How Can We Housing Resources to Address Multiple Community Needs?
Over the years, Melrose has evolved. People are slowly starting to realize the prime location that the neighborhood is in and while the neighborhood is growing and bettering in some aspects —colleges have began to move into the area, there are more hospitals— there are still many needs that the community has that have not been addressed. As active members of their community, Maria and Yolanda both see, first hand, the recourses that the community lacks in. One core example is something which Yolanda sees everyday at work.
As said before, Yolanda is a teacher for pre-k at P.S. 61. Due to the competitiveness and exclusivity of charter schools in the battle between public vs. charter schools for free education, Yolanda’s class consists of quite a few children living in extreme poverty or in shelters. These children don’t get all of the resources they need at home, such as a bed to sleep on at night or a meal at dinnertime and it leads to behavioral issues that dominate the classroom. “We’re in school six hours. Three hours we’re dealing with behavior, then we only have three hours to teach. In those three hours we have to—they have to eat lunch, breakfast, and my kids take a nap, so when are they learning? An hour an a half? That’s not fair,” explains Yolanda.
In addition to having multiple children in the classroom with behavior problems, the teachers are not given proper training on how to effectively handle the situations and are left in a guessing game. Yolanda expressed multiple times how she would love to see professional developments or any time dedicated towards helping teachers learn how to deal with these behaviors so that they can teach their students, yet no such resources are currently available at her school.
Often the emotional and behavioral issues are a result of the fact that these young children aren’t in a stable home environment where all of their needs can be met. Homelessness is a problem which plagues New York City and the Bronx is certainly not immmune to it. The Melrose neighborhood has some of the highest populations of homeless families in the Bronx. Homelessness is a social justice issue which is deeply imbedded in the tangled web of social injustice. So while erradicating homelessness isn’t as simple as putting everyone in a house and addressing it will not solve every other need in the Melrose community, it can help reduce that need significantly in some big areas.
Yolanda and Maria both mentioned that the area needs a good urgent care center. They have hospitals nearby, but an urgent care is what the community would really benefit from at this point. By reducing some of the homelessness and providing housing at rates that will help relieve the rent burden that almost 60% of the Melrose & Mott Haven community endure, the overall health of the area will improve. According to a New York City study on Melrose & Mott Haven, comparing income and death rates among neighborhoods shows that almost 50% of the total deaths could be prevented and at the end of the day, while an urgent care is something which the community still needs, the effect that Melrose residents may feel from not having one is not as large.
Providing accessible and stable housing for homeless youth will also help improve their lives in the classroom and make teachers like Yolanda’s job not only easier, but a lot more possible. Public schools struggle with a lack of teaching supplies and resources as well. Students receive lower quality school materials than students in charter and private schools, which can lead to a lower level of educational success. While placing homeless youth in stable housing may not supply better quality textbooks to kids, it will allow teachers to spend more time on teaching the material instead of having to correct behavior.
These are just a couple of the ways that providing stable housing through governmental programs such as Section 8, public housing, and tax write-offs for buildings in the 80/20 program can really help to improve Melrose as a whole. It’s not a permanent and end all be all solution, but housing is a great start.