Hairdressers dole out blankets to homeless New Yorkers

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Colette Morales, a hair stylist at Who Does Your Hair? in Bellmore, was walking down 5th Avenue in Manhattan on Jan. 9 when she saw a homeless man wearing lightweight pants curled up into a ball. This man planned to stay warm at a McDonald’s that night, when the temperature cooled to 15 degrees.

“If he keeps buying coffee, they can’t throw him out,” said Morales.

The very next day Morales posted on Facebook that she would collect blankets until Jan. 15 to warm those who are living on the streets of New York City. She immediately received several responses, and her first donation by 4 p.m. Her co-worker, Lauren Lupola, also shared the message and immediately offered her assistance.

“Lauren and I are very similar in that we have an abundance of compassion for people and we connect on that level tremendously,” said Morales.

On Jan. 15, the two women drove into New York City and personally handed out the blankets to anyone they saw sleeping on the streets.

“A little interaction, you know? I think it’s a big thing that’ll mean a lot to them instead of just going to the shelter and picking it out,” said Lupola last week, before the trip.

If people would like to donate blankets, but could make it to the salon in time, Morales and Lupola are willing to extend the deadline for drop-offs.

“People just want so badly to be a part [of this], and I have no problem taking another trip in, but the sooner we can get them in there the better,” said Morales.

The winter weather will make these blankets necessary. In fact, many street homeless people suffer from hypothermia.

“Obviously homelessness does have an inherent health risk year-round, but those risks are amplified in the winter when you have frigid temperatures or snow or sleet,” said Jacquelyn Simone, a policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless.

According to New York City Open Data, in 2014 there were 3,111 people sleeping on the streets in New York City. But Simone believes that there are more street homeless than are being recorded.

“The city says there are about 3,000 sleeping on the street each night, but we think it may be double that because their methodology isn’t accurate,” Simone said, citing the fact that the the city’s count does not include people who are sleeping in bank vestibules or inside other public buildings.

“It’s inherently a very difficult population to quantify because as a community they try to avoid the count,” she said.

New Yorkers are guaranteed a right to shelter ever since the 1981 state Supreme Court decision Callahan v. Carey. But not everybody takes advantage of this right, either because they do not like the rules and regulations they would have to face at a shelter or because they do not like the lack of privacy in these shelters.

“In a room with a lot of other people, for some who have a mental illness, that may be a frightening experience,” said Simone.

The Coalition for the Homeless has a solution, however. It recommends the building of more supportive housing units, which would have fewer regulations than a homeless shelter.

City and state officials agree that supportive housing units are necessary. In November 2015, Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced that 15,000 units of supportive housing units would be built over 15 years and on Jan. 13, 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would be creating 20,000 units over the next 15 years. Unfortunately, the money has not yet been released to fund these 35,000 housing units.

In the meantime, however, Morales and Lupola are doing their part to keep the street homeless warm.