The weather wasn’t so bad in Kingston on Thursday, January 2. It was above freezing, and there was no rain.
That was some small consolation to Tim Greer. He was headed on foot first to the M.Clifford Miller Middle School in Lake Katrine to pick up two of his kids, and then take a bus six and a half miles to the John F Kennedy Elementary School in Kingston, after which they’d all ride another bus to Saugerties.
Since he began to suffer from strokes four years ago, driving a car is no longer an option for Tim Greer.
“All of a sudden my brain will stop working and I can’t function. I start stuttering,” Greer said. “I’ve had like 60 or 70 little strokes, but I’ve had two big ones that I’ve been hospitalized for.”
The husband and father of nine hustling across the landscape was under the impression he and his family were going to be evicted that evening from the two rooms of emergency temporary housing at the Comfort Inn in Saugerties that had been home for the last eleven months.
“When I went to the Department of Social Services [DSS] this morning to get the voucher, my case worker told me that the motel would no longer be accepting the voucher in my case,” Greer said. “I would have to vacate the premises immediately.”
Greer has been through an eviction before. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. Faced with the option of being kicked out or refusing to leave on the other, Greer felt he didn’t really have any real choice at all.
“I love my kids, they’re the most important thing in the world to me. But if I stay, the sheriff comes,” explained Greer. “And if I leave, I’m probably gonna lose my kids and be on the streets. I’m assuming Child Protective Services will probably get involved ’cause it’ll be freezing cold outside tonight and I got babies.”
As it turned out, no eviction warrant had been signed. Greer had misunderstood the immediate consequences of what he was told in the DSS office.
No eviction scheduled
“I was over at DSS this morning when they told him his voucher wasn’t being renewed,” said Saugerties county legislator Joe Maloney, who has known Greer since they were children. “He said the DSS caseworker was being very nice, but she had no answers. They keep telling him, don’t you have Family? Call Family. We get told in meetings that they don’t turn people away, that everyone’s offered something. Nobody wants to deal with the fact that — and this is only getting worse — there’s a lot of people being turned away.”
Reached by telephone, undersheriff Jimmy Mullen explained that the sheriff’s office had checked with the division responsible for enforcing the order of the court. No evictions had been scheduled.
“Nothing’s come through our office,” Mullen said. “I can’t see DSS just pushing them out into the street, but that’s something that they’d have to answer .… I know sometimes they do move people around.”
Greer, his wife Jessica, and their five boys and four girls — Jon’s the oldest at twelve, Kate the youngest at four months — were placed by the DSS at the Comfort Inn after residing for three years in an apartment managed by Rural Ulster Preservation Company (RUPCO). Greer suspected the reason they were kicked out was that the property manager took a dislike to his wife.
“It was only a three-bedroom apartment, and they tried saying that there weren’t enough bedrooms for all the people in the house, so they evicted us.”
Asked for comment, executive director of RUPCO Kevin O’Connor said likes and dislikes had nothing to do with the eviction. It was occupancy rules, plain and simple.
“When they moved in in 2019, they were a family of two adults and five children,” O’Connor said. “It was a three-bedroom, which has an occupancy requirement of three to six [people]. Because one of the children was under one year old, we approved the seventh based on hardship. When they were evicted, they had eight children. They [had become] a family of ten.”
Where the homeless go
When the eviction warrant was enforced, a sheriff’s deputy drove the family to DSS. “They put us in this little crumbhole out in Kerhonkson called the Colonial Motel,” said Greer. “No heat. Drug addicts running around, knocking on our doors at midnight. You know, stuff like that.”
A week later the Greers were moved again to their present two-room situation at the Comfort Inn. Negative consequences still followed them.
“Until we got evicted from the other place, my wife was working,” Greer said. “She tried to maintain the job, but having to travel all that way — and it just wasn’t realistic, plus she was pregnant at the time. And now we had even less room.”
A Pattern for Progress report released on Halloween reported that in 2023 138 Ulster County families were living in DSS-placed temporary emergency shelters — i.e., motel and hotel rooms.
“When people become homeless, the model for decades has been to place folks in hotels,” O’Connor said. “I just think with the rise in homelessness across the county the length of stay in hotels [has become] atrocious. The conditions, the size of units, condition of units, lack of services. And it’s not cheap.”
Assistant county executive Amberly Jane Campbell confirmed this.
“Essentially we are paying market rates per diem for our emergency placements in motels and hotels,” explained Campbell. “But we are reimbursed 100 percent through federal and state programs for emergency housing for families. It’s called Family Assistance.”
Campbell put that number for the Greers at around $110 per room per night, which would come out to $6600 a month — in the ballpark for renting a five-bedroom house in Tivoli or Germantown, with money to spare for savings and vacations.
For most, those payments elicit outrage.
Everyone can see the fastest solution would be adding more housing. It’s the characteristics of that added housing — unfettered free-market, rent-controlled, government-owned or government-subsidized — that has splintered observers into acrimonious factions. The years crawl by while the infighting continues.
For now, the Greers can remain in the two rooms at the Comfort Inn. They will not be cast out into the street.
It’s a fluid situation
“On December 20th, the Comfort Inn notified DSS that they would not extend the placement for this family of these two rooms,” Campbell explained. “In the normal course of business, [sometimes] that happens. There’s never been a fear that they will be out on the street. There’s never been a fear that they’re going to have their kids taken away. There’s never been anything on the table to have the sheriff be involved.”
Campbell acknowledged it was the prerogative of the county to move those in temporary housing to other hotels as needed. She conjectured that, confronted with the initial news of the motel owner’s desire to sever the room-letting arrangement with Greer and his family, Greer may have assumed the worst.
“Ideally, we would like to place them at the Kingston Motel because they have additional support services there,” she said. “But we don’t know yet. It’s a fluid situation. The size of the family certainly makes it more challenging.”
Before it became clear that no eviction was coming, Greer was pleading for a reprieve he didn’t believe could come.
“I would just like to extend it a month,” he had said. “Just to buy myself an extra month. My wife can claim her taxes next month. We have nine children, so we get the child tax credit and should have a nice hefty chunk of change. We were planning on trying to buy a trailer or trying to get into something at that point.”
According to the county, the Greers will remain at the motel at least through the end of the weekend while attempts are made to find an “appropriate alternative placement.”
“We could build all the permanent housing and house everybody,” said O’Connor, weighing in on the reality of the tragedy, “And tomorrow there’ll be somebody who runs into some trouble — you know, disasters, fires, loss of job, people split up, domestic issues, what have you. People will always become homeless. So we always need an emergency response. We need to do better in design and creation of emergency units and provide more adequate housing services that are designed for people experiencing homelessness and the trauma associated with it.”
“What we’ve got, it’s not a perfect system,” concluded Campbell, “But we’re trying.”
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