The NYPD Raided A Bronx Homeless Encampment—Now What?

On a Wednesday in early September, the NYPD and Mayor Bill de Blasio converged on a homeless encampment in the Bronx, one of 80 similar encampments across the city targeted by the administration.

The dwelling, a known shooting gallery along a span of abandoned railroad tracks tunneled under St. Ann’s Avenue, was dotted with dirty mattresses and used needles.

“We don't accept encampments of homeless people in this city,” de Blasio said, as police filled dump trucks with trash and cardboard tents pieced together with duct tape. In anticipation of the raid, the city had reserved ten beds in a nearby shelter, but most of the camp’s residents fled before the mayor’s visit.

Efrain “Tanaka” Pagán, 46, was one of those residents until about five months ago. He lived in this squalid tunnel—known to its inhabitants as “The Hole”—for almost 20 years.

“Everyone is scattered around, sleeping in parks and on benches,” Pagán said as he stood on the corner of St. Mary’s Park, where many drug users who used to frequent The Hole hang out. “They said they had ten beds, but psh,” he scoffed. “You need more than ten beds. You need a building.”

Pagán said he first tried heroin at age ten, in Puerto Rico. “My family has disowned me because I get high,” he said.

He washes bikes and collects cans to make money, which he uses to buy anywhere from 10 to 18 bags of heroin daily—an addiction that costs around $100 to $180 every day.

In a video taken during the cleanup by the New York Daily News, the mayor said the encampment had been around since 2007. Pagán’s account pegs The Hole’s origins much earlier. When he first moved there in 1996, he said it had been established for several years, but was different from the community drug den the city just cleaned out—less crowded and more peaceful.

Pagán wished the cops hadn’t taken the belongings of those in The Hole, but he’s not mad they emptied it.

“There’s a school across the street,” he said. “We were doing a lot of crazy stuff in front of kids in school. People were breaking windows. It was good they shut it down, put it that way.”

Nearby business owner and Bronx-bred tax preparer Bob Muller, 68, remembers when the underpass was a meat and fish market in the ‘60s called Holgan’s Alley. But even then the area was rife with illicit deals and drug activity, according to Muller, who is a retired cop.

“It was bad back then, so they moved the market. The buildings came down in the early ‘70s. It’s been a shooting gallery for 40 years,” he said, peering out from his tiny shop across from the empty lot.

Eventually, the city took notice. In 2006, a similar cleanup was conducted, according to Ed Manchess, director of Boom!Health, a nonprofit harm reduction center that’s a 15-minute walk from The Hole.

Currently The Hole and its adjacent lots are vacant—the city has made them difficult to access by erecting a double layer of chain-link fences.

As was the case in 2006, Manchess predicts the area won’t stay vacant for long. “Boarding it up actually makes it more attractive to users,” he said, “because it makes it more secure.”

Based on city records, the vacant lots surrounding the tunneled encampment were originally owned by the City of New York in the 1970s. From there, one of the parcels was passed around, mostly to various railway companies, through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. In 1994, IBM employee and railroad buff Richard Coller purchased the lot as a part of a 19-parcel deal at an auction.

“At that time, the city was making noise about upgrading that part of the Bronx,” said Coller, a Poughkeepsie resident. He never actually saw the land, and sold it to a California speculator in 1997.

In 2006, right before the housing market crash, that lot was scooped up by South Bronx Revitalization, Inc., owned by 36-year-old real estate developer Joshua Dardashtian.

Dardashtian has a history of flipping homes in the Bronx. He said that the actual area of the encampment is owned by the city, and that they have plans to fill in the tunnel so it no longer has to be policed.

As for his land, a 669-square foot area bordering the street, Dardashtian is tight-lipped. Other lots that encompass the area are owned by the New York Police Department, and have been in the City’s hands since the ‘70s. A Community Affairs Officer from the 40th Precinct said there have been rumors for years about the plot being the future home of a new station house.

Dardashtian all but confirmed it—he predicts that the new NYPD 40th Precinct building will break ground there in the next seven years.

A block away from The Hole, in front of the Auto Zone on St. Ann’s Avenue, another former encampment resident worked on a customer’s beat-up Toyota Camry. His name is Osvaldo Lopez, but he goes by “Connecticut.”

Lopez, 43, constructed his own hut in the encampment. It was destroyed when the city workers came through with a bulldozer. Lopez said that he got a heads up that the police were on their way because the Daily News came the day before to take pictures.

Since the cleanup, Lopez has stayed “here and there,” but eventually took one of the ten offered beds at BronxWorks, a nearby temporary shelter. “It’s better there. You can stay there for a while.”

Lopez, who is originally from Puerto Rico, described how police often wake up the homeless if they are sleeping in public and ask them to leave. The Hole, he said, was a respite from that.

“Some other people went with me down there, but then they went back,” he said, adding that he wished the city had handled things differently.

“It wasn’t fair. They know that we don’t have anywhere to stay. I know there was a lot of stuff going on in there, but people stay there for a reason.”

Sammy Sanchez is a former addict turned outreach worker who hits the streets of the South Bronx almost every day as a recovery support peer at Boom!Health.

Sanchez seeks out drug addicts, the homeless, the poverty-stricken and those struggling with health issues like HIV and Hepatitis to let them know about services Boom!Health provides—showers, HIV and Hepatitis C testing, counseling, clean needles for injecting and a place to wash clothes—in the hopes that getting them in the door will be the first step in getting them off drugs and the streets.

Sanchez is uniquely qualified for this job, because he used to be one of those people. A former addict who lived in The Hole for four months, he’s been clean for two years.

"I used to call that place the pits of Hell,” said Sanchez. “Who wants to be in a pit where you have to eat, sleep and shit there? I thank God that I got out.”

The recent crackdown on encampments has thrown the lack of adequate housing into sharp relief, said Manchess, a longtime advocate for the homeless. He believes that the key to keeping encampments from spreading is providing half-way houses and safe injection facilities (SIF).

SIFs provide a clean, private space to inject, while offering health services and information about ending drug use.

Vancouver, once the home to the highest number of reported HIV infection among injection drug users in the world, has maintained a SIF facility since 2003. In the first year, fatal overdoses dropped by 35 percent. New cases of HIV have also steadily declined in the area.

Manchess dreams of opening a SIF in the South Bronx, one of the leading districts for both HIV deaths [PDF] and Hepatitis C cases [PDF].

“If we had a place for them to go that was medically supervised it would be safer,” he said. “All of the equipment would be disposed of properly. While we establish a rapport and trust, we counsel on reduction use.”

A former user himself and recovery professional for over 20 years, Manchess said that the shutdown of the encampment won’t solve the underlying problem.

“There are plenty of highways in the Bronx,” he shrugged, suggesting that users will find another underpass to inject under. “You can’t do this from a police level.”

Emily Woodruff is a freelance writer/reporter living in New York City and pursuing a Master's degree at Columbia Journalism School.