AIDS Housing Activists Protest City Cuts
There was a bit of a protester traffic jam at city hall this past Wednesday. Just as a coalition of Bronx criminal justice activists were packing up their protest gear another group appeared on the scene waiting anxiously to scream their chants and invectives on Bloomberg’s tidy steps.
Before the second group really announced themselves a woman from the Bronx group explained.
“They are AIDS housing activists. I don’t understand what they are protesting about. People with AIDS get plenty of housing,” she said.
The coalition, as it turned out, was protesting Bloomberg’s proposed cuts to the Scatter Site II program which provides people living with AIDS housing and therapy. The contract for Scatter Site II is expiring this coming June and the Mayor has signaled that he might not renew it.
Many of those in the program would be moved into unsupervised housing that would not include any kind of counseling and supervision, according to Kenneth Whitmore a housing developer specialist with Floating Hospital.
“Remember the housing crisis in the eighties?” Whitmore said, if the city makes cuts to the Scatter Site II program “it would be the same all over again.”
But some policy experts say that the programs are poorly run. Housing Works Director of New York Policy Kristin Goodwin said in a recent article in AIDS Issues updates that Scatter Site II’s initial assessments of the clients are poorly done and people are placed in housing who may really need more serious treatment.
“The problems with Scatter Site II are structural,” Goodwin said.
For Alberto Cardona the protests are to maintain a program that he says saved his life. He was homeless with HIV when he enrolled in the program.
“Once I became homeless none of my friends were there for me” Cardona said.
“[Scatter Site II] allowed me to come in. I was without clothes on my back, they provided me with shelter…they immediately transformed me into a working individual.”