Our visit to Capitol Hill was eye-opening to not only the ways homelessness is being addressed in New York City but who the homeless are. The stigma of homelessness is one of laziness, addiction, and filth. New Yorkers pass by their fellow citizens begging for change on street corners and don’t even bat an eyelash because many have the perception that these are people who have strayed too far down the wrong path in life and cannot pull themselves up. Capitol Hill’s residence consists mostly of the elderly who simply cannot afford to live in the city they have called home for most of their lives. Some of these residents may suffer from mental illness or are in addiction recovery, but at Capitol Hill that isn’t necessarily the norm.

Based on our visit to Capitol Hill and meeting some of the residents, I learned that homelessness isn’t a black and white issue when it comes to a solution. More places to keep people, whether it is a shelter or affordable housing, is not going to eradicate homelessness. What needs to be addressed is the reason people experience homelessness. An affordable housing complex like Capitol Hill addresses the needs of an aging population that cannot sustain itself on a meager pension or Social Security check in a city like New York. However, what about those experiencing mental illness? Families of four or more? The interplay of so many of the factors we discuss in class and more when it comes to homelessness makes it one of the trickiest to address in the sphere of public policy.

Ariel Avgi

It has been a struggle for me to fully understand and make sense of homelessness and what we do to combat it in New York City. Solutions always appeared simple – take those on the street and give them cheap affordable housing, provide them with health and mind care, and help to integrate them back into the working class society. Up until recently, I could not comprehend why this was not being done. We have enough space – I see abandoned buildings every couple blocks. We have enough compassion – although we are busy and often ignore the homeless, we care for them. So why are there still 60,000 humans of New York City that are still without a home?

Visiting Capitol Hall helped me to understand that while the homelessness problem is plenty worthy of attention and action, several barriers exist within our city government and real estate factions to prevent proper action. And more than anything, this is disheartening. Although single resident housing buildings like Capitol Hall are cost-efficient in the end, many cannot see past the initial price tag of building such housing. And without more buildings being dedicated to low-income housing, we will continue to have thousands of individuals out on the streets resenting new luxury housing going up under a roof that could have saved his/her life.

My favorite policy that Goddard tries to abide by is the “housing first” policy. Those in need of homes and shelter – one of the basic human needs, should not have to fit certain pre-requisites to provided with such. How can one be expected to be properly treated for mental ailments on the street? It is important to bring these people in first and then help them receive treatment – whether it be for mental illnesses or addiction. Moreover, I think it is important for Goddard to consider allowing in residents that do not have any income and then helping them to acquire an income after housing them.

While there is still much for me to comprehend when it comes to the homelessness crisis, I feel confident that visiting Capitol Hall has brought me closer to understanding and deeper into caring.

Laura James 

Our visit to Capitol Hall was wonderful. Meeting the residents and speaking with the employees of the Goddard Riverside Community Center did a lot to make the problem of homelessness more real for me. Though I’ve met quite a few homeless people in the past through my volunteer work, I never thought about the practical side of housing New York City’s homeless residents. This visit brought to light not only a possible solution to the problem, but emphasized the necessity for a change in current city policy.

The people I saw walking through Capitol Hall were just that: people. One of the speakers even shared my name. It’s hard to empathize with suffering if all you do is read about it on the news. It’s even harder when you politicize it and forget that there are actual humans behind the statistics and press releases. This visit and the people we met, however, made it easier for me to care.

One of the things that stood out to me was the social service aspect of Capitol Hall. I think that’s a great idea! It seems to me that Capitol Hall understands that dealing with homelessness has to happen, at least to some degree, on an individual level. Instead of expecting people to “pull themselves up”, as Mario said, the good people at Goddard realize that some folks just can’t manage the climb on their own. By providing them services like medical care, financial support, and free meals (to name a few), Capitol Hall makes the pulling up much easier.

Robert Mayo

Dear Seminarians,

Please see the message from Professor Berger below. / AO

For the midterm paper, write an editorial of approximately two pages, certainly no more than three, arguing for a change in a current city policy or program that falls within one of the topics we will have discussed by March 29: immigration, transportation, real estate and public-project development, policing and criminal justice, politics, economy and labor, and media relations. The paper is due March 29. In writing the paper, take into account the interplay of vision (ideas), politics, personalities, money, community reaction, bureaucracy and media influence that might affect your proposal’s enactment. The grade will be based on how well informed your paper is by what we have read and discussed in class.

The Broken Windows theory has some merit not in its effectiveness in policing, but rather its encouragement to maintain a relationship between the police and the community. The argument that the Broken Windows theory tries to make, namely that disorder, if left unaddressed, will lead to more serious crime, is a seemingly reasonable assumption but one that is too open to interpretation. Personal prejudices can quite easily be used to interpret “disorder” in a way that can quickly lead to profiling against minorities. The use of quotas would only exacerbate this problem. Eventually, a distrust of the police in these more heavily targeted communities would grow, as we have seen in recent years. One possible alternative to Broken Windows could be a reworking that removes this idea of attacking “disorder” and priorities instead the community based aspects of the policy. Community policing is such a philosophy that emphasizes the relationship between the community and the police by assigning police to communities and having them work with the members of those communities to identify and address problems. This personalized policing policy is being applied to the NYPD under Commissioner James P. O’Neill, who hopes it will help mend relations between communities and officers. The effectiveness of this new policy, however, has yet to be evaluated, but there has been less emphasis in the media about abuse of power by police or protests by groups such as BlackLivesMatter.

-Pooneet Thaper

On paper, broken windows policing sounds like a good idea. By preventing neighborhoods from appearing rundown and in need of repair, policing minor crimes heavily can foster a sense of community that ends up self-regulating its population. However, in reality this method led to a deepening distrust of police by the communities they served, caused among other things by the lop-sided rates of arrest in the black and hispanic communities. Very often police would arrest black and hispanic offenders for crimes that would only very rarely lead to an arrest for a white offender.

As a result of this, the intended benefits of broken windows policing were hugely negated by the antagonism that developed between the police and the communities they patrolled. Instead of being able to have less of a police presence in areas kept in check by locals, more police were needed to patrol areas looking for minor offenders. The police being seen as only going after minority offenders, which statistically was much more likely then them going after white offenders, made it much harder for them to effectively combat crime. When the police are seen as the enemy, no one wants to help them, and this makes it harder for police to find those responsible for major crimes.

Broken windows, while seemingly a good idea, did not account for the discriminatory policing that it would eventually lead to. As a result of this, broken windows lead to a worsening of the relationship between the community and police.

-Jon Baumann

The Broken Windows theory sounds logical. Implementing ways to combat broken windows would probably reduce crime. Stopping little crimes like petty theft and graffiti would make neighborhoods safer, or at least give the illusion that it is safer. Cracking down on smaller crimes would give criminals the idea that they might get caught and discourage them from pursuing larger crimes.

However, this does not work well in real life. Police officers may stop smaller crimes, but they cannot stop the inner issues that cause people to commit these crimes. People who are economically disadvantaged are more likely to jump turnstiles or steal some money. They don’t do them because they want to, but because they feel that they need to. The law is there to curb wrongful behavior, but it actually seems to punish the poor. This is the fundamental problem with the broken windows theory. The poor, who are typically minorities, are being targeted as the cause of crime.

As a result, the broken windows theory is implemented with greater force in neighborhoods with majority African Americans. Trust between the police and residents of those neighborhoods are lowering. Crimes happen in other neighborhoods, but the broken windows theory doesn’t seem to cover those crimes. There is also the problem of the rich using their money to get away with crimes.

There needs to be a systematic change to policing. Every person should face the law equally, regardless of class or race.

-Rosa Kyung

I oppose the Broken Windows policing policy for two separate reasons. One is the implicit bias tied with the execution of the policy as well as the use of fear as the primary mode of social control. While the idea is sound in theory it can’t be practiced in a city like New York City; a city that is home to hundreds of ethnicities and immigrants of different socioeconomic classes.

The policy pushes social biases in action. The development of a quota system motivates enforcers to act to an unnecessary degree on those ethnicities who are “more likely” to commit a crime or economic classes that have “more of an incentive” to commit a crime. With such expectations, enforcers are bound to not only hold themselves to a higher level to civilians (which they are, but should still be understanding) but also be making unnecessary arrests to ensure that they get their paycheck at the end of the month.

The policy is also a policy of fear. The policy doesn’t teach civilians why crime is bad, it shows the repercussions of committing anything remotely close to a crime. At that point, you are not teaching, you are disciplining. For example, when a lion performs in a carnival, you don’t call him a well-taught animal, you call him a well-trained animal. The lion doesn’t know his act will impress the crowd, he just knows if he doesn’t do it, he’ll get whipped. The animal is living in fear. Humans are not animals, we have the capacity to learn the difference between right and wrong.

-Madhav Bhatt

For Kelling and Wilson of the Atlantic, if a window is broken, fix it right away to prove that somebody actually cares. But for Bob Gangi, what he opposes is the idea that if a window is broken, punish the breaker to the umpteenth degree.

This is why I am not surprised by Gangi’s reaction to this version of broken windows. Of course it leads to broken trust between the enforcers and the enforced. Why put trust in those who make it a policy (and put quotas on it!) to overreact? Add a bit of inherent bias and prejudice and you’re bound to get some people who say, “This is !@#$ed up.”

Gangi did not strike me as someone who proposed a solution, rather just a manifestation of a reaction. I agree with him; quota/broken windows policing doesn’t work. But his lack of knowledge of the history of the broken windows philosophy and how it devolved to what it is today was a clear sign to me that this problem was bigger than broken windows or no broken windows.

It’s about basic humanity. You can’t make a law that tells people to be good. No matter how much money you put into it or whatever plan you draw up, human beings tend to resist any non-organic method of generating solidarity. We have too many Utopia-turned-Dystopia novels to not understand this by now.

Before we have a conversation about getting rid of broken windows, we need to have a conversation about what our policies are trying to do: fix society or aid the natural goodness it tends toward all on its own?

Peter Fields

The Broken Windows Theory seemed promising when it was first proposed. Focus some attention on the smaller crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, panhandling, and the chances of larger crimes being committed would drop, thus preventing the neighborhood from becoming “bad.” It stood the test of time over years of implementation and had real, albeit negative, effects. People living in the neighborhoods felt safer. However, this targeting of smaller crimes soon became targeting the poor and the minorities.

It is no question that the broken windows policing at the moment is discriminatory and should definitely be reformed. The implementation of quotas, and the discriminatory targeting is proof of a broken system of broken trust between the authority and the public. African American men should not die for selling loosies, or for just “looking suspicious.” Targeting the smaller crimes is now targeting the smaller symptoms of an issue, rather than the actual root of the problem.

Until more resources are available for those living in poverty, who are forced to steal, to panhandle, and to sleep on public benches, until this system of setting quotas is resolved and mutual respect is built, broken windows policing will remain broken trust policing.

-Jennifer Chang