How a Murderous Rampage Reveals Perils for City’s Street Homeless - The New York Times

A police van idled and a single piece of yellow caution tape flapped from a nearby tree as Benjamin Vanbrackle pulled his shirt down to show the fresh scar that wrapped around his neck and to the top of his chest.

It took 28 stitches to sew him up after he was slashed with a box cutter several weeks ago, he said late Saturday, slurring his words. “I drink a lot.”

Hours earlier, feet away from where Mr. Vanbrackle sat on a bench, four men, believed to be homeless, were bludgeoned to death as they slept on the street in Chinatown at the base of the Bowery. A 24-year-old homeless man, Randy Santos, was charged on Sunday with four counts of murder, attempted murder and possession of marijuana, the police said.

The deaths of the four men brought the dangers of living on the street into full, public view, renewing attention on the unsheltered homeless, who make up only about 5 percent of the estimated 79,000 homeless people in New York City.

And the Bowery, an area of Lower Manhattan known in the 1930s as New York’s skid row, has long served as a daunting example of the city’s difficulties in addressing street homelessness. If anything, the problem is getting worse: The area is now drawing younger homeless people, many with drug and mental health problems, a population that the city’s traditional outreach methods have struggled to confront.

Mr. Santos began his rampage shortly before 2 a.m. on Saturday, the police said, wielding a metal bar and swinging it at the men’s heads as they were lying on the ground on a night that saw temperatures dip to 49 degrees. The police said the four men, including an 83-year-old named Cheun Kok, all died of their injuries. A 49-year-old man who was attacked remains in critical condition, officials said.

Homeless men living on the street expressed fear for their safety on Saturday and Sunday. But Mr. Vanbrackle, 62, said he felt at ease, in spite of the summertime attack with the box cutter. He pointed to a metal pipe in a shopping cart filled with scrap metal, aluminum cans and an air-conditioner. “I don’t worry,” he said. “I have an iron pipe.”

Community District 3, a cluster of neighborhoods bordered on the west by the Bowery, has one of the highest concentrations of homeless shelters — at least two dozen — in Manhattan, and many of them house single men.

Men have historically found refuge in cheap motels and flophouses along the Bowery, which has long welcomed the downtrodden with nowhere else to turn. Benedict Giamo, a professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, described the lodging as “nasty places.”

“But they still got out of the cold. They could have a cot, a roof, maybe a locker,” said Professor Giamo, who wrote a book, “On the Bowery: Confronting Homelessness in America,” and did field work there in the late 1970s.

“The Bowery men were considered commercial assets and not liabilities. They would go to the bar and spend a little money. Go to pawn shops, liquor stores,” he said.

The neighborhood grew and changed, drawing upscale markets and buildings with doormen.

But homelessness has persisted, and longtime residents have raised concerns about a new subpopulation within the homeless community.

A recent report described them as “travelers” or “young homeless people who travel to destinations depending on the weather, and often include instances of drug use and aggression.”

Over the past three years, complaints have increased about these younger arrivals, and the police and homeless outreach workers have said that “traditional outreach is not successful with this population,” according to the report.

Community leaders said in interviews on Saturday that the neighborhoods needed better mental health services and additional supportive housing and safe haven beds.

So-called safe havens, specialized shelters that have fewer restrictions and a less bureaucratic application process to quickly place people into permanent housing, have been credited with a modest decline in the street homelessness population. People on the street prefer them because many of the men’s shelters have a reputation for petty thefts and fights. Safe havens are smaller and even offer private rooms.

Supportive housing provides apartments where formerly homeless residents pay a modest rent and also receive services for mental health and substance abuse.

Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3, described the area’s homeless outreach workers as “dedicated, caring and patient people.”

“They keep trying to forge relationships over days, months, years. But what they can do is limited, especially without more safe haven and stabilization beds and other supportive housing,” she said.

Carlina Rivera, the councilwoman who represents the area, said the brutal murders should serve as an alert to city officials to find new ways to curb homelessness and treat mental illness. “Unfortunately, it’s evident that we’ve failed as a city at building deeply affordable housing,” Ms. Rivera said. “How we provide mental health services — we have to do better. We cannot treat this as business as usual, and we need a comprehensive plan.”

She questioned the effectiveness of ThriveNYC, the $1 billion plan to address mental health. Led by Chirlane McCray, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife, the mental health initiative has been criticized for failing to focus on people who are most in peril.

“We need more details about how outreach is going,” Ms. Rivera said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Thrive. What are the metrics? What is the rubric we are using? A lot of this comes back to building deeply affordable housing.”

Advocates for homeless people have pushed Mr. de Blasio to adjust his plan to build and preserve 300,000 units by including more units to move people out of shelters and off the street.

Mr. de Blasio has resisted. Instead, his administration has focused on opening safer shelters with more services, hoping to decrease the homeless population by about 500 people per year.

So far, the strategy is not working. The city is scheduled to open 90 shelters by 2022, and should have opened 40 by now. But it has only opened 27, stalled, in part, by residents who have banded together to pressure elected officials and even to sue the city. The most vocal objections have been to shelters for single men, whether they are in Maspeth in Queens, Crown Heights in Brooklyn or the so-called Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan. Last week, residents on the Upper West Side protested the city’s decision to turn a women’s shelter into one for men.

Steven Banks, the commissioner of social services, has no control over the mayor’s housing plan, but he has tried to manage the homelessness crisis with the shelters, facing angry elected officials and residents at town halls. He said the murders were “a heartbreaking reminder of why we do the work we do every day, to help people going through hard times, including those who may be troubled, get the support they need.”

But the city is hard pressed to find communities that embrace men’s shelters like the Bowery.

“We see them, but we don’t want to see them,” said Hakki Akdeniz, an advocate for homeless people.

Mr. Akdeniz, 39, is the owner of Champion Pizza, a chain of restaurants in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. He sobbed on Saturday, mourning the four deaths. “We think of homeless people like they are not human,” he said through his tears.

He was once one of them. Days after he arrived in New York City in 2001, he ran out of all the money he had, $240, Mr. Akdeniz said. But he found help, moving into Bowery Mission, one of the city’s oldest aid organizations.

Mr. Akdeniz, a Turkish immigrant, volunteers there now, begging homeless men to consider going into shelters. “At least it’s safe,” he said. “There’s more safety than on the outside.”

Wilfredo Molina, who said he was in his 60s, said he had been living on the streets since after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was diagnosed with a mental illness. He did not want to be a burden on his family, he said, so he turned to street living.

He was worried on Saturday night. “I sleep with one eye open and one eye closed,” he said.

Crouched on a curb across from the Bowery Mission, Miquel Rosa, 59, said people did not realize that assaults were common on the street. “Homeless people really got it rough,” he said, adding, “A homeless person is getting beat up here every day.”

Mr. Rosa now lives in a safe haven that allows him to check out for three days, so he spends some nights outside where he can be with friends.

He spotted a police van that had been idling. On Saturday, he said, he saw the van four times. “I guess they want people to feel a little more safe tonight,” Mr. Rosa said.

Jeffrey E. Singer and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.

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