OFF THE STREET

A journey from homelessness to a room of one's of one's own in New York City.

-  JENNIFER EGAN

Jessica moved into 90 Sands Street, a vast new supportive-housing facility in Brooklyn, on February 15th: a bleak, cloudy morning. The move came not a moment too soon; there had been much upheaval in her life in the previous few weeks, including an assault by her ex-boyfriend and two of his friends that had left her with facial bruises, and an overdose caused by the presence of the animal tranquillizer xylazine in her heroin an honest error, it seemed, on the part of her trusted dealer-for which the forty-two-year-old was rushed to Mount Sinai from the transitional-housing facility where she'd been living for nine months. "I was dead," she told me with characteristic flair, in her strong Southern accent. "When I left in the ambulance, I was dead. They gave me CPR, they took me to the best hospital in Manhattan, and they shocked me in the hospital six times."

Her hospital discharge paper flapped in the breeze on top of one of the many plastic tubs that Jessica, her friend Bill, and her case manager, Carley Medley, hauled from Jessica's transitional-housing room to the van that Medley was driving. (Jessica's name and those of her friends and family have been changed.) Given that Jessica had spent most of the previous seven years living outdoors (with two interludes in jail for probation violations on old drug-related charges), she had amassed a remarkable number of possessions: Barbies and LOL Surprise! Balls, craft kits, scented candles, and an array of cosmetics. Jessica is savvy and resourceful, which is partly how she managed to survive, alone, on New York's streets. In addition to panhandling, which usually brought in a hundred dollars a day, she ran an online business with a friend, selling merchandise they'd bought at a discount from "boosters," who often had stolen it from large stores. Hence the random assortment of brand-new items in her bins.