Press
Read recent media coverage of Community Solutions’ work to strengthen communities to end homelessness. For press inquiries, contact Jake Maguire at (347) 266-0175.
Rosanne Haggerty believes that by walking the streets of a neighborhood and meeting homeless people one by one, she builds the foundation to help them find homes.
Four years ago, expecting her second child and behind in her bills, Rosalind Magwood found herself facing eviction from her apartment in a public housing complex in Brooklyn's Brownsville. Desperate to avoid ending up in a homeless shelter, she turned to the Brownsville Partnership, which quickly assigned her a case worker and a lawyer, and sent her to a financial literacy class. Today, the 40-year-old mother of four is paid up on all her bills, has a steady job and lives in a larger apartment in the same complex.
A year after Rosanne Haggerty won a 2001 MacArthur “genius grant,” Amherst magazine wrote about her nonprofit Common Ground, which had transformed the Times Square Hotel in New York City from a rat-infested “dumping ground for the homeless” into a model of subsidized “permanent supportive housing,” with health care and job training services on-site—as well as roof gardens and exercise rooms.
The benefit of writing a column about solutions is that it provides an alternative lens through which to view the world. The daily news tends to be dominated by daunting challenges (unemployment, climate change, the polarization of Congress) and flashpoint events (the killing of Osama bin Laden, the tsunami in Japan, the Penn State scandal). These stories are vital to cover. However, people often come away from the news with a lot more information about problems than about how society is dealing with them.
During the 1980s, those of us who served as pastors of urban churches witnessed a rapidly growing number of people living on the streets. At the same time, it became harder to help people get help. Many of us, in our frustration, began advocating for more shelters to help get people off of the street.In Philadelphia where I was a pastor at the time, whenever there were hearings or meetings, Roy Leeds always seemed to show up. Roy was a homeless veteran who lived in shelters.
When people give, they want to know they are making a difference. So here are some tough-minded programs we’ve written about since Fixes began in October 2010, that make particularly good use of charitable dollars. Like all the ideas we’ve highlighted in Fixes, they are proven to work. All of them spend a relatively small amount now to create huge savings down the road. But these are also programs where a little bit of money can make a huge difference...
Out of work for more than two decades, my uncle Tom, a Vietnam veteran whom I idolized as a kid, somehow made ends meet. Our family was never quite sure how, and we were too polite to ask. Over a cryptic phone call with my mom one gray fall day, Tom divulged that he was severely in debt. Creditors were calling him constantly, leading to paranoia and depression. This uncle, with whom we shot hoops and played catch, rapidly declined into a shell of his former self.
BROWNSVILLE — Building on a session on public housing at the recent Municipal Art Society (MAS) Summit for New York City, the MAS is launching “The Brownsville Revitalization Initiative” in partnership with Rosanne Haggerty and her colleagues at Community Solutions.The goal is to look at the challenges and opportunities in Brownsville’s under-developed asset of public housing.The two organizations have selected Brownsville because it has the highest concentration of public housing units in the city.
Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions made a presentation at the Municipal Arts Society Summit in October that recast the troubled Brownsville public housing in Brooklyn as a major public asset. Rethinking the housing block, Haggerty proposed a surgical approach that preserves original buildings and emphasizes breaking up the superblock with through-traffic streets, integrated urban agriculture, ground floor retail, and the incorporation of social services—all without displacing a single resident.
With the return of American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s expected that there will be a surge in the number of homeless veterans.“I don’t think we’re ready for the influx of veterans that is coming," Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless told me. "The drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will put a heavy strain on the facilities of the nation and New York. We’ll be dealing with thousands of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. There will be a great need for affordable housing and for other psychiatric services.”
