John Freeman

Several years ago, I bought an apartment in Manhattan with an inheritance passed to me from my grandmother, who was the daughter of a former attorney for Standard Oil. She outlived three husbands and managed her money well, and in one moment hoisted me out of one social class and into another.

Meanwhile, barely a mile away, my younger brother was living in a homeless shelter. It was the second or third shelter he’d been in after moving to the city. It’s awkward enough, in most instances, to talk about money, but doubly so when it involves family. Let me just briefly say that my brother had not been left out of his inheritance; he just had no immediate access to it due to the fact that he has a mental illness. He has dealt with this illness bravely and takes precautions to manage his condition. One of the first things he did after moving to New York was check in at a hospital and use his Medicaid card to get his prescriptions.

Still, it was a very bad idea for him to move to the city. We – my older brother, father, and I – had warned and pleaded, even begged him not to move to New York. My father told horror stories from when we lived here in the 1970s. I talked about how hard it could be on some nights just to sleep, with the heat, the noise, the city’s constant pulsing. My older brother talked to him about how difficult it was to find work, something my younger brother already knew because he had been applying for jobs where he was, in Utica, for over a year – counsellor, technological writer, librarian’s assistant, anything to do with words that paid better than minimum wage. He held a BA and had been published in newspapers.

The Freeman brothers in 1996. Photograph: courtesy of John Freeman

None of that mattered in the end. He couldn’t get a job, and felt he couldn’t stay in Utica so he got on a train to New York and checked himself into a shelter. He had almost no belongings, having given them away or sold them. He brought a suitcase, a laptop he slept with so it wouldn’t be stolen, and a pay-as-you-go mobile phone. These are luxuries in many parts of the world, but they were the thin string holding my brother’s life together by giving him a connection to the world that wasn’t right around him. He told us about his movements by Facebook: which shelter he’d been kicked out of for fighting or calling people names, where he’d slept – the Staten Island ferry, a bathroom at a bus station in Albany. Eventually, he settled at this final shelter, and it was, to some degree, a last resort. He had lived there for a while and joined their job-training programme.

All the time that my brother was homeless, I never invited him over to where I lived or let him into my apartment. I love my brother. He can be sweet and funny; he is gentle and kind to older people. Even when he made less than $10,000 a year, he spent hours each week tutoring and teaching people English. Every time I see him I am reminded how lucky I am to have him as a brother. I am also reminded how lucky I am that I was born, for reasons unfathomable, with a slightly different gene structure, one that means that I thrive under the same stress that makes his life impossible. It is not fair, but long ago I decided I would not spend my time trying to ameliorate the difference in our fortunes by fighting battles I know are not winnable, among them trying to sort out his accommodation.

I have had the experience of sharing a home with my brother and have arrived at the conclusion that it is better for us to live apart. During the time I’m writing about, my girlfriend and I were thinking of joining our two adjacent apartments together, and my feelings of guilt did not trump my resolve to avoid putting the relationship with her at risk from the strain of taking him in. I knew my brother would be aware of the problems he was creating, and that it would be bad for him, too. At least that’s what I told myself.

So we communicated by Facebook and email and once or twice met for lunch at a diner, where he arrived looking hollow and yet more alive than I had seen him in years. I almost didn’t recognise him. He had been walking everywhere and the food in the shelter was so bad, he’d lost 40 pounds. He didn’t look sad any more, but more like the brother I grew up with in California, who was handsome and had girlfriends, a golden boy. He had much more energy now, too, as a result of being more fit, and deployed it waging battles against the city’s social services bureaucracy. He had applied for a low-income housing programme, and sent out resumes for jobs at the library. In the meantime, he was working up in Harlem, handing out free newspapers at the entrance to a subway. I realised that to make my house a lifeline for him would have been a mistake – that, as hard as it was, he wanted to prove to us and to himself that he could do this on his own. I gave him a few hundred dollars and he walked away, back into his separate life.

I couldn’t have predicted it then, but he succeeded. My brother got out of the shelter. He was accepted into the housing programme, found an apartment and, for a while, achieved his dream. He was living in New York, on his own. At first, he loved his new life. But as time went by, with his benefits package constantly under threat, he became tired of the strain of the city – the way it makes everything difficult, doubly so if you need help from it. Eventually he moved back to Utica and then on to Dallas, where he seems happy now. It’s warm, he has a car and things to do. He can live with a degree of peace and a lack of stress, and even if he has become a Republican, I still love him. I often like his photographs on Facebook.

Illustration: Yann Kebbi/heartagency.com

I haven’t resolved how I feel about his time in New York. I don’t think I ever will – the juxtaposition of our fates and fortunes is too much to assimilate. Everything was too unequal. During the time he was here, because of my job, I rarely woke up later than 6am. I was on and off airplanes on a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis and it messed up my internal clock. Meanwhile, he was living four blocks away. On some mornings, I stood by the window of my apartment, drinking my first coffee while watching the dawn light up the walls surrounding the car park across the street. On some of those mornings he must have passed my building on his way from the shelter to the 1 train uptown to hand out papers, but he didn’t ring our doorbell. Did he even look up to see if I was there, worrying about him, wondering if he’d been kicked out of his shelter after another fight? I asked him once why he never stopped by after he left the shelter and had an apartment of his own. He said: “It was cold, and I didn’t want to be late for work.”I tell this story now because we need to change the way we talk about inequality. My experience of witnessing my brother’s homelessness was not nearly as hard as it was for him to live it, and I know there are people who have suffered far more than both of us. The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, was elected in part because his narrative of New York as a “tale of two cities” hit a chord. He has called it “the central issue of our time”. New Yorkers related to his frustration and passion, his dream that the city could do much better. They were also galvanised by the sense he conveyed in his campaign that the gap between the rich and poor, the haves and have-nots, has grown so wide as to make New York City untenable. The city’s narrative – of it being a special place, a city of dreams and so on – appears in shreds in the face of reality: the city’s income disparity is as big as it has ever been.

Nearly half of New York is living close to the poverty line. In the last two decades, the income disparity in the city has returned to what it was just before the Great Depression. The top 1% of New Yorkers saw their median income grow from $452,000 to $717,000 between 1990 and 2010. Meanwhile, the lowest 10% of New Yorkers saw a much smaller percentage growth, from just $8,500 in 1990 to $9,500 in 2010. The concentration of wealth in that period has also been skewed towards the very rich. In 2009, the top 1% earned more than a third of the city’s income. It is very clear: the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.

And the middle class, as it has been for some time, is progressively vanishing. Just prior to De Blasio’s election, the business and finance journalist James Surowiecki wrote an article explaining that the city is highly dependent on the finance industry to create revenue – the top 1% pay 43% of the income tax – and yet that same industry is driving income inequality. At the same time, the kinds of jobs that bolster the middle class have disappeared. Between 2001 and 2011, the city lost 51% of its manufacturing jobs. The cost of doing business in New York City, Surowiecki pointed out, is simply too expensive, and factories, workshops, and shipyards have gone elsewhere.

These numbers reflect an extreme version of what is happening in many cities, as people move back to urban areas from the suburbs, driving up urban home prices and rents. New York City, like London, has experienced that trend in an exaggerated way. New Yorkers who are not in the top 10% have seen just a modest growth in their income, but they have faced catastrophic rent increases. Between 2002 and 2012, the median rent has risen 75%. Rent in New York City is now three times the national average. As a result, nearly one-third of New Yorkers pay more than 50% of their annual income in rent. Forget about not being able to afford to own; many New Yorkers cannot afford to rent. The New York City borough that spends the highest percentage on rent – the Bronx, where the typical household spends 66% of its income to rent a three-bedroom home – is also its poorest. This is where my brother lived once he got an apartment.

These conditions are not sustainable. What’s more, the gap between what New York says it is – in its myths and pop culture – and the reality, is widening into total implausibility. In January this year, I contacted a number of writers who live or have lived in New York City, who feel it is their home – inviting them to address this second gap, by thinking and dreaming and describing what it is like in New York City today. How does it feel, what does one see, what stories do we tell about ourselves and how, if at all, has inequality changed the city? Thirty of them – including Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Edmund White and Teju Cole – responded. My brother replied with an essay of his own describing his seven months of being homeless.

Tim Freeman

Ever since I can remember, I loved New York and wanted to live there. I was born in New York – at North Shore hospital in Manhasset, just outside Queens. My parents lived in the middle-class suburb of Westbury on Long Island for a few years before moving to Pennsylvania in 1979. My father worked for the welfare department. I remember taking trips to the city as a young boy. One of my earliest memories is piling on to a bus in Allentown with my parents and brothers and 100 other people to attend a peace march in New York protesting against the escalation of nuclear weapons. This was around 1981 or 1982. I held up a sign that my brother drew of a giant hand blocking two missiles being fired simultaneously from the US and Russia with the word “stop” written beneath it. I remember walking down the wide avenues of Manhattan and looking up at the brick apartment buildings.

On another trip, we went to the top of the Empire State Building and rode the Staten Island ferry. Our family Christmas card photo from 1983 shows me and my brothers posing on the boat. I still remember that trip well. I remember right before that picture was taken, walking to the ferry terminal holding my mother’s hand. It was a beautiful day. As we walked, the cavernous alleys of Lower Manhattan giving way to the waterfront, we encountered several homeless men and women. I was seven years old, but until that time had never seen a homeless person. I stared in bewilderment. They were bedraggled and raw.

I tugged at my mother’s hand and pointed at the people. “There’s a bum,” I said. “There’s another bum.” My mother leaned over and informed me that it was not polite to say that. “There’s a bum ... There’s a bum ... There’s a bum,” I chimed. A homeless lady sitting on a bench looked up at me.

My mother began to tell me why it was impolite to point at homeless people. “They are poor and have nowhere to live,” she said. I continued to stare.

Looking back, I always associated this incident with childhood tactlessness, but it would provide a context for something that would happen to me years later.

Left to right: Andy Freeman, John Freeman and Tim Freeman in Skaneateles, New York, 1978. Photograph: courtesy of John Freeman

Almost three decades after this trip, in July 2010, I vacated the apartment I was renting upstate and bought a one-way train ticket to New York City. I had a few hundred dollars. The first night I stayed at a hotel in midtown Manhattan. The next afternoon, I went to the Bellevue men’s shelter on First Avenue in midtown and declared myself homeless. I was angry about a family inheritance, I was angry at my dad, I was unhappy with my life – and, more than anything, I had wanted to live in New York for as long as I could remember. Also, since the age of 16, I have been seeing a psychiatrist and taking medicine for a mental illness and depression. Mental health issues have a way of exacerbating life’s stresses and problems.

The Bellevue men’s shelter is a forbidding nine-storey prewar red-brick building surrounded by a high wall and wrought-iron fencing. The building used to be a psychiatric hospital. When I arrived there, I was fingerprinted and photographed before being assigned a bed on the seventh floor. The room where I found my bed was large and empty. The walls were painted a yellowish-white; there was a large heavy door with a small square window. In one corner, there was a hole in the ceiling through which water dripped. Dirty puddles collected on the floor. In another corner, next to a metal locker, there was a cot with white sheets and a scratchy wool blanket that smelled of banana peel. The pillow was like a half-inflated beach ball. On the night that I arrived, somebody else’s possessions were still in the locker.

I spent the next seven months as a homeless person. For much of that time I was at Bellevue, but sometimes I stayed at other shelters in the city. On some nights, if I had enough money, I would get a hotel room. If I was too weary to follow the rules of whatever shelter I happened to be staying at, I slept on the street.

I had many different room-mates at the various shelters. I had one room-mate who smoked crack. Another smelled so bad that the other people in the room would spray him with air freshener. I shared a room with a group of guys who smoked marijuana as if it was tobacco. I had a room-mate with a degree in sociology from the University of Chicago. There was even a guy at one of the shelters who dressed like a businessman.

All types of people become homeless for all kinds of reasons. Financial problems, alcoholism, drug addiction, family and relationship issues, depression, mental illness, laziness and problems with the law tend to be the most frequent causes. Some young adults in New York end up in shelters having become too old for foster care. There are also a lot of veterans. I met several men who had served in Vietnam or who were recent veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. According to shelter census figures on the Coalition for the Homeless website, during the time that I was homeless, there were approximately 38,500 people in shelters each night in New York City. Today, that figure is closer to 55,000. A large number of these homeless people are children. According to the Coalition’s figures for April 2014, there were 13,000 homeless families residing in New York City shelters consisting of 20,000 adults and 23,000 kids. A major reason for the rise in the city’s homelessness over the last few years is cuts that the Bloomberg administration made to vital programmes that were designed to move people out of shelters and into housing. The city terminated a rental subsidy programme that helped me get an apartment in the Bronx for a year.

Regardless of the reasons why people become homeless, everyone in the shelters is treated like an equal. And when I say equal, I mean it in the way that livestock are treated as equals. Life in the shelters is regimented. You wake up. You wait to take a shower. You shower. You get dressed. You wait in a long line to eat breakfast. You bolt your breakfast. You shuffle out of the shelter and try to find something to do to keep you busy until lunch. You come back to the shelter and wait for lunch. And so on.

The days go by like this. Days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months.

I was homeless on my birthday and at Christmas. That year for Christmas, my dad and my brothers were in Britain. They had invited me and the family could pay, but I couldn’t get a passport in time. They called me on Christmas Day but I didn’t answer. What do you say to your family on Christmas Day when they are surrounded by warmth and happiness and you are alone in a homeless shelter? I wanted to say “fuck you”, but I thought I would spare them.

Illustration: Yann Kebbi/heartagency.com

Family issues become awkward when you are homeless. Nobody knows how to talk about the homeless family member. When I was homeless, some relatives invited me to their house in New Haven for Thanksgiving. We had a good time. I got to play with their dog and sleep in a real bed for a change. We even went to the Peabody Museum of Natural History and looked at all the dioramas. For a couple of days everything was normal. Never once was the subject of homelessness broached.

I did not want anybody’s help when I was homeless. If a family member had offered to take me in, I probably would have declined the offer. When I was staying at Bellevue, my brother John lived less than a mile away. I saw him only twice during the whole time that I was homeless. Again, I think this was because of the awkwardness.

I was evicted from several shelters more than once for breaking petty rules. During an altercation at Bellevue, I was slammed to the ground repeatedly by a young man who had recently been released from prison. I also suffered a severe panic attack that landed me in the emergency room.

For many people, homelessness is not a choice. And for the nearly 55,000 homeless New Yorkers, the shelters are a kind of indefinite home. Now that initiatives such as the rental subsidy programme that helped me get an apartment have ended, they have nowhere else to go. The homeless people in New York are the city’s refugees, and the shelters are their refugee camps.

Everywhere in New York there are gleaming condominiums going up, and gentrification is transforming working-class neighbourhoods into enclaves for the rich. New Yorkers can no longer afford to live on the streets they grew up in. Those at the bottom are affected the worst. This competitiveness is one of the reasons why I left New York when my subsidy was terminated. I now live in Texas, which is friendly and cheaper, and I am not sure I want to live in New York any more.

Images of the city tend to be of the young bohemian artsy hipster, the chic model and the sophisticated socialite. What we don’t see are the long queues at the welfare office, the children living in homeless shelters, the single mother on benefits receiving an eviction letter, and the tenement housing residents who had their gas shut off because their landlord failed to send a check to Con Edison.

New York is a tale of two cities, the rich and the poor. We don’t hear much about the poor.

• Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York, edited by John Freeman, is published by OR Books.