Street Kids

Homeless Youth, Outreach, and Policing New York's Streets

Kristina E. Gibson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814732892
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie urbaine

Street outreach workers comb public places such as parks, vacant lots, and abandoned waterfronts to search for young people who are living out in public spaces, if not always in the public eye. Street Kids opens a window to the largely hidden world of street youth, drawing on their detailed and compelling narratives to give new insight into the experiences of youth homelessness and youth outreach. Kristina Gibson argues that the enforcement of quality of life ordinances in New York City has spurred hyper-mobility amongst the city's street youth population and has serious implications for social work with homeless youth. Youth in motion have become socially invisible and marginalized from public spaces where social workers traditionally contact them, jeopardizing their access to the already limited opportunities to escape street life. The culmination of a multi-year ethnographic investigation into the lives of street outreach workers and 'their kids' on the streets of New York City, Street Kids illustrates the critical role that public space regulations and policing play in shaping the experience of youth homelessness and the effectiveness of street outreach.

1
Introduction

The Street Youth Dilemma

I first heard about Ali Forney at a community board meeting in Manhattan’s affluent West Greenwich Village, a picturesque and historic New York City neighborhood of tree-lined streets shading meticulously preserved brownstones. An eclectic mix of art galleries, high-end restaurants, old taverns, and specialty shops make this neighborhood both a busy commercial center and a popular tourist attraction. Greenwich Village also was the site of the 1969 Stonewall riots that launched the gay civil rights movement, and it has been an epicenter for gay culture in New York City for more than one hundred years.¹ Gay youth have traditionally made their way to this neighborhood to explore and express their sexuality in an accepting environment. The neighborhood bustles with gay bars, alternative coffeehouses, avantegarde theaters, and adult-themed stores, dispersed among the high-end specialty-food stores and the lower-end chain stores like McDonalds and Starbucks. Today, the majority of kids hanging out in the West Village are gay youth of color from all five New York City boroughs and northern New Jersey. They flock to the main drag, Christopher Street, in search of friends, a community, and a safe place to be “out.” In New York City, 30 to 40 percent of the homeless youth population is made up of gay youth, most of whom hang out in the West Village. A survey of young people in Hudson River Park, at the end of Christopher Street, found that nearly half those surveyed did not live with a parent or guardian; 90 percent were people of color; 88 percent self-identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or questioning (GLBTQ); and more than half were using social services for at-risk, street, and homeless youth.² On a typical summer evening, hundreds of young people traverse the West Village, converge along Christopher Street, and end up on the piers stretching out into the Hudson River along the West Side park. There they hang out, dance, chat, pick up dates, and create their own public community.

At the community board meeting I attended, a social worker stood up and told Ali Forney’s story to a mixed crowd of white residents of the West Village and mostly African American and Hispanic gay youth who were at the meeting to discuss public-space policies and the behavior of young people. The influx of large numbers of teenagers, especially in the summer months and on the weekends, had led to tensions between adult residents and youth. In the meeting, the mostly white, middle-aged, and elderly residents sat in silence in the center of the room, while nearly forty youth of color stood around the perimeter, holding up large, hand-painted poster board signs that read “Safe space” and “It’s our park too.” The conflicts arising during this meeting and the many others that followed reflected the contentious position of street kids in the public sphere and public space. In the past, they have had only marginal voices in public debates over the right to use urban public spaces.

Advocacy groups worked with the young people on Christopher Street for several months in an effort to teach them how to represent themselves in public forums. These same advocates also collected harassment reports from young people in the West Village, detailing their interactions with the New York Police Department (NYPD), private park security agents, business owners, and residents.³ Increasing tensions over the governance of public spaces, the public identity of the West Village neighborhood, the private control and commercialization of the area’s public spaces, and the place of youth in this environment were rapidly coming to a head. Each group claimed a different form of “ownership” and “rights.” These debates had their roots in prior struggles, particularly the nearly decade-old cleanup of Times Square, Ali Forney’s old haunt.

Residents of the West Greenwich Village neighborhood in particular had formed a succession of committees and called many community board meetings to discuss the maintenance of order and the policing of their neighborhood. They already had requested and received more foot-police patrols, and Hudson River Park had a 1 a.m. curfew. Among other requests, the neighborhood had further restricted access to the park, citing noise, disorderly conduct, and safety issues, which they attributed to primarily young people. The West Side piers and newly established Hudson River Park are an ongoing development project, the latest segment of which (around pier 57) is predicted to cost $210 million.⁴ The site stretches from Battery Park on Manhattan’s southern tip five miles north to Fifty-ninth Street in Midtown. The park is intended to make the West Side of Manhattan an elite residential, shopping, and entertainment district linking Battery Park, Tribeca, the West Village, and the Meatpacking District. The piers and the park are an important gathering place for New York City’s street youth. When Hudson River Park opened in 2003, a curfew was put in place and additional park security was employed to patrol the newly renovated piers along the waterfront. By late 2005, the 1 a.m. park curfew was drawing a flood of youth into the neighborhood every night, sparking complaints of noise and large, intimidating groups of young people blocking the sidewalks. In turn, the young people complained of harassment from the police, park police, and private residents.

At one community board meeting, a middle-aged resident stood up and, in a trembling voice, expressed the strong emotions of many West Village residents, that the young people hanging out in the park were “intolerable” and like an “army of occupation.” She concluded by asking, “Why don’t they party in their own neighborhoods?”⁵ What was most troubling during these meetings was the wish of many residents that the young people would just “go home.” This sentiment was voiced repeatedly, despite efforts by social workers and youth advocates to educate the community about youth homelessness (particularly gay youth homelessness), the dangers to abused young people of returning to their neighborhoods of origin, and the current lack of services for street youth, both in the West Village and citywide. At the end of one community board meeting attended by hundreds of residents and youth, a social worker stood up to speak. This was Carl Siciliano, the director of the Ali Forney Center. He had been a youth worker when Times Square was “cleaned up” and had seen at first hand what happened to young people pushed out of public spaces “back to where they came from.” He had been the social worker called when Ali Forney was killed years earlier. The cleanup of Times Square and the deaths of Ali and several other youth had convinced him that street kids were in profound danger from both the street environment and the police. As he said years later:

Every couple of months one of our kids was dying on the streets. It was just like a regular thing, that we had to have these memorial services at the church next door. We’d be trying to figure out how to bury the kid … and it was horrible. It was so clear to me that the condition of being out and alone and homeless on the streets put kids in danger of death, in a very stark way.⁶

What social workers tried to prove was not just that the young people being displaced had as much right to be in a public space as did any other member of society and, furthermore, had nowhere safe to “move on” to but also that many of the youth were on the streets because they had been abused and, more often than not, had been kicked out by their own families and communities.

The 1990s was about watching kids slowly become defeated. Because there wasn’t a way to get them any alternative. We certainly don’t have the capacity today to meet the needs of all the kids in the city …. If you’re going to profoundly neglect a bunch of homeless kids and don’t give them access to shelter and jobs and housing, then what are they supposed to do?⁷

Public-space regulations that pushed street youth out of the West Village were not helping them get off the streets, for they did not go home. Rather, constantly being moved around only narrowed their options. A spokesman for a national street outreach group for youth put it bluntly: “Children aren’t living on the streets; they’re dying.”⁸ When kids are pushed out of public spaces around the city, their plight not only is worsened, it also is made invisible. Far from becoming someone else’s concern, they become no one’s concern.

Social workers tried to convince neighborhood residents that by choosing the West Village, these kids had become their kids, part of their community, and deserved their (positive) attention. The West Village had historically been a refuge for gay youth, many of whom had grown up to be economically successful adult residents of the neighborhood. This generation of West Village youth, however, face more complicated intersections of race, class, sexuality, and homelessness, as well as greater stigmatization.

I wanted to understand how such marginalized young people experienced the spatial organization of their lives, especially in regard to public-space ordinances that apply to street kids. Youth homelessness is experienced through marginalization processes that are controlled in space, by governance, in the performance of “deviant” social behaviors, and by means of mobility and invisibility. Social theorists have critically addressed how social regimes are naturalized in spaces, bodies, practices, and performances.⁹ More recently, social scientists have been grappling with the complicated intersection between social regimes and processes of physical and social mobility.¹⁰ My theoretical focus is on the new regimes of public-space governance, which, through interlocking systems of mobility and invisibility, are shaping the lives of street youth. I decided to approach this problem through the role played by social service providers, such as street outreach workers. The social workers who spoke at community board meetings told a powerful story of how changing social regimes were harming “their kids.”

From the summer of 2004 to the summer of 2006 I conducted an ethnographic investigation in public spaces throughout New York City. I gathered additional information during return visits to the field from 2007 to 2010. I collected data primarily by practicing street outreach, particularly on the intersection of street youths’ experiences, street outreach performances, and the regulation of public spaces in neighborhoods around Midtown and Lower Manhattan. Because the street is a dangerous environment for youth, my data are primarily my and other outreach workers’ notes. Because a typical street conversation is distracted, fast, and interrupted by the myriad activities and demands of street life, it was recorded as accurately as possible into field notebooks immediately after each outreach. I did not tape-record any kids in public—drawing the attention of a pimp, drug dealer, or even the police can be harmful for them—but I did conduct some formal interviews in drop-in centers and other sites. Because these sites are institutional and under adult control, I cannot claim that these interviews are directly representative of or substitutable for the thousands of conversations I had on the streets, but these youth were better able to reflect comprehensively on some of their experiences in these sheltered environments. I also conducted formal interviews with most of the fewer than thirty street outreach workers in the city active during my tenure as a street counselor.

To understand how street outreach workers and street kids interrelate in a place called the “street,” I have combined a number of different literatures, empirical data, and social theories and situated them in a framework of activist, ethical research. The study of street youth and street outreach sits at an intersection between ethical activism and the processes of marginalization. Feminist scholars have pointed to the need for a critical understanding of ethics, care, and activism in work with marginalized populations.¹¹ During my time as a street outreach counselor, I was able to spend six months conducting independent observations of street youth hangouts and public spaces, as well as in-depth interviews with twenty current and former street outreach counselors and hundreds of informal conversations with homeless youth. I also was fortunate enough to participate in a statewide coalition of homeless youth agencies and advocacy groups and attended two street outreach retreats. These meetings were invaluable opportunities to lay out early theories and receive informed, expert feedback.¹²

What I learned is that there are many kinds of street youth, many different experiences of being young and homeless, and many kinds of street outreach being carried out in public spaces. Although each street kid and outreach worker that I contacted had a different story to tell, certain widespread social forces colored all their experiences. In this book, I use a feminist sensibility, which seeks to uncover the unfolding of power in society. Seeing mobility as both an empowering and a disempowering sociospatial force framed by a public revanchism encouraged by neoliberal polices is central to understanding the street youth experience. This book reveals the social structures, social actors, practices, and places that shape street youths’ abilities to navigate the roots and routes of homelessness. All too often, however, the stories of street kids remain untold; Ali Forney’s is an exception.

This book begins with the presupposition that youth homelessness exists in the intersection of social discourses, social services, public spaces, and the everyday experiences of youth. But my study is not a traditional ethnography of youth. Previous ethnographies have situated the researcher as a caring visitor, albeit one attempting to lend power and authority to young peoples’ experiences. Many studies of street youth make policy recommendations for public aid through the provision of social services, and calls for increased street outreach are common.¹³ My goal instead is to understand the multitude of experiences and intersections that influence street kids’ encounters with public aid in the form of street outreach. In addition to kids’ experiences, I wanted to explore the experiences of people like Carl who work directly with youth in public-space environments. I wanted to know what happens when policing regimes fundamentally alter the sociospatial relationships built between outreach workers and street kids.

Street Kids and Youth Homelessness

Where are you from?

—Outreach counselor speaking to street kid

I’m from here.

—Street kid responding, pointing to a bench in a public park

Street youth have been saddled with a powerful societal image of what it means to be both young and homeless. The popular image of street youth found in movies and TV shows is both a romance and a morality tale. Usually this tale involves a teenaged white male from suburbia who leaves home to seek freedom and adventure. Eventually he drifts into the unforgiving city, with old army backpack and antiestablishment attitude in hand. Several months later, he is strung out on drugs and begging for coins. This image should not be surprising, as it speaks to social norms that construct street youth as socially deviant and out of place while simultaneously belying the complex experiences and situations that lead young people to the streets and structure their lives there.

In the context of this book, street youth¹⁴ are young people, twelve to twenty-four years old, who are living without family support or a stable residence, both on and off the actual streets and in the public spaces of cities and towns. They may live intermittently in shelters, with friends or relatives (couch surfing), or on the streets. In order to survive, street kids typically participate in the street economies of theft, sex work, drug dealing, and pan-handling.¹⁵ In the United States, an estimated 1.6 million to 2 million kids leave home every year,¹⁶ and of these, a quarter will not return.¹⁷ Homeless youth are one of the fastest-growing segments of the homeless population in North America, making up an estimated 25 percent of all homeless people.¹⁸ Nonetheless, despite the growing presence of homeless youth, national discussions about “ending homelessness” focus exclusively on adult homelessness and related issues such as poverty and affordable housing. The reasons that young people become homeless in the Western world have been well documented in both the academic and professional literature.¹⁹ These studies have found that the most common routes to homelessness among youth are abuse and neglect, family breakdown, aging out of government (foster care) programs, and, last, poverty. The National Alliance to End Homelessness’s 2006 report on youth homelessness was a compilation of recent studies concluding that nearly half of homeless youth had been abused and more than half had been told that they were no longer wanted by their families.²⁰ Another study found that more than 75 percent of female street youth had been abused. Children who are abused in the home early in life are more likely to suffer from depression and...