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As a moving truck pulled up to the Martinique Hotel, a 4-year-old girl with a pink jacket nervously clutched a tiny potted holly plant dotted with red berries. Next to her were a half-dozen black plastic bags and a few cardboard boxes that held her family's belongings.
Joanna Hernandez, her mother, her father and her baby sister were moving for the eighth time since they lost their apartment 11 months ago and entered the byzantine world of the city's homeless shelter system.
They very likely will have to move again. The maximum stay at Help 1, the Red Cross shelter in East New York, Brooklyn, where they were headed, is six months. Only families that have been homeless for a year are eligible for permanent housing in city-owned apartments.
Joanna's family was evicted from the two rooms they subleased for $250 a month in a five-room apartment in East New York when the main tenant left. Their names weren't on the lease, and the landlord demanded $1,200 for a security deposit and first month's rent, which they couldn't afford.
"We used to be all right. We weren't on welfare or anything," Joanna's mother, Anna Rodriguez, 21, said as she sat on the narrow bed in their tiny room in the Martinique, holding the baby in her arms.
The Martinique Hotel, a symbol of everything that's wrong with the welfare system, is closing. The city, state and federal governments have paid millions of dollars - about $1,600 a month per room at the present rates - for 15 years to house thousands of families in squalid, overcrowded conditions in the hotel near Manhattan's Herald Square. Now, the families are moving out.
About half of the families, such as Ada Rios and her six children, will go to city-owned apartments after being homeless for more than a year, while the other half, including Joanna's family, will go to shelters run by the city or by nonprofit groups.
The owners of the hotel have refused requests for interviews, and won't say what they plan to do with the 16-story building, once a grand hotel, with high ceilings and delicate plaster designs. Tenants have heard rumors that the owners plan to convert the 88-year-old hotel to condominiums.
The...