Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
On January 7, during a typically busy 8 a.m. rush, the Q35 drove past Floyd Bennett Field without stopping. “There was no one there to pick up,” an organizer with Floyd Bennett Field Neighbors wrote on the mutual aid group’s WhatsApp chat. City officials announced in December that two dozen shelters across the five boroughs would be closing, and many of the roughly 2,000 people who called the former airfield home had already started their moves to other corners of the shelter system.
“We were one of the first families that entered Floyd Bennett, adapting as the shelter was growing,” says Kimberly, who arrived with her husband and four children from Venezuela last December. (Kimberly is a pseudonym.) That meant adjusting to the tent complex’s outdoor bathrooms (a tricky thing with young kids during the bone-chilling winters and scorching summers) and learning to live with the shelter’s restrictions on coming and going. But they fell into a routine all the same. In the morning she and her husband would stand outside the tent waiting for the bus that took their kids — ages 12, 9, 6, and 5 — to school. Then the couple would head to Home Depot to see what odd jobs they could pick up or what the nearby food pantries had in stock. The kids made friends at school and in the shelter. Predictability became a small comfort. Relocating, after all that, felt scary. “My family and I feel adrift,” she says. “Although it’s true that the state has helped us a lot and we are grateful, we feel that we are still on the journey because we are still going from one place to another.”
The family moved just before Christmas. After a stopover at the Roosevelt Hotel for a night, they moved again, this time to the Utica Hotel in Bed-Stuy, where they’ll stay for the next 60 days. The commute to school now takes nearly an hour, and the kids are mostly inside when they’re home. “We feel isolated,” she says. But her major worry right now is what changing addresses will mean for receiving mail that’s crucial to any future stability she hopes to have. Kimberly is close to finishing the asylum process and obtaining her working papers and a Social Security number. Missing a piece of mail could mean missing something vital — like a fingerprint appointment or a notice about their paperwork. She wants to feel settled — to have her own protection. “I’m looking for a way to find stability by going out to look for work and taking courses,” she tells me. “I have a lot of anxiety because people can disrespect us and can pay us whatever they want because we don’t have working papers.” And the people they’ve become dependent on to do that — social workers, volunteers, other residents of the shelters — sometimes don’t have answers either.
The shelter system has been a godsend, she knows. And there are a lot of benefits to being in Bed-Stuy, which is much more centrally located than the tent complex in Marine Park — there are restaurants where she can try to find work, and there’s more transportation. But it’s also a shaky kind of stability. She wants a permanent home. Working papers. A way out. “I’m waiting for my work permit and that of my family,” she says, “so I can work and gather funds to be able to leave the shelters.”
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