CUT
"On April 17, the Department of Homeless Services denied housing to the Iraqi war veteran on the grounds that she could live with her mother. Beyond the overcrowding that such a return would create (four women and two small children in a two-bedroom apartment), she says that the decision ignored the untenable situation between mother and daughter.
MS. GOODWIN immediately reapplied, thus entering a limbo world known as fast track, in which families who have already been denied housing return within 48 hours to the Emergency Assistance Unit to apply again, and to wait, again, for that late-night bus to somewhere."
"City officials say that under the fast-track process, the applications of the recently rejected are expedited to see whether any new information might make them eligible. But according to Ms. Goodwin, fast track seems designed to generate so much frustration that the applicant gives up and goes away."
"Two days into her fast-track odyssey, Ms. Goodwin got a four-hour pass from the Emergency Assistance Unit - keeping her application active - and made her way to the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center. The Department of Veterans Affairs does not have housing for homeless veterans, but it does have a comprehensive plan for homelessness that includes assistance with employment and counseling."
"Jim Connell, a spokesman for the Bronx center, said staff members tried to find housing for the Goodwins. "They started calling alternative shelters, but a lot of them don't take women," he said. "One was full, another wouldn't take a child." He added: "They were not particularly successful."
"Before the staff at the medical center could help Ms. Goodwin further, Mr. Connell said, she had to leave "because her pass was running out." But someone in Veterans Affairs managed to call her cellphone and refer her to the Coalition for the Homeless for legal help."
"By last evening, officials in Veterans Affairs were vowing to make sure that Nicole Goodwin receives the assistance she needs, and Jim Anderson, a spokesman for Homeless Services, was delivering the official city explanation." (the press got some results?)
(Damage control)"It is a disgrace that soldiers experience instability as they return home and, sadly, hundreds of homeless vets today call municipal shelters their home," Mr. Anderson said.
She chooses to get her 15 minutes...as you say. I bash the Times just like the rest of the Freepers but there is a real problem..that a vet can serve his or her country and then come back to a pile of bureaucratic bs paperwork pushed by "garbarge in garbage out" employees to coin your phrase, and be next to homeless. The system doesn't work now nor has it ever; government gets bigger and bigger and squeezes the taxpayer more and more no matter what party comes to office. Sadly neither candidate will ever address this problem. Talk is cheap.