The New York Times’ Sarah Maslin Nir—along with photos by Victor J. Blue—has put together a moving profile of a small business owner in Brooklyn, NY, who has been giving shelter to the homeless, in the basement of his bodega, for well over a decade. In the city that doesn’t sleep, everyone needs to rest some times and for tens of thousands that means finding someplace in a subway, in a park, on the street, in an alleyway. Candido Arcángel has housed around 6 people a night in his likely illegal dwelling for 14 years now.
The shop is zoned for commercial use, and the basement does not have the required certificate of occupancy to permit people to live there. Mr. Arcángel has not made the necessary applications to the Department of Buildings to convert it into habitable space, which would require an inspection to determine if it is safe to do so.
Why do this?
The absence of permits has not deterred Mr. Arcángel, who says his reasoning for opening his basement to the homeless is simple. “Because they don’t have,” he said. “And I do.”
The rules are relatively simple. No one staying in the shelter can return after 10 PM (though they can leave whenever they like) until Arcángel returns to open his shop in the morning at 8 AM. He provides electricity and a place to stay. The accommodations are crude—it’s a basement—but they are more than nothing; and the people staying there usually have nothing.
Mr. Arcángel grew up in the Dominican Republic, with dreams of becoming a baseball player. He played professionally on a Venezuelan team for one year, he said, before a shoulder injury ended his career and he left for America in 1989. It was his experience as a boy playing on teams — where children from working-class families like himself played alongside street children — that showed him how providing some structure, even in the form of uniforms, bats and gloves, transformed his teammates’ lives.
“These youths that were lost, you have to find them, and bring them in, so they could love God,” he said. “This is not a personal mission; it’s a mission for the good of society.”
Over the past few years, New York City, one of the richest cities in the world, where rents continue to skyrocket, has seen the most paternalistic of attempts at dealing with the homeless problem while pretending that income inequality isn’t at the root. Coalition for the Homeless puts the number of homeless living in NYC above 60,000. But that number is simply people accounted for in the New York City municipal shelter system. The majority of that 60,000 number are families, and that means that there are likely tens of thousands more single individuals searching for the kindness that people like Mr. Arcángel provides.