The Ali Forney Center - Housing for Homeless LGBT Youth

Helping Them Make It Through the Night
New York Times Editorial, July 12, 1998
By Tina Rosenberg

It would be hard to find anyone in New York more marginalized in more ways than Ali Forney. He was homeless, black, gay, 22, and a crack addict who made money and found shelter through prostitution, often wearing a dress, heels and a wig. In December he was shot in the head, the third young transgender prostitute murdered in Harlem in 14 months. All the cases are unsolved.

Those who did not know him might miss the human being under all those labels. But at his memorial, held at a Times Square church, 70 friends and relatives gathered to remember a complex man. Six months before his death, he closed a talent show at a center for homeless youth with a gospel song and a prayer, preaching that '”God loves everybody for who they are.”

He was proudly H.I.V. negative, no mean feat for someone in his line of work, and spent many nights working with social service organizations in the gay bars and piers of the West Village and Times Square, dispensing condoms and talking about safe sex and places young people could get meals, showers, drug treatment, medical care and counseling.

Many people and institutions failed Ali Forney in his short life, not least Mr. Forney himself. But among them was the city of New York. The city’s quality-of-life initiative and the development of Times Square have inadvertently pushed homeless youths out of their traditional haunts. They now populate a lonelier, and hence more dangerous, diaspora in areas such as Harlem, and are much harder for the nightly patrols of outreach workers to find and help.

No one knows how many homeless teens and young adults there are in New York City, but state and city studies a few years ago put the number at 12,000 to 20,000. People who work with them say their ranks are swelling due to cuts in services and the coming of age of children from families ravaged by the mid-1980’s crack epidemic. The youth population in general is also growing.

The vast majority of homeless youths are from New York, and are black or Hispanic. Many ran away from foster care. Forty percent are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, a term for people who feel they belong to the opposite sex. This group is disproportionately homeless because their families sometimes kick them out, and they are often unwelcome and even assaulted in their schools and foster homes.

Most homeless young people use drugs, but researchers warn against concluding that drug abuse leads to homelessness. Michael Clatts, a medical anthropologist commissioned by the Giuliani administration to study New York’s homeless teen-agers last year, says it is the other way around -- most began using drugs only after reaching the street. They also turn to dealing, and car theft, and many become prostitutes to make money and have a place to sleep. They get AIDS -- teen-agers now acquire H.I.V. at a faster rate than any other group. And few young people who spend nights on the street or in abandoned buildings have the stability to kick drugs or find a job.

Although shelter is their most basic need, they do not fit in any city shelter program. They are scared of the giant, dangerous shelters that house adults and need smaller group homes with help for people who may be adults chronologically but not emotionally. But youth programs will not house anyone over 18. The city has only about 400 beds designed for older youths, 80 percent of them in Covenant House.

New York has shown little interest in solutions. From 1995 to 1997, the Department of Youth and Community Development failed to spend nearly $1 million it had budgeted for housing for homeless youths, which resulted in a loss of an additional $1.5 million in matching funds from the state. The department says it will leave $450,000 unspent in 1998, because shelters are unpopular with neighborhoods. But at least one, the West Village, has volunteered. There are other signs that the city has not been trying very hard. The tone of Mr. Clatts’s report displeased the administration and it has vanished. He is barred from discussing his findings, even with the City Council.

The problem of homeless youth has also fallen between the cracks at the City Council. But the new head of the Youth Committee, Kenneth Fisher, last month held the first hearing on homeless teen-agers that anyone can remember. The hearing seems to have prodded the city into action on a shelter and some of the bureaucratic hurdles that keep youths on the street. It will require a sustained commitment from the city to a group of people invisible until they get sick, arrested or murdered.