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THE RISE IN FAMILY HOMELESSNESS
For over two decades, New York City has been driven by crisis management in dealing with homelessness, spending almost a billion dollars annually on emergency services to fuel a sprawling shelter system that consumes an ever-growing stream of homeless families and individuals. Solving the problem with long-term solutions was virtually ignored.
That is, until Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office and wisely concluded that it’s more compassionate and certainly fiscally prudent to shift the city’s focus to a proactive agenda on prevention. No one could quarrel with the Mayor that it’s more judicious to allocate dollars to help stabilize a family already in housing, than to spend $3,000 a month to warehouse an evicted family in a city shelter.
That’s why New Yorkers gave the proverbial thumbs-up to the Mayor for announcing, at the start of his administration, what we all believed was a thoughtful and far-reaching plan to reform the city’s shelter system and focus on homeless prevention. At the time, it certainly signaled a welcome sea change in policy - a paradigm shift that was in synch with current national thinking and trends.
Indeed, proven prevention strategies - especially expansion of community-based services that focus on such things as education and job training, and access to quality health care - are critical to keeping people in their homes. And for every family that isn’t uprooted, every child who remains in his own school, every senior citizen who keeps her home of 40 years, that’s an enormous victory.
But the immense promise threatens to fall short. In fact, there’s a wide gap between the Mayor’s rhetoric and reality.
The reality is that family homelessness has increased by 17 percent over the last two years. And, to date, it appears that the Mayor’s prevention programs have not had a significant impact. Low-income families and their children now comprise over 72% of our city’s shelter population. There are nearly 14,000 children and over 8,500 families calling a city shelter home. And these figures, obviously, do not include the countless thousands sleeping on the living room couch in an overcrowded apartment of a family member or friend, or those who are about to fall over the precipice paying more than 50% of their income toward rent.
The big question is why?
As a start, we’re simply not addressing our city’s dire affordable-housing shortage. Though there’s a commendable commitment to increase supportive housing, largely for single adults, the vast majority of families will not be reached by this “special needs” housing program. Without low-income, affordable housing as the base to begin addressing the other underlying root causes, the Mayor’s plan to reduce family homelessness will be simply illusory.
And while the Mayor needs a partner in the State and in Washington, his “New Marketplace” housing initiative, recently reviewed favorably by the Independent Budget Office (IBO) for its production and preservation of low-income housing, targets only a small share of the units for the households who are either homeless or most at risk. In fact, the IBO’s report made it clear that the Mayor’s low-income housing efforts were largely fueled by the preservation of thousands of Mitchell-Lama housing. While, certainly an important city-wide effort, it does nothing to stem the tide of poor families desperately in need of low-income housing.
Without a simultaneous commitment to truly addressing affordable housing, there is genuine concern that the Mayor’s charge to reduce the shelter population by two-thirds can not be accomplished without shredding the crucial safety net provided for by shelters. With no available housing, there is a real risk that the Department of Homeless Services will be forced, by necessity, to rely on measures that will narrow the opening of its shelter doors to those in need in order to reduce the shelter population.
For homeless families, shelters are often their last stop. Prevent them from entering shelter and where will they go? Hopefully not the streets. That certainly would be a huge step backward for the Mayor, who has taken a giant leap forward in trying to address a crisis that first surfaced more than 25 years ago when an army of homeless men and women first appeared on our doorsteps. But if the Mayor is serious about achieving his goals, his new initiatives need to be followed by a similarly ambitious plan that addresses the most fundamental cause of our skyrocketing homelessness – enough housing for all.
Let Mayor Bloomberg know what you think about this issue.
Arnold S. Cohen August 2008
President & CEO
The Partnership for the Homeless
