At the peak of its notoriety, the New York Times dubbed it “Hell’s Embassy”. The Prince George building on 28th Street between Fifth and Madison was once a grand hotel but it had since become a dilapidated welfare hell of squalid rooms - so dirty that even professional cleaning companies baulked at taking them on - and hundreds of homeless people. There was enough drug abuse, prostitution and violence to keep a police squad car busy throughout the night, every night. “It was one of the scariest places in the city,” recalls Beth Sandor. “No one wanted to walk down 28th.”
Today, the vast foyer of the restored Prince George has oak-panelled walls, gleaming marble floors and elaborately patterned ceilings. To one side are the original “ladies’ tea” and “men’s tap” rooms of 1904; to another is the magnificent ballroom. In the middle a welcoming concierge sits at a desk of highly polished wood.
The scale and quality of the refurbishment is itself impressive. What makes it extraordinary is that half of the people who live here have the same histories as the people who were herded into the old place 20 years ago. Once homeless, they now act as proper permanent tenants and live alongside “normal” working people.
The Prince George is the second scheme run by Common Ground, the brainchild of Roseanne Haggerty, a former social worker who saw in the early 1990s that New York’s homeless needed a more radical approach than the traditional soup and shelters and decided that transforming the wrecked Times Square hotel with public and private finance was the solution. Since then there have been four more conversions in Manhattan. Work is under way on projects in New Haven and Boston, and the concept has spread to Canada and Australia - and now the UK.
Plans for a £50m Urban Village in London are currently being developed by the housing association Genesis and the charity Crisis, which were given £3.6m by Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour as start-up funding. Common Ground project manager Sandor is over on attachment from New York to help replicate the American success.
Shaks Ghosh, chief executive of Crisis, says: “We’d been looking for what should be the next step after you’ve solved someone’s survival needs. There might be enough emergency accommodation but if you’re in a hostel or a shelter you’re still homeless. That shouldn’t be the end of the route.”
What appealed about the New York schemes, she says, was the combination of high-quality accommodation, integration into the community and the emphasis on work. “There’s a real wow factor when you walk into the foyer of the Prince George: a big gold angel statue, a grand piano, a marble staircase. I know a lot of places [for the homeless] here are better than they used to be but there’s often still an awful smell and obtrusive security. Another difference over there is that if you visit in the day there aren’t many people around. They’re out at work, not just hanging about.”
She contrasts that with a visit earlier this year to a hostel for homeless ex-offenders near Sheffield. “It was a perfectly OK place but at 11am on a bright sunny morning these guys were lying in a darkened room in sleeping bags, staring at a huge TV. I pulled the curtains back and said ‘What’s going on?’ Of course they shouted at me to close the curtains. It was a classic example of how when people have no expectation of getting up and being active they just drift into dead end lives, sleeping late and lying about. You have to convince them that work is normal - and help them to do it. Otherwise they’re forever dependent on the state or charity.”
The American model de-ghettoises the homeless by accommodating them alongside low income workers, defined as those earning between $15,000 and $30,000 a year. Although Common Ground originally allocated these units - half of the Prince George’s 416 - on a first-come, first-served basis without any social engineering, it managed to achieve a good mix: residents range from twentysomethings to an 89-year-old and work as musicians, actors and flight attendants as well as in blue-collar jobs.
The homeless come from the city’s homeless services plus its services for people with mental health problems and Aids. Prospective tenants are interviewed by Common Ground and by social welfare agency Urban Community Services, whose staff will concern themselves with an individual’s psycho-social history.
”We’ve been accused of creaming off the best but that’s not the case,” says Sandor. “There are tenants with very complex needs but the main indicator is whether this person will be able to live independently. You need people who have insight into their problems and needs.”
Unsuccessful interviewees are advised as to how they might improve their chances and be reconsidered without automatically going back to the bottom of the list: appropriate medication, for instance, or a year’s sobriety. A criminal past is not necessarily a stumbling block - the nature of homelessness makes it inevitable that a certain number of applicants will have one - but some offences, including arson, rape and drug peddling, are unacceptable.
Once in, everyone gets the same space, a 250 sq ft studio with a kitchenette, private bathroom and essential furnishings. Rents range from $480 a month for those earning $15,000 a year to $675 for those making $30,000. The building superintendent lives on site and cleaning, maintenance and security are all done in-house. “When you first mention these schemes everyone scoffs and says ‘Why would anyone want to live with the homeless?’,” Sandor says. “Well this is why. You get affordable, beautiful, well-run, secure accommodation with a gym and other facilities two blocks south of the Empire State. You’d kill to live there.”
Aesthetics are part of the ethos. “If you make the common spaces beautiful and keep them that way - the floors are polished every other day for example - then it gives the tenants pride in where they live,” Sandor adds. “They can see outsiders looking in enviously. They know there’s a two-year waiting list. They’re also likely to carry that notion of quality into their own homes.”
Every resident has access to a case worker and although the former homeless are obviously likely to need the most support, “ordinary” residents may also have financial, personal or employment crises from time to time. Relapses into drink or drugs or mental breakdowns do not mean automatic expulsion. “Anyone who works in these fields knows that relapses are part of the syndrome and you have to support people through them. We’re not setting people up to fail.”
There are several tangible measures of the project’s success. Although tenancies are permanent there is a turn-over of about 10 per cent a year as residents get better jobs or partners they wish to move in with. The eviction rate, however, is only 2 per cent and that includes people who simply up and leave. Most evictions are for failing to pay rent despite all attempts at assistance.
One of Common Ground’s key principles was always that a project should not operate on its own but within the context of the surrounding neighbourhood. Integration would be a way of tackling suspicion or hostility, so its classes (including kick boxing, yoga, nutrition and financial planning) are open to non-residents, rooms are available for community events and the lobby is used as a polling station on election days.
Community involvement alongside the refurbishment of the building itself and the disappearance of the problems associated with its former incarnation have all contributed to the regeneration of what was a run-down area. Shops and restaurants have popped up within the vicinity of the Prince George. “There’s a new high-rise across the road where a studio will cost $2,000 a month,” says Sandor. “So we can help with regeneration at the same time as holding places for those people who’d normally be pushed out when an area improves.”
The UK scheme will retain the core principles of Common Ground, with a few changes. It hopes, for example, to have some of the units available for sale on a shared ownership basis. It will allocate accommodation for low-paid workers in accordance with job type. “These will be people who keep London running but who aren’t really served by current key worker provision,” says Shaks Ghosh. “So they’ll be public transport workers, street sweepers, cleaners, hospital porters, rather than teachers and firemen. We want homeless people to be inspired to join the world of work and realistically those are going to be the sort of jobs that are open to them. Most aren’t ever going to be nurses or policemen. They need the achievable.”
Assimilation into the wider community remains a key objective; isolation, she explains, is one of the worst aspects of rootlessness. “Some people never have a proper home in the first place. If you’re taken into care at, say, the age of two, by the time you’re 16 you’ll have averaged 14 foster placements. A lot of them go into the army so they’re in barracks or moving around the world, often picking up bad habits of drink and drugs. They might get a dishonourable discharge so it’s hard to find a job. They have poor literacy and poor social skills so making friends is difficult. They end up sleeping rough. They might be only 40 but their lives are effectively over.”
A second chance rests on finding a site for the Urban Village. Talks are under way for a site thought to be on the eastern edge of the City. Details are under wraps, but Ghosh is hopeful. If negotiations fail, she says: “We’re not fussy. We’ll take old, new, high-rise, low-rise, a building that needs a lot of work, a building that doesn’t need much, a warehouse, a hospital, a factory, a block of flats, a site alone.”
Obviously the premises have to be affordable and large enough to create 300 to 400 one-bedroom units of around 400 sq ft each and located in an inner city mixed area with good public transport. “Somewhere active and buzzy,” Ghosh says. “If you’re trying to challenge people’s isolation you want them to find something going on when they step outside their front door. It’s no good sticking them at the end of a sedate residential street.”
A substantial amount of revenue has already been raised; English Partnerships has pledged £10m, the Housing Corporation another £20m. A couple of big names in the private sector are already helping - JP Morgan, for example, is paying Sandor’s salary, City lawyers Freshfields are doing all the legal work pro bono - and Crisis hopes more will come on board.
Ghosh argues that there is a certain amount of economic self-interest to be served. Each tenant in the American scheme is subsidised to the tune of $13,000 a year - a bargain, Common Ground always points out, compared with $20,000 in a shelter; $60,000 in a jail and $113,000 in a psychiatric hospital.
