By Walter Elliott
NEWARK – It is not just the advent of winter that is bringing a chill in the air to those who regularly feed the poor, needy and homeless around Newark Penn Station this holiday season.
Those who distribute prepared food – from the NYC Rescue Van on Friday nights to a father and daughter serving coffee from their car’s tailgate Saturday mornings – are asking themselves whether to continue should they be required to pay a City of Newark permit.
“The City of Newark now requires a Food Handlers Permit for any public food distribution to the homeless,” declares a newarknj.gov website page Dec. 20. Volunteers must be certified in food safety by completing a food handlers course.”
The page then gives a Newark Department of Health and Community Wellness phone number and three private or association websites to schedule or access the said classes. The permit, pending successful course completion, is listed at $10 and is good for three years.
The permit has been on the books since 1966 – when its fee was $5.
Newark joins Englewood, Hillsborough, Lyndhurst, Paterson, Rutherford, Teaneck and Wayne in requiring permits for all food handlers. The original permit – which also bans unpermitted public distribution of candy and gum – goes back to 1966 with a $5 fee.
The Dec. 14 food permit revision is either a clarification or a rollback of a Nov. 19 “public feeding letter” sent to “Residents, Advocates and Business Owners” by “City Homelessness Czar” Sakinah Hoyte.
Hoyte’s letter had declared that the city “will prohibit the feeding of residents without addresses in Penn Station, the area surrounding Penn Station, and all of our city parks.”
The current chill, while not as deep as Nov. 19, was being felt by food distributors and the hungry as late as last weekend and as early as last summer.
Angels on a Wing, for example, had set up along the southern sidewalk of Edison Place, across from Peter Francisco Park, 7 a.m. Dec. 19. The Newark-based organization used to serve some 30 recipients along the park’s west, or Railroad Place, side until Dec. 12. A volunteer told “Local Talk” that Newark police officers told them they could not stay there unless they want to get ticketed.
Witnesses have said that Amtrak and NJTransit police have recently waved back those who want to deliver food to the homeless within Penn Station.
Police have used metal barricade sawhorses to fence off areas within and outside of the station on the heels of the state reopening smaller enclosed train and bus waiting rooms.
The fencing off includes Mother Cabrini Park – which had been off-limits to servers long before the COVID pandemic. Bridges Outreach, of Summit, used to distribute alongside the park’s Ferry Street side mid-Saturday mornings before eventually moving uphill to Court Street by St. James AME Church.
Baraka issued his Dec. 14 letter explaining that the city wants individuals and organizations who give food to the needy and/or homeless to coordinate food distribution with the 55 soup kitchens and food pantries and 23 homeless shelters among the five wards.
“The permit requirement ensures the safe handling and distribution of food for the protection of the consumers, including those exposed to homelessness,” said Baraka’s statement. “Every City public celebration, street fair and Heritage Day requires food vendors to file for such permits. The only difference is the volunteer groups feeding the homeless get their permits for free.”
The mayor added that the permits help the city track who served the food should an address-less person gets sick.
“There are people who feed the homeless who don’t have good intentions,” Baraka told NJ Spotlight and WCBS Channel 2 News after a Dec. 14 event. “People don’t see it from that perspective. There are homeless people that get sick, people who have given homeless fentanyl.”
A request to the Mayor, via his Public Information Office, on details of the said fentanyl-laced-food incident was not returned as of 11 a.m. Dec. 21.
Dispersing the homeless and their servers to designated sites away from Penn Station, to current Baraka Administration thinking, would allow the homeless access to shelters, health resources and the like in a more structured setting than on the street.
Some of those more established places – like St. John’s Barbara Moran Soup Kitchen downtown, The Dutch Reformed Church’s Bessie Green Community by Washington Park or St. Ann’s on the West Side – have had to serve take out and/or al fresco.
An Aetna Medicare Solutions representative had set up her pop-up tent on St. John’s parking lot during Dec. 18’s lunch hour.
Back at Peter Francisco Park Dec. 18, A NYC Rescue Van member was giving out Bridges’ Halsey Street address to those who want to get on a waiting list for gain residency at Newark’s Hope Village.
Newark Hope Village is a city project, on a former Newark Avenue DPW lot, where shipping containers have been converted to housing. That, the conversion of the former Miller Street School to a 166-bed shelter and the temporary housing and feeding the homeless in hotels during the 2020 COVID pandemic’s height are among the efforts the mayor outlined Dec. 14.
Baraka and Hoyte’s announcement outreach, however, is only as good as their contact list.
Angels on a Wing’s Jessica Perez and Regina Deavaula, of Solidarity Path Project, told “Local Talk” Sunday morning that they never received such a letter from City Hall – but had learned through the grapevine.
“I went to City Hall, the Mayor wasn’t there but his secretary was,” said Deavaula through an interpreter. “The secretary sent me to the health office. The health office sent me somewhere else. No one knows what they’re doing.”
Deavaula said that Solidarity started in 2019 as a service branch to their Ironbound Bible study group. Solidarity has a nonprofit tax certificate.
The Baraka Administration has two Municipal Council meetings next month to codify a path to permit. “Local Talk” wonders whether less frequent groups or individuals will fall prey to police ticketing for the lack of knowledge.
There is a Sikh temple, for example, which distributes from its Jersey City kitchen fresh vegetarian food one Tuesday a month.
Some readers may hear a familiar ring to City Hall’s attempt to redistribute the homeless and their servers.
East Ward Councilman Augusto Amador had called for enforcing the food handlers permit in 2019. Amador’s ward includes the Ironbound and Penn Station.
Amador and Ironbound Business Improvement District Executive Director Seth Grossman, then and now, cited how providers would leave containers, leftover food and other trash along the park’s sidewalks.
“What constitutes a good neighbor,” said Grossman Dec. 14, “is a person who is safe, clean and is considerate of each other.”
“Local Talk noticed Angels and Solidarity, among others, keeping refuse and discarded items bagged for placement next to city trash cans.
“Local Talk” also wonders if recent redevelopment is part of the push to disperse from the Penn Station neighborhood.
One can look east and see a 10-story residential building going up by the old CNJ Newark Branch railroad track site. The city has allowed overlapping “inclusionary” and special development zones in 2019.
NJDOT and NJTransit, earlier this year, awarded Newark its first Transit Village zone. That area runs from Broad and Market streets east – into Penn Station.
NJTransit and the state, as of Aug. 27, have forwarded $190 million towards renovating Newark Penn Station. The 85-year-old station is owned by Amtrak.
The food providers, applying Marketing 101’s “Find a need a fill it” slogan, have focused on the Penn Station neighborhood because that is where the homeless have been visibly concentrated.
Newark, pop. 311,000 by the 2020 US Census, has been consistently measured as having the bulk of Essex County’s homeless.
The Monarch Housing Group advocacy organization counted an average 1,483 homeless people from among 10 Essex County municipalities Jan. 26. New Jersey’s largest city had 1,274 – or 85.9 percent of the county’s homeless.
Newark also scored 86 percent (1,959 of 2,167) in 2020 and 87 percent (1,927 of 2,214) in 2019.
Newark proportionally scored high in unsheltered homeless those three years.
There were 363 people on Newark streets Jan. 26 for 67.7 percent of the county’s unsheltered. There were 349, or 85 percent in 2020 and 286, or 85 percent in 2019.
“Local Talk” has not immediately found statistics to compare Penn Station area homeless to available shelter bed in Newark. Newark Penn’s vast size, access to restrooms and being a major transportation hub may account for its volume of homeless more than for NJTransit’s North Broad Street station some 1.5 miles northwest. (There are no immediate stats for those “sheltering” at Newark Liberty International Airport.)
It is believed that the homeless gather downtown and around Newark Penn for nearby social services. More such services then set up shop downtown because that is where the homeless are. This chicken and egg situation triggers a momentum of its own.
