Associated Press - Friday, September 29, 2000
George Watson, Associated Press Writer

Some are veterans of the streets, seeking a home under a molding cardboard box in an alleyway. Some are teens who ran from something but stumbled into a life far worse; they trade sex for a night in a bed. Others believe their luck has run out after losing jobs, apartments and friends.

Yet every day, a handful of the thousands of homeless men and women living with AIDS in New York City make an effort rarely taken by their brethren.

They seek help.

That fight for life, no matter the inevitable future, is mirrored across the nation, where hundreds of public and nonprofit groups struggle to help the needy.

Funds are already limited because of the curious problem caused by scientists who haven't cured HIV or AIDS yet keep patients living longer through powerful drug concoctions. Now advocates wonder how they can possibly help all the people infected with the virus.

"Today, people think the epidemic is over," said Gina Quattrochi, president of the National AIDS Housing Coalition and executive director at Bailey House, a private center in Greenwich Village helping homeless AIDS patients. "The reality is people are living much longer, but the vast majority are disabled."

Advocates like Quattrochi are urging Congress to add $60 million above this year's $232 million federal budget for housing and other services to homeless AIDS patients. They worried when President Clinton proposed upping it to just $260 million and became fearful because Senate leaders don't want to increase the appropriation at all.

"It's thin. We have to get it up," said U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., a longtime supporter of AIDS services. "This country is rolling in money."

Expending millions of dollars for AIDS-exclusive assistance meets resistance in every case.

"There has always been pressure from the far right to portray it for drug addicts and queers," Quattrochi said, adding that others question the need to fund specific AIDS housing.

Quattrochi says only half of Bailey House's residents are gay or lesbian.

By conservative estimates, she says, at least 450,000 Americans with AIDS need housing.

New York City, which served 1,200 homeless people with AIDS in 1988, now assists more than 27,000. This month, a Brooklyn federal judge chided the city's Division of AIDS Services for systematically delaying or terminating assistance and ordered the agency placed under federal oversight for three years. The city plans to appeal the decision.

If Congress would look at operations like Bailey House, Quattrochi believes it would understand the plea for more money. The alternative, she says, is soaring health care costs from homeless AIDS patients seeking treatment in emergency rooms, which is more expensive than standard care. Bailey House started in the mid-1980s when AIDS was still considered by many as homosexuals' punishment from God. The 6 1/2-story building, in a prime location along the Hudson River, nurtured homeless AIDS survivors. In 1995, Bailey House added a vocational studies program because clients lived longer and weren't interested in just wasting away.

"I wanted to do something productive with my life," said Sean Ransom, 31, who contracted the virus in the late 1980s. "I didn't want to ... take my meds and wait to die."

Those medications - a triple combination of drugs - have doubled the average time it takes for the HIV infection to develop into AIDS, said Professor Alvaro Munoz of Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health. They increased the average survival time of AIDS sufferers from 18 months to six years.

In the late 1980s, residents in Bailey House stayed an average of three months, and their stay almost always ended in death. These days, they stay about three years. Many now walk out on their own.

Beyond treatment, stable housing is crucial to patients' health, Quattrochi says.

Living on a friend's couch or moving between shelters, patients find it difficult and tiring to get steady care; the effort weakens the body and strengthens the disease - a deadly duo. Patients also need refrigerators to keep their medicine effective.

These problems become remote when a homeless person wakes up after a night under crumbled, urine-stained newspapers. Medications? It's doubtful they have any. It's often little better in city-run shelters.

Derryck, who declined to give his last name, lived in emergency housing officially called Single Room Occupancy Units, but known by residents as bare-boned welfare hotels.

He could touch all four walls from the middle of his cubicle. Occupants shared a single bathroom, and he shudders when remembering the filth, prostitutes, drugs and loan sharking.

Derryck, 50, concedes he was lucky to live there. "There's even a lack of bad housing," he said glumly.

Derryck found his way to Bailey House. Now he can sit on his bed in his 85-square-foot home, with a view of the Hudson River, watch TV, grab a snack - or his medications - from his mini-fridge, or use his personal bathroom.

"It works for me," he said with a grin as jazz wafted from his stereo.

Behind him, through a window, a sailboat sliced through gusty winds on its way to the open harbor.

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