Memorial Day means soup kitchen for far too many vets

Volume 1, Number 37 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | June 1 - 7, 2007

Chelsea Now photo courtesy of the Church of the Holy Apostles

Vets were the largest group attending the Church of the Holy Apostles soup kitchen this Memorial Day.

By Chris Lombardi

Chelsea glowed on Memorial Day 2007. The weather was near-perfect, the air cleared by a morning storm. The mood on the streets was a sweet mix of festive and solemn. And unlike elsewhere in the city, where the day was marked by parades and memorials, the only sign of our nation’s wars was the long line for a free lunch at the Church of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen.

Michael Peterson, a sixtysomething Special Forces veteran, laughed when asked why he joined the Army in 1968. “My family, my brothers, they’re all Marines,” he said. “But me—I can’t swim!” The Army had taught him how, he added, and turned him into a member of Special Forces.

“Too bad,” said a friend and ex-Marine beside him. “You’d be finished eating by now. The Marines teach you to eat, not talk.” And with that, he left Peterson behind to join the food line.

Peterson and his unnamed buddy are just two of the half-million veterans in the nation who, according to studies, are or have recently been homeless. Some of these make their way to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen (HASK), the largest of its kind in Manhattan. The 25-year-old agency that runs the kitchen had its busiest May on record this year, a trend consistent with the pressure experienced by other emergency food programs in the city. But on Memorial Day, it was veterans—ironically—who were among the largest group of the 1,500 clients who came for an afternoon sandwich, veggies, coffee and ice cream.

As with the rest of the estimated 10,000–15,000 homeless or near-homeless veterans in New York City, some of these veterans live on the streets, while others scrape by in temporary housing or shelters. In addition to a hot meal, they can check in with counseling services offered by HASK staff or the Veterans Administration (VA), which until recently visited the agency every week to serve them.

Meanwhile, as the city acts aggressively to stem the number of homeless veterans, developing a new strategy along with the VA, HASK’s advocacy wing continues to press for food-stamp reforms and other measures to try to mitigate the effects of today’s bifurcated economy on low-income people, including veterans.

But it is the Chelsea-based soup kitchen that is the centerpiece of the agency’s efforts. Established in 1982 after clergy at Chelsea’s Church of the Holy Apostles, a landmark Episcopal church founded in 1844, noticed a wave of low-income people knocking on the church door, it has been remained a comforting constant amid the steady change in and rapid gentrification of the neighborhood.

“No one ever thought it would be permanent,” said Reverend Elizabeth Maxwell, HASK’s director of programs and advocacy. Maxwell, who started at HASK in 1989, has watched the soup kitchen’s population increase steadily: HASK is now the largest direct-feeding program among the city’s 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries, serving more than 1,100 meals daily, including the day after the church caught fire in 1990. By its 25th anniversary this fall, HASK will have served 6 million meals.

Chelsea Now photo courtesy of the NYC Chapter of the American Guild of Organists

The Church of the Holy Apostles, at Ninth Avenue and 28th Street in Chelsea

The agency also offers in-house counseling, writing and art workshops, on-site legal and healthcare services in partnership with agencies like Positive Health, the Urban Justice Center and the Veterans Administration’s homeless outreach program, Project TORCH. This Memorial Day, HASK cycled its 1,500 clients through a dining room that holds a maximum of 125 and capping the agency’s busiest May ever, with nearly 27,000 served. They came from all over the city, from shelters like Peter’s Place, from transitional housing and the street. “When people are homeless, where they’re from is kind of a...moveable feast,” said Maxwell.

The increase marked by HASK is consistent with that experienced by other emergency providers, whether they are soup kitchens like HASK or the more common food pantries, which give out weekly or monthly bags of necessities. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH), the 600 food-assistance agencies receiving city funds served a combined average of 898,646 meals a month in 2005. By 2006, that number had increased to 905,586. This past May, the agencies (only half of the total number in the city) served an average of 905,048 meals a month. That number should increase come summer, when it becomes easier for people frequent the pantry or soup kitchen.

Both Maxwell and J.C. Dwyer, of NYCCAH, blame the increase on the rising cost of living and the stagnating incomes of the poorest New Yorkers. “The [federal] welfare grant hasn’t been increased in 10 years,” said Maxwell, who adds that while an increasing number of HASK’s clients work full-time, their low- or even medium-wage jobs have a hard time holding up under the pressure of New York City’s rising cost of living—especially real estate costs.

All of these forces—a lack of affordable housing, declining job opportunities and stagnating wagesóhave particular impact on veterans. According to 2006 figures from the Coalition for the Homeless, approximately 40 percent of homeless men are veterans, even though veterans compose only 34 percent of the general adult male population. And like Peterson, most struggle with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In New York City, only 700 of those living in shelters administered by with the Department of Homeless Services have self-identified as vets, but the aforementioned percentages suggest instead that veterans may compose 14,000 of the 35,071 currently in shelters and about 800 of the 3,755 people known to be living on the streets. And none of these figures include people like Peterson, who now has his own Bronx apartment after HASK helped him secure a housing voucher a few years ago.

The higher percentage made sense to Maxwell and HASK volunteer coordinator Clyde Kuemmerle, who told Chelsea Now that vets are the largest single group he sees.

A no-nonsense man who looks far too young to have been “almost drafted into the [1962] Cuban missile crisis,” as he told Chelsea Now, Kuemmerle has also frequently been the HASK point person for veterans who need help, whether they be Vietnam vets like Peterson or the agency’s numerous clients who served in the first Gulf War. So far, there have been few from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“They [the newer vets] haven’t had time to break down yet,” Kuemmerle said wryly, noting that PTSD takes time to develop.

Kuemmerle said that soon after he arrived at HASK in the mid-1990s, he and Maxwell contacted the Veterans Administration and its outreach program, Project TORCH. HASK soon had a two-way referral relationship with the VA’s Manhattan drop-in center on 31st Street, said Kuemmerle, before that center was closed during a 2003 consolidation.

In addition, he said, “[The VA] used to have these vans, called Eagle I and Eagle II, that would come right into our driveway,” just as HASK’s own counseling van does. The Eagle vans would come once a week and offer immediate referrals and help for clients applying for educational and disability benefits.

Vietnam veteran Peterson was one of the beneficiaries of those vans. He told Chelsea Now on Memorial Day that after seven years with the 101st Airborne from 1968 to 1975, in Da Nang, Okinawa and Germany, he was adrift for many years before being diagnosed with PTSD. After coming to HASK about eight years ago, he was soon hooked up with counseling and legal help. Now he receives disability benefits from the VA, who helped him get a federal Section 8 housing voucher and his own apartment in the Bronx. “This place [HASK] is really great, “ he smiled as he stood up for more food. “Excuse me, I’ll come back in a minute.” (He never returned.)

Not all veterans trust the VA, according to Kuemmerle, who said that he often finds himself cajoling vets to give the VA a try. “They’ll say, ‘They’re not gonna do a damn thing for me,’ but I always encourage them to check it out, saying, ‘How will you know if you don’t try?’” he said.

Kuemmerle also added that recent cutbacks and changes at the federal agency have also had an impact, however. The Eagle van doesn’t come any more, and the VA itself is forced to limit its visits to once a month or less. In addition, changes in eligibility have made matters harder: As the cost of treating veterans from the newest wars rise, veterans from pre-September 11 conflicts are subject to higher fees and even more red tape.

“You gotta dot your T’s and cross your I’s, to get anything,” said James Thatcher, who told Chelsea Now on Memorial Day that he joined the Army in 1982. Honorably discharged after three years in Korea, he now works full time for the U.S. Post Office.

“It’s just hard,” he said, adding that he cycles in and out of the veterans’ shelters such as the Harlem residence run by Black Veterans for Social Justice. He believes that the city has an obligation to help veterans trapped by the current top-down economy, “especially the real estate.”

Some in city government agree. “It’s a disgrace that people who served this country are now going to soup kitchens to survive,” said City Council Veterans Affairs Committee chairman Hiram Montserrate, himself a Gulf War veteran.

Noting that Mayor Bloomberg’s veterans affairs office gets half of its $180 million budget from New York State and spends the other half largely on salaries, Montserrate is now pressing for a $5 billion initiative to create resource centers in every borough for vets seeking help with their complex needs. “The federal government has faileda miserably,” he said. “That’s no excuse for the city not to step up.”

And last December, a joint task force composed of city, federal and state veterans’ service agencies pledged to house 100 veterans in 100 days, and to come up with a strategic plan to end veterans’ homelessness by 2009. That plan is still in development, according to DHS representative Tanya Valle-Batista, who added that the city had surpassed the concrete portion of its promise.

“We reached the goal of placing 100 veterans into permanent housing nearly three weeks ahead of schedule, on March 14,” said Valle-Batista. “By the deadline of March 31, we placed a total of 115 vets in permanent housing.”

Nevertheless, advocates interviewed for this story expressed guarded optimism that city policies were going in the right direction, and conveyed concern that it would take much more to ease the overall crunch on low-income clients. Dwyer of NYCCAH applauded recent moves by the Bloomberg administration to streamline food-stamp applications and allow clients to apply right in the soup kitchens and food pantries that serve them. But both he and Maxwell were critical of Mayor Bloomberg’s decision last year to overrule his own staff and not give able-bodied low-income more than six months to seek work before their food stamps run out. “We need to keep work incentives in place,” Bloomberg told the New York Times last year.

“Other cities, like Chicago, have that waiver,” said Maxwell. “His refusal is completely ideological, and kind of short-sighted.” Then again, she added, that attitude is right in tune with other trends that keep HASK’s dining rooms full.

“The federal government’s priorities have been entirely about the war in Iraq,” Maxwell said. “Meanwhile, low-income people have to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place.”