Building for a Better Future
On October 1st, a bright sunny morning in New York, a man named Julius Graham randomly stabbed five people in Riverside Park with a pair of scissors. No one was killed, but a father was seriously wounded while defending his 18-month-old son. There was no apparent motive for the attack and little is known about Mr. Graham other than he arrived in New York a year ago and was living in a homeless shelter in the Bronx, sleeping on a cot in a communal room with nearly 100 other men. Mr. Graham obviously has some serious problems, and quite possibly had been using drugs. We do know he was disconnected from family and community, and not accessing any mental health services. He will probably end up in prison for his awful deed, costing taxpayers $60,000 plus per year.
Contrast this terror to our celebration on October 2nd of the opening of Community Access’ Vyse Avenue Apartments, supportive housing in the Bronx for 64 adults living with psychiatric disabilities. All the tenants at Vyse Apartments were previously living in state psych hospitals or in the city’s shelter system for many years. Now they have a home in a beautiful building with on-site support services, 24-hour front-desk coverage, exercise and computer rooms, an outdoor patio and garden, and a community room that allows for many activities so that no one is ever isolated or alone. Vyse Apartments costs a fraction of what we pay for a state hospital, prison or shelter. Imagine if Mr. Graham had been living here instead of a homeless shelter, perhaps the horror in the park would have been prevented.
For almost 40 years, Community Access has been committed to providing housing, services and recovery programs as an alternative to hospitals, shelters and jails for people living with mental illness. New York has 55,000 people in homeless shelters each night, half of whom have serious psychiatric disabilities and need our help—not just a cot and a meal, but a home and a community. To help meet this need, we intend to build another 1,000 units of supportive housing, adding to our current stock of 1,100.
In addition to housing, we are also developing new treatment models that we know are effective, like the Respite Center we opened in January, offering people in an emotional crisis a lower-cost, and often more effective alternative, to an inpatient psychiatric bed. And to help revolutionize the workforce, we will be expanding our award-winning Howie the Harp Peer Advocacy Program to new sites, allowing us to train more people to be peer health care navigators, counselors and outreach workers: a proven “best practice” in health care system reform.
Finally, we’re advocating to make our public institutions more responsive to people with mental illness. Through the Communities for Crisis Intervention Teams coalition (CCIT-NYC), we are asking that the NYPD have trained specialists available when responding to 911 “emotionally disturbed person” calls, like in 2,700 other communities across the nation. Please read this Epoch Times article on last week’s CCIT-NYC press conference on the steps of City Hall.
Thank you again for your support of Community Access and for sharing in the solutions that make New York a more humane and livable city for all.
