By Camryn Sanchez
As of this week, the Tiny Houses for Yonkers Homeless petition has reached 1,578 out of 2,500 desired signatures. The Yonkers Homelessness Outreach Forum headed by community activist Maddie Cheatham-Walker created the petition to indicate that a tiny house village in Yonkers is something the community supports.
The purpose of the petition is solely to get permission from the city to use a space for the tiny house village. In terms of funding, Cheatham-Walker says she is committed to building the house with or without city funding.
The housing insecure population in Yonkers has risen this year due to a variety of factors including COVID-19 and the Special One-Time Assistance program known as SOTA which relocates homeless people from the five boroughs of New York City into Yonkers.
Longtime Yonkers resident John Rivera says he has observed the situation worsening. “I’ve been seeing a lot of fresh new faces, and when I ask the person ‘Where you from?’ they say, ‘Oh I’m from the Bronx, I’m from Manhattan.’ So I’m like ‘Bro why are you up here?’ and they said, “They sent us up here.’”
In response to this increase, Yonkers police have been evacuating homeless out of certain streets, but not relocating them into housing. As a result, homeless people scattered throughout Yonkers are forced to move often and not allowed to settle.
“Now they don’t allow them to stay in Getty Square. The police are having the homeless move, and oftentimes the homeless don’t just go, and they’re willing to do it with force. And that’s a problem as well because you’re telling people who already don’t have a place to go to go somewhere else. How does that work? How does that serve them? How does that solve the problem for the long term?” Says Cheatham-Walker. “They’re human beings just like we are. They are people and it is our duty here on earth to help people.”
Rivera says he’s seen Yonkers homeless arrested for sleeping on park benches, picking up sleeping homeless people off of the ground late at night and forcing them to move a block over, and recently he saw police take a homeless man’s belongings from him and throw them into a trash can.
Yonkers homeless services are not sufficient to house the large homeless population, and Rivera worries that incoming developments providing affordable housing will still be too expensive or inaccessible. The Broadway Terrace Apartments on N Broadway in Yonkers is full of what the city considers “affordable housing,” however, the building is full and time on the waitlist is on average three to four years long. Applicants to affordable housing are often required to have a sizable income, and about one year’s recent history of positive rental experience. Studio apartments considered affordable can have rents as high as 1,999 dollars per month.
Many housing insecure Yonkers residents receive benefits through the Department of Social Services “DSS,” which many landlords in Yonkers do not accept.
The result is a bit of a Catch 22. Residents who need housing but make too much money do not qualify for available low income housing, but residents in need of housing who do not make enough money are also not eligible. Additionally, Yonkers is currently lacking in all housing. The main men’s shelter in Yonkers; Broadway Manor currently has on available beds.
Tiny house villages have been popping up in cities all over the United States including Dallas and Los Angeles. They inspired Cheatham-Walker to start the petition in Yonkers, and she has solicited the services of architect Stephanie Walker. A Yonkers native, Walker says she has noticed the homeless population more and more and wants to be a part of the project to give back to her community. Currently she and Cheatham-Walker are in the process of finding a space for the tiny house village. Walker says of the tiny houses, “It starts to give people their own space rather than having them in a homeless shelter where everybody doesn’t have privacy.”
Cheatham-Walker has also started a GoFundMe to raise money for the tiny house village, and believes that if we come together as a community, this will be easy to achieve. She asks, “How can I as an individual sit here and act like I’m okay when I know that I am connected to everyone universally, and I know that there are people suffering right in my face?”
