In one of New York City’s large family homeless shelters, we saw a gaunt, young mother holding her 4-day-old baby who lay limp in her arms. With sunken eyes, the mother watched a YouTube video about mixing formula, while her own mother tried to coach her on the telephone. The young mother told us she had eaten only a single McDonald’s hamburger in the past three days.
This was just one of the more than 12,000 families in a city shelter system that is built on a scale not imagined elsewhere. Almost 70% of the city's homeless are now families; more than half of the 22,000 children are below age six. Lack of affordable housing has ballooned the average shelter stay past 400 nights. One family we talked with had been in shelter for more than three years.
[For more of this story, written by Ellen Bassuk, go to http://www.nydailynews.com/opi...rs-article-1.3298301]
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