Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

Housing designed to fill that niche -- buildings parceled into small, clean "efficiency units" that are the functional successor to the old, squalid S.R.O. apartments -- are being constructed in some numbers for the first time in five decades.

Not big numbers.

Only a few hundred of New York's homeless thousands are or soon will be benefiting from the development. Still, just the fact that ground has been broken within the last two years for 13 efficiency-apartment buildings containing 668 units in all the boroughs except Staten Island -- nine have been completed so far -- represents at least a symbolic shift in a city that has seen, by some estimates, 87 percent of its S.R.O., or single-room-occupancy, stock eliminated since 1950.

The construction is a new phase in the evolution of the 20-year-old supportive housing movement, in which not-for-profit groups join forces with government agencies to finance and operate housing projects that go beyond merely providing a residence. The new projects not only take people off the streets and out of shelters, but offer them the on-site services they need to lead independent and, where possible, productive lives -- medical care, drug counseling, psychiatric help, job training and placement.

The movement attempts to fill the gap gouged by government policies that, for decades, discouraged S.R.O. housing as a cruel and degrading vestige of the past, but mainly by market-rate development that gobbled up S.R.O. hotels and tenement buildings -- first as neighborhoods gentrified during the 70's and 80's and, more recently, as owners renovated buildings to tap potential profit from throngs of tourists to the city.

"It's not like a real estate developer is saying, 'Let me build all this low-income housing,' " said Maureen Friar, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, a coalition of 115 not-for-profit organizations, "but what we do -- creating and operating supportive housing -- has become the solution to homelessness. So it's a start."

The distinction between the old single-room-occupancy units and the new efficiency apartments is striking. Unlike the S.R.O.'s -- typically unsanitary, with shared bathroom and cooking facilities down the hall -- the efficiency apartment comes with a private bathroom and a kitchenette in a building equipped with lounge areas, classrooms, a laundry and even, in some cases, an exercise room. Rooted in the not-too-distant past, however, those involved in the supportive housing movement and even government officials sometimes slip into the vernacular and still refer to the new units as S.R.O.'s.

Call it what you will, Larry Gatson thinks he's living in a unit of heaven.

"Gatson residence!" is the way Mr. Gatson, 54, answers the phone in his home in the newly constructed, 40-unit efficiency-apartment building at 690 East 147th Street in the South Bronx, owned and operated by University Consultation and Treatment Center, a Supportive Housing Network member.

"Oh man, you don't know how it feels to have a place of my own, 'cause I've been from the shelter to the train to abandoned buildings," said Mr. Gatson, who moved in last May, shortly after the building opened. "I was homeless four years, 'cause, see, I used to be a crackhead."

Members of the network -- in cooperation, particularly, with the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Federal Government's Department of Housing and Urban Development and the mental health agencies of the city and state -- have created 11,800 efficiency apartments since 1980 by refurbishing dilapidated S.R.O. buildings.

Now they are building new ones.

"The transition to new construction from rehabilitation of existing buildings is the most significant thing about the current focus of the program," said Richard T. Roberts, the city's Commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development. "It's a function of the city's success in reducing its housing portfolio -- meaning we don't have as many city-owned buildings to commit to these efforts -- and improvements in the real estate market that make it much less likely for a private owner to sell or donate a building for supportive housing."

But according to Ms. Friar, the director of the Supportive Housing Network, "This is only a start." And she cited the dimensions of the continuing need: "There are still 7,200 single adults in the shelter system, 1,200 persons with AIDS in rundown commercial S.R.O.s and at least 10,000 people on the street."

Of the 13 efficiency-apartment buildings begun in the last two years, seven, containing 341 units, were financed through the New York State Office of Mental Health -- two in the Bronx, two in Manhattan and three in Brooklyn. "They're up and running," Ms. Friar said.

The six other efficiency-apartment buildings were financed through the city's Housing Preservation and Development Department.

In the Bronx, besides the 40-unit building where Mr. Gatson so delightedly now resides, two projects are under construction -- a 45-unit building at 1316 Boston Road in the East Tremont section and a 43-unit building at 1616 Grand Avenue in Morris Heights.

In Brooklyn, two other H.P.D.-financed projects -- a 68-unit building at 545 Warren Street in Park Slope and a 57-unit building at 2324 Pitkin Avenue in East New York -- are also under construction.

And two weeks ago, Edwin Jimenez stood in front of 223 East 117th Street in Harlem as concrete continued to be poured for a 73-unit building sponsored by the Doe Fund -- the homeless-aid group most visible for its royal blue uniformed street cleaning crews on the Upper East and West Sides.

Mr. Jimenez, 34, can hardly wait for construction to be completed in early 2000 so he can move into his 12- by 14-foot apartment with its large window, polished floor, kitchenette and -- "Can you believe it?" he said -- a private bathroom. He has been living with 10 other men in one wing of the Doe Fund's dormitory-style transitional shelter on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem since last October.

And that has been one of his more luxurious residences.

"I've been a runaway since I was 13 years old," Mr. Jimenez said. "My father was an alcoholic and always beat my mother; my mother would turn around and beat on me. So I ran to a friend's house on 42d Street and lived in the basement."

"For the need of money for my habit," he said, "I did what they do out there -- sell myself. I've been on drugs, alcohol since I was 9."

When he was 17, Mr. Jimenez met a woman he refers to as "my daughter's mother" -- his daughter, Domanisha, was born in 1986. For four y