Regan Good

Our dear donors know the outlines of Michael’s difficult story. We have been working for over a year to get him out of a substandard living situation-- spotty and sometimes zero heat, no working refrigerator (he uses a bucket and ice), and no electricity in the front of the apartment. He is the last tenant in this excuse for a building. Sadly, a few months ago he lost Ollie, one of his beloved cats; the cats also suffer from this horrible situation. PLUS: Now that the government is shut down, he will receive no SNAP benefits this month. What an ugly country. There is, however, good news!: We are making good contacts in the Human Resources Admin world where they are beginning to understand our specific, one-off problem which is: Because Michael is not in a shelter, we have no access to a “housing specialist.” We made two great contacts, one at Legal Aid and another at the Mayor’s office. And soon Michael will FINALLY be receiving Social Security checks. He has an important phone appointment Nov. 10 that we are both living for. This morning, however, he only had $17 to his name. Please help us get over this hump.

Michael Moore, my elderly neighbor, is still waiting patiently for the city to help him move. Thanks to you, we have gotten a few good things done in the last year: we got Michael an ID, we got him hooked into Adult Protective Services, we got him an apartment voucher, we got him on SNAP and Medicaid, etc). However, the situation remains fairy hideous. One thing that is making us both crazy is an electric bill for $1400 that is a kind of snowballed old mess. His social worker made a mistake filing for it to be covered, and now she won’t fix it, and so he is on the hook for it. To add to this stress, he has no working refrigerator because his apartment is on two ConEd accounts, the front of the apartment that serves the fridge was another tenant’s account, and that person moved out and that account was shut off. His landlord is not responding. He’s using a cooler with ice. It’s Kafkaesque. When he calls ConEd, he gets the run around. When he called HRA, he gets the run around. This kind of bill can ruin someone. So, he has no refrigerator and a nasty bill that Con Ed won’t absolve. Insane. I wonder if we couldn’t band together again and just pay the god damn thing so he can work on more pressing issues like where he will be moving to. THANK YOU!