Steven Boone

On making a move from the City to the South. Steven Boone and other New Yorkers have headed to Warner Robins, Georgia:

“Like so many young black parents, she moved south not just to provide her children with a more secure environment but also to escape the punishing New York rents. In Warner Robins, entire homes in quiet areas rent for less than a single room in Bed Stuy. Townhouses on well-kept complexes, complete with pool and 24-hour gym access, go for as little as $450 a month and rarely higher than $850. In Macon, the college town next door (and geographically the true dead center of Georgia), gorgeous historic homes rent for as low as $400 a month and often no more than $650. (The local rumor is that, as lovely as the homes are, the ghosts in them insure frequent turnaround. Cool.)

“This new wave of African-Americans heading south has been called the Second Great Migration or the Reverse Migration, in contrast to last century’s black exodus from a segregated, hostile South to opportunities in the North.”

We had four options: join Ready Willing and Able’s program, which prepared men to become street sweepers and janitors; sign up for a Bloomberg administration program which presents participants with a one-way ticket out of town, so long as the applicants could provide a contact person in the destination city who would agree to host them; enter the city’s shelter system, which the liaison accurately portrayed as a horror show, with gang-and-drug-infested death traps like Wards Island (Said one of my brethren, “Yo, I was at Wards Island one night, woke up and a dude was laying there dead, all cut the fuck up.”); or hop in the van with him to tour Brooklyn’s three-quarter sober houses, which were private residences that sounded a lot more promising than a shelter.

It’s a secret because homelessness is the one condition they find shameful. An inner-city hustler’s entire life is devoted to either rising above his station or projecting the illusion of same. So when the drug abuse or prison term or unemployability send him into the street, he needs a hiding place. Homeless shelters are a place for him to hide his shame. What I discovered at various shelters in New York City is that they are also the place where hustling goes into overdrive.