed by the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) and DHS’s Routine Site Review Inspection (RSRI) indeed confirmed what residents were saying.

OTDA’s most recent inspection that was completed in June and July 2009, for example, cited the shelter for 14 violations, including the facility’s failure to provide at least two housing specialists to “ensure that adequate and appropriate housing services are provided to families.” Additionally, DHS’s most recent inspection that was conducted in December 2009 documented seven lead paint hazards, including chipped paint on dining room walls, as well as peeling paint on kitchen walls.

Neither Deborah Harper, the director of the shelter, nor DHS returned calls to comment on these issues.

Since then, however, the shelter has taken action to correct some of the violations that the reports cited last year, said Craig Hughes, community organizer at SNAP. For example, Hughes said that the city has reportedly reserved about 100 spots in four local daycares for residents to take their children while they go to their appointments.

Additionally, in the most recent Auburn Assessment Recreation Center Corrective Action plan dated on Feb. 16, 2010, the shelter stated that it would correct all patching and painting defects by Feb. 27.

Still, many residents at Auburn maintained that the poor conditions in the shelter are far from being solved. Even children who came to live in the shelter with their parents have noticed the problems that still persist.

“The place is nasty,” said a 9-year-old female. “The most disgusting thing about it is that the rats die on the sixth floor where we live. It always stinks like rats.”

To maintain strong communication between SNAP officials and Auburn residents, SNAP workers also hold weekly outreach sessions in front of the shelter to talk directly with people, said Hughes. Since 2008, Hughes said that SNAP staff members visit the shelter every day or a few times a week for a couple of hours throughout the year.

And to keep people in the community informed about the shelter’s conditions, Hughes also initiated the Auburn Independent Monitoring Committee at SNAP, which involves a longer-term effort with local elected officials, community activists and other people in the neighborhood who provide additional direction. Carmen Hernandez, a resident of Fort Greene for 19 years, became a member of this committee two years ago and participates in the outreach sessions with Hughes each week.

“I wanted to do more,” said Hernandez, 54. “There are a lot of things that we take for granted every day in our homes that people are lacking. The residents are so angry. They’ll tell you what’s happening. The shelter officials are not pleased that we are there at all.”

Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst for Coalition for the Homeless, added that while shelters that are run directly by DHS tend to have much worse conditions than shelters that are operated by non-profit service providers for unknown reasons, the poor conditions in the Auburn Family Shelter ultimately stem from the failure of the city’s homeless policy as a whole.

“The Bloomberg administration tends to view the homeless problem not as it really is,” said Markee, 45. “It’s a housing affordability problem. Rents are high in New York City, and low-income people, even though they’re lucky enough to have jobs in this kind of economy, just don’t earn enough to afford market rents. Instead of viewing homelessness as that problem, they continue to view it as a behavioral modification problem. They keep touting this ridiculous mantra that if people just go and get jobs, then that’s going to end the problem of homelessness.”

On June 23, 2004, Mayor Bloomberg released a press release announcing his citywide campaign to end homelessness. The campaign included expanding community-based homelessness prevention programs, forming strategies to redirect funds that were locked into shelters into prevention and other housing solutions and re-designing the family intake and eligibility review process with an expansion of prevention and housing-related resources for at-risk and homeless families.

Over the past six years, though, the administration has been widely criticized for some of the programs that it implemented to solve the homeless problem, including one that paid for over 550 families to leave the city as a way of keeping them out of the pricey shelter system, according to a report by the New York Times.

As of Oct. 1, 2010, there were 35,241 total homeless individuals in New York City, including 7,974 families with children, according to the most recent data on DHS’s website. While the lives of some New Yorkers may be beginning to look up due to the weakening recession, the 25-year-old Auburn resident is not feeling too optimistic about her current situation. 

“I don’t think much is going to happen,” she said. “Right now, I’m trying to roll with the punches, but nobody is really helping.”

Students learn mariachi techniques during last week's guitar class. (Caitlin Kasunich/The Brooklyn Ink)

The Brooklyn Music School has served the African-American community in Fort Greene almost exclusively during most of its 98 years in operation. That is changing as more and more Hispanics are moving into the neighborhood.

Executive director Frank Alvarado said he realized soon after he arrived in 2009 that his school, which offers extracurricular music and dance classes to adults and children throughout the week, could not continue to ignore the shifting ethnic makeup of the neighborhood. It came home to him, he said, when five Latino families who had recently moved to Fort Greene came to him and said they felt unhappy and isolated from the rest of the population. They asked him to find a way to bring diversity to the school.

Change came on Aug. 30, when a Manhattan-based cultural group called Mano a Mano: Mexican Culture Without Borders moved to the Brooklyn Music School to launch a new program aimed at integrating Mexican arts and customs into the lives of children, teenagers and adults in the neighborhood. The program, entitled Mexicanidad, allows singers, dancers and musicians of all ages and experience levels to enroll in Mexican cultural classes, such as mariachi trumpet and Son Jarocho strings and dance, which are taught by professional performers.

“Mexicans who are living in New York will feel that their culture is honored,” said Emily Socolov, 58, executive director of Mano a Mano. “They will come here and say, ‘Wow, this is great. Look at all these people who love Mexico and love Mexicans and love Mexican culture and want to promote it and support it.’”

As of Sept. 13, Alvarado, 55, said that 90 percent of the 191 total participants at the school, not including those in the Mexicanidad program, were African-American. But Alvardo said the new program is partly responsible for an influx of Hispanic students: so far, Mexicanidad has already attracted 30 to 40 new participants, almost all of whom are Hispanic, said Luz Aguirre, program manager of Mano a Mano.

U.S. Census statistics also indicate that Brooklyn’s Kings County, which includes Fort Greene, has experienced steady growth in the Hispanic population, from 462,411 in 1990 to 487,878 in 2000. For the past four or five years, Alvarado said, more and more members of the Hispanic community have been re-locating to Fort Greene, for two main reasons: one is the low-income housing in Downtown Brooklyn that makes the neighborhood more affordable than others in the borough, and the other is Fort Greene’s proximity to Sunset Park, which already has a strong Hispanic presence.

As communities change over time, however, cultural tensions between different ethnic groups inevitably arise, said Socolov.

“No spaces are new. This space used to be our space, and now it’s your space,” she said. “There will always be that kind of issue. It has happened in El Barrio, which was always Puerto Rican and somewhat Dominican and is now dominantly Mexican. These changes that happen constantly in our city both create a tension and a sense of ownership. It’s sort of a cyclical process in a sense.”

Eduardo Penaloza, educational programs coordinator at the Mexican Consulate in New York, said programs like Mexicanidad are effective.

“This is a way to bring the communities together,” said Penaloza, 45. “Just open a common space, and let everybody show his own culture, his own thing, his own music, dance and art..”

“These programs are pretty important,” agreed Lisia Leon, 33, a participant in the Tuesday night mariachi guitar class who moved to Park Slope two months ago. “When I first came to New York eight years ago, there weren’t a lot of Mexicans. People are away from their families, and we come from large families. This is something my family has listened to my whole life. I have obviously never played it, so this is a nice way to listen to it and be a part of it at the same time.”

Monica Guevara, Mexicanidad’s dance instructor for the kids’ ballet folkórico, says the program helps bridge ethnic divides. “It provides a forum or a way of interacting with people who aren’t necessarily in your race or ethnicity,” she said “Just being able to have that common ground – that common enjoyment of something like dance or music or art – allows you to explore that together and grow in that way.”

One of Guevara’s students, 5-year-old Emma, came to her first class on Sept. 20. Her father, 41-year-old Jean-Paul Forsans from France, said that he wanted his daughter to participate with the program so that she could connect with her Mexican background, and he had not heard of another program in the city where she could do so.

“My wife speaks Spanish to Emma, and I speak French to her,” he said. “This program is making the link between her Mexican roots and Spanish and the opportunity to practice Spanish outside of the home.”

Registration for Mexicanidad’s first semester began on Aug. 23, and the year-long session will run until June 18, 2011.

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Cleanup in Prospect Heights (Manuel Rueda/The Brooklyn Ink)

By Manuel Rueda

If you thought solidarity was dead in the borough, think back to Sunday, when small clusters of Brooklyn residents joined a global day of action against global warming.

Glove-wearing volunteers with big black trash-bags carried out street clean-ups in Red Hook, Fort Greene and near the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights.

Solar panels were installed in Park Slope homes, bicycles were fixed in Williamsburg, letters for assembly members were written in Prospect Heights and in Gowanus, residents of one apartment building handed out energy efficient CFL light bulbs, for free.

The unusual activities were part of a Global Work Party, promoted by the environmental website 350.org, which provided maps to make it easy for participants to find locations and times of activities.

In Brooklyn, where volunteers held 13 separate activities attended by anywhere from two to 50 people, three strangers met in Prospect Park to share their knowledge of sustainable lifestyles.

“I’m happy I came because even though it’s a small group I feel like I got to share a lot of things that I know about that need to be shared” said Margaret Rose de Cruz, a massage therapist and longtime resident of the area, who talked with her new friends about environmental literature and personal energy saving measures after showing them how to sow damaged socks using a gourd.

“As far as this occasion turned out I was a little bit disappointed,” said event organizer Colin Reis “it made me sad but it’s a bit telling of the movement at large.” he added as he reflected on the difficulties of making people more environmentally aware when they are not under the threat of an immediate ecological disaster.

In nearby Park Slope, about 35 members of a local Buddhist temple,the Zen Center for New York City, took to the streets with large black and transparent trash bags, picking up plastic bottles, soft drink cans and old flyers and separating recyclable trash.

Kohl Suddeth, an actor who attends the temple and participates in its recently established Green Dragon group, found a car battery lying amongst the bushes in Gore Park.

“Realistically it’s a small gesture, it’s a small thing” he said of the cleanup initiative.  “But I can’t even count the number of people we talked to on the street that asked us about what we were doing…It’s as much about the visibility than about the gesture of the work itself.”

The 350.org website was funded by environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben, and it is part of a campaign to pressure global leaders to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

“’If we can get to work on solutions to the climate crisis,” the website reads, “so can you.”

350.org -–the number stands for the lowest number of carbon dioxide parts per million that experts say the atmosphere can handle– claims that people in 181 countries carried out environmentally friendly activities as part of the Sundays days of action, such as planting trees, campaigning against the use of plastic bags and forming human mosaics with green messages.

More than 7,000 separate activities took place worldwide according to the website, which shows pictures of Vietnamese volunteers planting a tree and a group of about 30 Israeli youngsters, posing with their bicycles in a lonely desert road.

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