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What Life Looks Like For One Of 3,600 Homeless People Living On NYC Streets
By
Mirela Iverac
Published Mar 16, 2020
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Amy Pearl / Gothamist
By
Mirela Iverac
Published Mar 16, 2020
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On a recent Saturday evening, Peter Malvan approached a group of homeless men sitting on the steps of a church in midtown Manhattan.
“Good evening, y’all,” he said. “The Midnight Run is here.”
Midnight Run is a non-profit that gives out food, clothes, and toiletries nearly every day to New Yorkers living on the street. Malvan serves as the group’s vice president—a volunteer position—and is well-known by the group’s clients. As he stopped by different spots in Midtown where the homeless congregate, a woman approached him to give him a hug, while another one asked him to find a coat of the right size for her.
“I’ve gotten to know people,” he said.
Malvan, 61, five-feet-eight with a trimmed moustache and gray hair, handled the requests with his usual calm.
“I know Peter for a hundred years,” said Al Pagan, who still comes to Midnight Run drop-offs, even though he’s no longer homeless. “He's always trying to help somebody.”
Eight other people were helping the homeless that night, but Malvan was the only one who was homeless himself. After volunteering, he made his way to his home: the steps of a luxury clothing store just off Fifth Avenue.
Malvan is one of around 3,600 people who live on New York City’s streets. Far more homeless New Yorkers—58,000—live in shelters. But those on the street have become a highly visible flashpoint in the debate over how the city treats some of its most vulnerable residents. Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed to get people who have been living on the street for long periods of time and who reject traditional shelters housed within five years. That goal requires building more housing, including some that would need to meet very specific criteria. Some chronically homeless people, like Malvan, have developed sophisticated strategies to survive on the street, and finding the right type of accomodation they will accept can be challenging.
At night, when he gets ready to go to bed, Malvan follows a routine. He first looks for a few pieces of cardboard on Fifth Avenue and puts his sleeping bag on top of it.
“It's like I create a bed,” he says.
Then he looks for a cup, avoiding one trash can where there are a lot of rats. He finds a venti Starbucks cup that he’ll use for restroom breaks during the night.
Malvan usually sleeps in his pants and shirt and uses his jackets as a pillow. Despite the cold, he said he mostly sleeps soundly.
Listen to reporter Mirela Iverac's story on WNYC:
On a recent morning, the only thing visible from underneath the dandelion-patterned comforter Malvan wrapped himself in was an orange hood. After he got up, he quickly put on his shoes and socks. Malvan said homelessness happens on the clock that starts as soon as he wakes up because he needs to leave before the store and other businesses open.
He often gets breakfast and other meals at churches and synagogues across the city and uses it as a chance to socialize. Recently, however, he’s lost these opportunities to catch up with his peers because fears of the new coronavirus have prompted most religious institutions to cancel their meals.
In the morning, Malvan also goes to Starbucks to charge his phone and orders coffee with three sugars, sprinkling vanilla and chocolate powder on top.
He gets $1,600 a month in social security benefits because of his mental health condition. (He has been diagnosed with depression and PTSD.) He says he can’t afford an apartment and he doesn’t want roommates, but he’s figured out a way to get some of his needs met. He spends $25 a year on a membership to city-run recreation centers so he can take a shower every day.
“Looking homeless makes you feel homeless,” he says. “It has an effect on you psychologically because people look at you like you're dirt.”
At the rec center, Malvan “pampers” himself, taking time to shower, put on his favorite cologne, Cuba, and lotion that helps with dry skin. Afterwards, he sometimes jumps on a bus to go to a storage facility in East Harlem. For around $200 a month, Malvan gets two five-foot-by-five-foot units where he keeps his possessions from what he calls his “other life”—the time when he worked—clothing from Burberry, suits, fabric he bought to make summer suits.
Peter's storage unit in East Harlem
Mirela Iverac / WNYC
A few months ago, Malvan had a fantasy about that kind of life again when he saw blue fashion sneakers in the window of the store in front of which he sleeps.
“Someday, you’ll have a home and you can run around in those sneakers,” he said, laughing. “I don’t know if regular people do—but homeless people—we have fantasies.”
About 11 miles from the spot where he sleeps now, Malvan grew up in a middle-class household in Corona, Queens. He shared a firebrick house with his dad, mom and sister. There was a lot he liked about growing up in this neighborhood: his school, P.S. 143.; the neighborhood grocery store where he bought Coke for himself and Pepsi for his sister; a quick lesson in playing the trumpet that he got one day from the legendary Louis Armstrong, who lived close by.
“He showed me … you have to puff the cheeks out and blow,” he said one day recently, when he showed a reporter the old neighborhood.
Back then Malvan was a quiet and shy teenager. These days he loves to talk. But standing in front of his former home, he didn’t have much to say.
“There's good times, bad times,” he mused.
The bad times were in the 1980s, when his mother and, later, his father died.
“I got really, really, really, really, really depressed,” he said.
Peter stands outside his family's old home in Corona.
Mirela Iverac / WNYC
He said he didn’t get any money after his sister decided to sell the house for $170,000. In the summer of 1988, he moved out with a plan to come back the following winter.
“I was going to wait for winter and then come and lie down,” he said. “I’d wake up … with my dog and my parents. I wanted to be with the people that I loved.”
That never happened. He briefly stayed with his grandmother, but then left her house and became homeless. He slept in the subway and then moved onto Battery Park.
“I climbed into the gun ports,” he said. “That's where I would sleep.”
After about three years on the street he got a lucky break—a job working with homeless men in a drop-in center in Hell’s Kitchen. Soon after he got a job at another drop-in center called John Heuss House. Gregory Shinn, who was the director of social services at the center, said Malvan was “hard working,” and “empathetic” and able to help people break the cycle of homelessness because he went through the same thing.
“Peter was awesome,” Shinn said. “He had the best attitude.”
For about two decades Malvan held various jobs and had a roof over his head, at one point renting his own studio in Newark. But after a dispute with an employer, he lost his job and again became homeless in 2012. (WNYC/Gothamist was unable to verify the nature of the dispute but did confirm the other details of his work history with former employers.)
“I ended up on 23rd Street and FDR,” he said. “I was depressed.”
The city eventually placed him in a safe haven. Unlike traditional shelters, safe havens have fewer rules and more privacy. Malvan liked it, but he was supposed to move to supportive housing – a permanent apartment in a building with onsite services for people with mental health challenges. But Malvan had a problem with that arrangement.
“They sent me to a place where they told me, ‘We have to take your medication and monitor it for 90 days,’” Malvan said in an interview.
He didn’t want to live under such close supervision, seeing the place as better suited for people with more serious mental health issues. He turned down the offer and said he was told to pack up his stuff. (Breaking Ground, the non-profit that found Malvan supportive housing, declined to comment, citing confidentiality.) Malvan’s best friend, Theodore Mitchell, helped him move out.
Peter wrapped up in his blanket on the stoop outside the boutique in midtown Manhattan.
Mirela Iverac / WNYC
“They put him in the street. Just kicked him out,” Mitchell said. “No remorse, no nothing, felt nothing, put him in the street and they never looked back.”
Mitchell had also been homeless for 15 years. Malvan met him when he was an outreach worker and helped Mitchell get into housing. They stayed in touch and became friends. And then, years later, the roles got reversed.
“He's a proud dude,” Mitchell said of his friend. “When it was cold, I'll be like, ‘Peter, come over to my house.’ Peter’s like, ‘I'm all right. I got it.’”
But living on the street has serious consequences. Last fiscal year, 148 unsheltered people died in New York City, according to official statistics. In October, four men were killed while living on the streets of Chinatown. Despite the risks, Daniel Farrell, a clinical social worker, said homeless people manage to survive and even thrive while living on the street. It’s not always an easy decision to accept an offer of housing.
“‘I have this choice to make. Do I want to go in this place?’” Farrell said. “‘It has lots of restrictions. Or do I want to stay on the street where I feel like I can be really free and be in this familiar environment.’”
Malvan’s entered multiple lotteries for affordable housing but hasn’t gotten a place. He has specific requirements: he wants a one-bedroom apartment for himself, in a new building in Manhattan. He once took himself out of the running for an apartment near the World Trade Center because of the trauma he experienced during 9/11. Malvan said he’s unwilling to compromise and knows what he'll do if he doesn’t get what he’s looking for.
“Then I’d probably stay on the street until it's time for me to go in a nursing home,” he said.
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Mirela Iverac
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