The Dorothy Day Apartments on Riverside Drive in West Harlem are shockingly beautiful.

The building is one of six in the neighborhood run by Broadway Housing Communities. Charles Blow, an excellent new addition to The New York Times Op-Ed pages, went to visit. His experience challenges the stereotypes that many of us have about poverty and its solutions.

The Dorothy Day Apartments provide housing for 190 people, more than half of whom are children and all of whom were either homeless, or living in extreme poverty. Many of the adults are those recovering from drug addiction, or living with chronic diseases like H.I.V.; some have mental disabilities.

Despite the fact that most of the adults suffer from some form of disability, Charles Blow reported on September 23, 2011 that:

“There are no security guards. There is no commotion. There are no signs of institutional living like names above doors. There isn’t even so much as a crayon mark on any of the walls. This is an oasis of civility and tranquility and culture inhabited — and to some degree, self-policed — by people whom the world would rob of those dignities. They have taken the most extreme cases, given them a warm, safe, stable and, yes, beautiful place to live, while treating them with dignity and respect. And the transformations of the adults, and, more important, the outcomes for the children have been incredible.”

Since the Dorothy Day Apartments opened in 2003, there have had no arrests and no teenage pregnancies. Blow also reports that:

“Most of the children went through the Head Start program in the basement, which now mostly serves the surrounding community. None of the children have dropped out of school. A handful have even earned scholarships to the city’s better private schools. Of the 10 children who have graduated from high school, eight have gone on to college and one has just graduated from college. (None of the adults in the building have ever been to college.)”

So you wonder, how much did all this cost? Can it be replicated in other neighborhoods and even other cities? Isn’t this just the kind of thing we can’t afford to do in the midst of an economic crisis?

Well, Blow did the numbers and they will shock you.

“The cost of the building plus renovations was $17 million. So if it houses 190 people, that works out to about $89,500 a person. But let’s put that into the context of prison construction. According to the New York State Commission of Correction, 1,000 new jail beds will have been built between the end of 2007 and the end of 2011 in the counties of Albany, Essex, Rensselaer and Suffolk at a cost of $100,000 per bed. Furthermore permanent supportive housing for an individual costs taxpayers $12,500 annually, compared to annual costs of $25,000 for an emergency shelter cot; $60,000 for a prison cell; and $125,000 for a psychiatric hospital bed.”

Let’s give those in greatest need a fighting chance. Not only is it a great investment, but we already have the world’s largest prison population, a huge waste of human potential and money. Perhaps of some of the millions now sitting in jail had grown up in a Dorothy Day Apartment, they would have never entered jail in the first place.

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