Squats: Most homeless people in Camden live free of shelter system FWD (fwd)
rosaphil
part of the forgotten rural poor Bill Clinton will visit nor
part of the mixed-income subsidized developments andy cuomo will visit nor
part of the forsaken drought-ridden farmer al gore will visit nor
part of the overtaxed "compassionate conservatives" will visit nor
part of the war-heroes george bush junior will visit.
there are many, many "tony lands" in this land of bounty.
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*Better Living Thru Better Living!* http://www.interport.net/~rugosa *
From: Tom Boland <wg...@earthlink.net>
To: HOMELESS PEOPLE'S NETWORK list <H...@aspin.asu.edu>
http://www.phillynews.com/programs/aprint
FWD Philadelphia Inquirer, August 2, 1999
CAMDEN'S HOMELESS LOOK FOR ANOTHER WAY
Makeshift camps and ``abandominiums''
keep them out of the system,
off the streets, and feeling free.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
Inquirer Staff Reporter
CAMDEN, NY, USA -- The gateway, like everything else in "Tonytown," is
improvised. It's a rusty, chain-link fence pulled back to allow access to
the homeless colony, set in a field of waist-high weeds in bloom.
Tony "Montana" Dean surveys the camp that bears his name.
To the left, a metal horse, sentinel of the Black Horse Pike, towers above
a shack made out of milk crates, skids, cardboard and a tarp bearing the
Budweiser insignia. Laundry hangs off a bush, and chicken salvaged from a
Save-A-Lot trash container cooks over a grill.
To the right, framed by heaps of crushed metal from Camden Recycling Inc.
next door, is a clearing with a cluster of more stopgap homes.
Dean, the first to raise a shanty in the field, runs the settlement of
seven men. He is the model of a leader common in a cross-section of Camden
-- a leader not of co-ops or community boards, but of tiny groups of the
dispossessed.
At least 3,500 people are homeless in the city of Camden, but most are
neither in shelters nor on the streets. They bunker down in countless
condemned buildings, dubbed "abandominiums," most without water or
electricity. And they establish camps like Tonytown.
Social workers who navigate this hidden world, trying to coax homeless
people into the system, say that kingpins have emerged.
"It's a little chain-of-command thing," said Milton Murchison, an outreach
worker with Project HOPE, a homeless health initiative run by Our Lady of
Lourdes Hospital. "There's always some head honcho . . . All over Camden
-- east, south, west. You name it. It's all over."
The system is well established at Westfield Acres, an East Camden housing
project slated to be torn down by the end of the year. Homeless people
occupy vacated apartments in the complex, where plywood plugs the windows
in many of the 18 three-story buildings.
Because the project is a drug hot spot, the head is often a dealer who
lets others stay for money or other favors, Murchison said. And because
it's a public-housing project, electricity and water are available, making
it top-of-the-line among abandominiums.
Dean, Tonytown's de facto mayor, calls Westfield Acres "the Taj Mahal."
In most abandominiums, candles are the only source of light, Murchison
said, but there are examples of luck and ingenuity.
http://objects.phillynews.com/element/square.gif
A naked lightbulb hangs in a small foyer, one of the two rooms that Eric
Johnson reclaimed six months ago from the debris and dust of a Kaighns
Avenue building, once a Chicken George's restaurant.
Johnson, a former maintenance man, hooked two wires to one circuit breaker
in the boarded-up red storefront. "I found out the electricity was still
running," he said.
The bulb, hanging from a long cord, can be moved. In one room, it
illuminates three chairs and a tape player. In the other, there is a fan
and a makeshift bed of foam, rubber and cushions.
At 50, with a gray beard and a scar below his left eye, Johnson has lived
in a few abandominiums during the last decade. Two women and a teenage boy
often spend five days a week with him. They don't pay him rent. They are
"people who need me," he said.
The door to the house is secured with a bar Johnson made out of a block of
wood, a clamp and a few feet of white electrical wire. The bar was
necessary after one of his charges tore a foot-long hole in the door.
"Things in Camden are more selfish these days," he said. "I had a bed, a
color TV, a radio, a fan. All of that is gone. Things are stolen or sold or
broken up, and you end up being the head of nothing -- or alone.
"The best thing to do is to cut everybody loose and do it myself," he
said. "But I just don't have the cold-heartedness yet."
Until he broke his jaw recently and had to go on disability, Johnson
refused municipal welfare and stayed out of shelters. Instead, he sold
scavenged metal to 11 recycling yards in Camden and turned vacant houses
into makeshift homes.
Jacqueline Santiago, a nurse with Project HOPE, called him proud. But
Johnson is not alone in spurning shelters, and pride is not the only reason
homeless people reject the system.
http://objects.phillynews.com/element/square.gif
Milton Murchison, known as "Nick" to the people who remember him as a
homeless man, made a breakthrough last Monday.
Although he had discovered more than six months ago that Tonytown existed,
he had not been able to get past its gates. It took several meetings with
Tony Dean to get permission for a team from Project HOPE to visit the
shantytown.<br>
And when the guests came -- bearing a box of turkey sandwich lunches and
hygiene packets with soap, laundry detergent and toothpaste -- Dean
presided like a mayor.
His silver dog tags from the Vietnam War still around his neck, a green
kerchief tied around his head, he led Savara Nobling, director of the
Aletha R. Wright Center for homeless men, through his colony.
"We're living proof that it's not bad -- except at night with the damn
mosquitoes," he told her, showing her the shanties of his deputies: Raymond
"Brutus" Walters, 42; Scott "LeRoc" Parks, 37; and Robert "Snake" Coates,
52.
Nobling complimented their gumption.
"It takes one incredible, creative bunch of people to come up with this
[Tonytown]," she said, adding that there was room at the Wright shelter for
anyone who wanted it.
But Dean had been at the Aletha Wright Center, from January to May 1998.
So had Parks and Walters. They prefered their lives in Tonytown, they said.
"They've got so many rules and regulations in the shelters," Walters said.
"At least [Walters] won't be kicked out for coming in late here," Dean
said. "The big thing here is freedom."
It costs $33 a day to stay at Aletha Wright. There is a curfew -- 10 p.m.
during the week and midnight on weekends. Narcotics Anonymous and
Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, if applicable, are required. Clients also
must go for job and continuing education counseling.
"It's their home away from home, but it's not a place where people become
complacent," Nobling said. "It's really intense. It's not the myth . . .
that the only thing provided is three hots and a cot."
For Walters and Scott, however, Tonytown is home away from home.
"You can't be by yourself," said Walters, a former cook who became a
father two weeks ago. "We don't deny each other for nothing. That's the way
we live back here."
Parks, who last worked for $5.50 an hour loading trucks at Camden
Recycling Inc., said that his family wants nothing to do with him. He
became homeless seven years ago, after his mother's death.
"I just never made it back to where reality was," he said.
Now, he hustles, like the rest of Tonytown. He moves items in and out of a
furniture store nearby, for $10 a pop. He helps the hot dog vendor pack up
at the end of the day. He takes scrap to the junkyard.
When he's not working, he hangs out under the shade of Kombo's Hamburgers
on Mount Ephraim Avenue, sometimes adding to the mountain of beer bottles
in brown paper bags next to it and watching police car number 206 drive by
yet again.
And he spends time in the 3-foot-high coop that he made from a collapsed
West Coast Video sign, with rubber on top to keep out the rain and plywood
and two curtains in front for privacy. It's a modest setup compared to the
one he had last summer.
"I had it built high, like a house. It was a duplex," he said. "Somebody
got jealous and knocked it over."
END FORWARD
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