City Limits WEEKLY article - HOMELESS NUMBERS HIGH DESPITE MONEY AND EFFORT

City Limits WEEKLY
Week of: September 29, 2008
Number: 658

HOMELESS NUMBERS HIGH DESPITE MONEY AND EFFORT
More than four years into a five-year plan to greatly reduce homelessness, officials find the problem a tenacious one.
By Lindsey McCormack

Is the city’s ambitious plan to help the homeless showing signs of success or headed towardfailure? Administration officials remain optimistic about staying the course, while an array of critiques portray an initiative that is not accomplishing enough, fast enough.

With the end date in sight for the city's five-year plan, launched in June 2004 and called "United for Solutions Beyond Shelter," many advocates and others are zeroing in on the blueprint's marquee promise to reduce homelessness by two-thirds. That goal won't be met – but Department of Homeless Services (DHS) leaders say numerous other significant improvements to both internal procedures and external service delivery have been achieved.

At a hearing at City Hall on Sept. 23, City Councilman Bill de Blasio, chairman of the General Welfare Committee, grilled DHS Commissioner Robert Hess on the city's progress. At issue was
the finding published last month by the Independent Budget Office that the total number of homeless people in New York has decreased little since 2004, even as costs of shelter and prevention programs rise. With less than a year left to go, the total shelter population was 34,401 as of Sept. 25, down from around 36,600 when Bloomberg announced the plan; a two thirds reduction would put the total shelter population at around 12,100 in 2009.

“This is a watershed moment,” said de Blasio, a Brooklyn Democrat. “We’ll either attack the problem while we have a competent team and a bold goal, or we’ll continue with the pantomime of having a bold goal and doing little to achieve it.”

Facing an onslaught of criticism, the Department of Homeless Services released its own progress report last week, detailing how it has met 86 percent of its goals in a wide range of areas, from overhauling the family intake system to launching a homelessness prevention program in the housing courts. As to why these successes have not translated to vastly reduced numbers of the homeless, Hess said in his testimony, “If we could report today that we were successful at reaching all of our targets, that would mean that our targets are not ambitious
enough.”

“I find that downright Orwellian,” de Blasio countered after Hess’s testimony. “You’re letting yourselves off the hook, saying ‘aren’t we noble for setting this unattainable goal.’ We have to level with New Yorkers about what can really be done.”

Putting aside the debate over whether the two-thirds goal should serve as a measure of success or point of aspiration, the hearing hit on two crucial questions—why homelessness in New York City has not fallen as quickly as expected, and whether DHS needs to consider new strategies to pick up the pace. In the current budget-cutting atmosphere, however, new approaches likely would have to be thrifty ones.

In an interview the following day, Hess said that the administration’s emphasis on prevention is already yielding results, even if not in the desired timeframe. “You have to remember, originally this was going to be a 10-year plan, and the mayor said, ‘This is great, but I only have five years left,’” Hess said. “So what was already a stretch became a five-year plan. I think the mayor was right to do that.”

Referring to the Emergency Assistance Unit – the troubled Bronx family intake center replaced by the PATH center a few years ago – he added, “No one who was at the EAU just a few years ago and saw the horrors there—children sleeping on floor, no sink in the doctor’s office, social workers interviewing domestic violence victims in front of other families—no one can see those things and say we haven’t made tremendous progress.”

City Council's review comes as DHS faces strong opposition to its plan to move the adult men’s intake center from the former Bellevue psychiatric hospital, on East 29th Street in Manhattan, to the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn – and as it enjoys the settlement of a 25-year-old lawsuit against the DHS by the Legal Aid Society (see related story this week). “You settled a lawsuit last week, but now you’re opening a new front of hostility and litigation,” said Councilwoman Letitia James, whose district includes the Armory.

Hess emphasized his department’s progress in targeting adults living on the streets.
Responding to suggestions from advocates, DHS has implemented a “street to home” approach that steers the chronically homeless towards stable housing, rather than emergency shelters. In four years, the street homeless population has dropped 25 percent citywide, and 60 percent in Queens, according to the annual HOPE survey – though earlier this year revelations surfaced that some men had been sent to illegal boarding houses. Still, many advocates are supportive. “There’s been a real turnaround,” says Carolyn McLaughlin, executive director of the Citizen’s
Advice Bureau, a social service organization in the Bronx. “I know of over 80 homeless people who have been put in long-term housing, and most do very well.”

The news is less positive for families with children. According to the Independent Budget Office report, their numbers actually went up between the end of fiscal 2004 and 2008, from 8,712 to 8,848. Over that period the total number of homeless in shelters decreased by 5.3 percent, however, from 36,399 to 34,467. Meanwhile, city spending on family shelter has risen more than $70 million. This is a disappointment for DHS, which has tried to drastically lower the shelter population by boosting prevention services, and by helping those who do enter the shelter
system to move quickly into permanent housing.

In its progress report, DHS highlights a two-pronged approach to reducing the shelter
population. HomeBase focuses on prevention, with community organizations providing services such as family mediation, rent subsidies and legal assistance. HomeBase works largely with people who have already applied for emergency shelter but may have other housing options. On the housing end, DHS has a suite of Advantage programs—Work Advantage, Child Advantage, Fixed Income Advantage—which offer rental assistance and a savings match program. The first cohort of Advantage recipients will phase out of the program next spring, two years after entering.

At last week’s hearing, de Blasio presented his own Five-Point Plan to reduce family
homelessness, which included suggestions to expand anti-eviction services, earmark 10
percent of available Section 8 vouchers for the homeless, and lengthen subsidies for needy families beyond the two years provided by Advantage. Hess said he would consider the suggestions, but told City Limits that the city created its own rental subsidy program in order to provide more flexible and timely service than Section 8 allows.

“We structured Work Advantage to be what families in shelters told us they wanted,” said Hess. “They told us that if they had a couple years to get on their feet, get some work history behind them, save a little money for that rainy day that might come, then they thought they’d be okay.” He added that further assistance is available through HomeBase, and the city would help those needing a long-term subsidy to apply for Section 8. The underlying question is whether there are enough affordable housing units to accommodate the large population of low-income New Yorkers who may at some point come into contact with the homeless safety net. At Tuesday’s hearing, Zoilo Torres, director of community relations at the Partnership for the Homeless, said that the administration’s emphasis on reducing the shelter population masks a deeper housing crisis. “Essentially, what we’ve done is simply substituted a living room couch in an overcrowded apartment for a shelter bed,” Torres testified. Through its "New Housing Marketplace" initiative, the city has pledged to bring 165,000 new affordable housing units online by 2013; last week Mayor Bloomberg announced the landmark that half those units had been funded. As part of that, the 2005 New York/New York III agreement between Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki provides for construction of 9,000 new units of supportive housing for the formerly homeless.

Hess noted that his colleagues from Boston to Minneapolis are grappling with a surge in families seeking shelter. As opposed to the chronically homeless, this population is squeezed by the economic downturn. “The general consensus is that when people are living on the margins, it doesn’t take much to push them into homelessness—when the price of milk, rent, and utilities all go up, and there’s no increase in income.”

Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice who has informally consulted with DHS, has found that a 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate causes a 0.4 percent increase in homelessness— and unemployment in New York is rising . Still, Culhane said, the city is doing the right thing by focusing on prevention.

“We can’t control the number of people coming to the front door of the shelter system,” Culhane said. “What we can do is help them avoid going through the threshold, or if they do cross in, help them to move on as soon as possible.”

Testimony to City Council- by DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY RELATIONS, THE PARTNERSHIP FOR THE HOMELESS

TESTIMONY OF ZOILO TORRES, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY RELATIONS, THE PARTNERSHIP FOR THE HOMELESS

RHETORIC vs. REALITY

Thank you Councilman de Blasio and members of the General Welfare Committee for inviting me here today to speak at this hearing concerning the Department of Homeless Services progress in meeting the Mayor’s pledge to reduce homelessness by two-thirds by the end of his administration.

My name is Zoilo Torres, and I’m the Director of Community Relations at The Partnership for the Homeless.

As we all know, for over two decades, New York City has been driven by crisis management in dealing with homelessness.

According to an Independent Budget Office Report issued not too long ago, our city spends 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 seemed to understand 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 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 The Partnership for the Homeless 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.

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. 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.

And for single adults, based on the Department of Homeless Services own statistics, there are almost 7,000 homeless individuals on our streets, in shelters and drop-in centers.


The big question is why?

As a start, we’re simply not addressing our city’s dire affordable-housing shortage. Without low-income, affordable housing as the base to begin addressing the other underlying root causes, the Mayor’s plan to reduce homelessness will be simply illusory.

The Mayor’s “New Marketplace” housing initiative, recently reviewed favorably by the 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 - now complete - 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 enough affordable housing, and without the resources or commitment to provide ongoing support once an individual or family does find housing, we’re genuinely concerned that the Mayor’s charge to reduce homelessness by two-thirds is pressuring the Department of Homeless Services to take measures that are not solving the problem but are rather short-term efforts that may artificially shrink the shelter population so that they can declare some sort of victory.

First as to families, while the city has invested in Home-Base programs, we agree with the concerns raised by the IBO that there is little or no data evaluating the effectiveness of these programs. This is especially important in light of the continuing crisis of family homelessness.

And, what we’ve seen over time with HomeBase is that the Department of Homeless Services is more focused, again because of the mayor’s pledge, on diversion from shelter, rather than focusing on the longer-term problems facing poor families. We’re quickly becoming a city where hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are living doubled-up, in overcrowded apartments and paying more than 50% of their income toward rent.

Essentially, what we’ve done is simply substituted a living room couch in an overcrowded apartment for a shelter bed.

It is clear to us at the Partnership that family homelessness is a function of entrenched poverty and the Department of Homeless Services, created to manage the problem, can not alone solve it.

And with no real concerted effort to focus on low income housing or the root issues, and with an end of court oversight under McCain v. Koch, we believe there is a real risk that the Department of Homeless Services will be forced, again 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.

As to single adults, we’re similarly concerned.

Again, we believe that the Mayor’s pledge at the start of his administration is singularly driving the efforts of the Department of Homeless Services, rather than what should be a multi-layered approach that understands the complexity of the problem.

Of course, the dearth of affordable housing again looms large. We’ve seen over and over again from the research and the literature in the field that a Housing First program works best for those adults living on our city’s streets. And it works even for those who have been labeled chronically homeless.

So again, in the absence of housing, the Department of Homeless Services, in an effort to make good on the Mayor’s promise, is now creating small, safe haven shelters to simply reduce the street population. And while these smaller, so-called friendlier shelters may indeed be better than the larger shelters, without housing, they offer no long term solution. Yes, the Mayor may declare a reduction of street homelessness, but to what end.

And these safe haven shelters costs us on average between $2,250 and $2.850 per person per month. (Or between $27,000 to $34,200 per person per year.)

And these safe haven shelters are limited to those who the city has labeled chronically homeless - those men and women living on the street from 9 months to one-year or more.

But what about those men and women who have just fallen into homelessness – the seniors in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, who we’re seeing more and more fall prey to homelessness and who just will not go to a large city shelter. Or the men and women working at low-wage jobs who simply can not afford housing. Or the veteran, who doesn’t fit the city’s definition of chronically homeless, but has no place to go.

At least 1000 of these men and women appear at the city’s drop in centers daily.

These men and women – and other vulnerable New Yorkers in need – rely on the city’s drop-in centers for a meal, medical care and counseling, temporary shelter, and the kind of case management assistance that help these men and women put their lives back together again.

And we’re concerned now that the Department of Homeless Services is focusing singularly on safe havens at the expense of the safe haven of drop-in centers. In fact, we’ve already seen the Department of Homeless Services close two drop-in centers – and we’re unsure of what they’re planning with the rest.

And we’re also concerned about the Partnership’s network of faith-based shelters we created, along with Ed Koch, more than 25 years ago.

In the absence of housing, these small overnight shelters in churches, synagogues, and other faith-based houses of worship provide a vital life-line for those men and women who frequent our city’s drop-in centers. In fact, this network has proven so important, that a number of years ago the Department of Homeless conducted a survey of those individuals in the drop-ins, and 85% reported that they would not have come off the street to a drop-in but for the availability of a church/synagogue bed.

These faith shelter beds fill a real need. On any given day during peak season (that is during the winter when faith beds are most in demand) the Partnership provides week day average of 550 beds.

While we at The Partnership have talked about expanding the network in light of the need and in the absence of affordable housing, the Department of Homeless Services wants to dramatically shrink the Emergency Shelter Network, again focusing on safe haven shelters and the effort to make good on the Mayor’s pledge.

The Department of Homeless Services has demanded that we cut the faith-beds by a week day average of 150 while men and women continue to sleep in chairs at drop-in centers. In fact, while we’re near capacity in the church/synagogue network, anywhere from 80 to 360 homeless men and women sleep on chairs in the city’s drop-in centers on any summer week day.

And because we won’t be complicit in this effort, the Department of Homeless Services is now planning on issuing an RFP to put out for bid the Emergency Shelter Network.

Please know that the Partnership has more than a contractual relationship with the faith community that can be easily transferred to another agency. The network is a relationship born over a quarter of century ago by Mayor Ed Koch and the Partnership’s founder, Peter Smith, to provide homeless adults with safe, overnight lodging, wholesome meals, and fellowship.

The Partnership, thus, was not the answer to an RFP, but emerged organically from the faith community, and became the unifying force of this faith-movement. Clergy and volunteers continue to play a major role in the direction of the Network and the Partnership. Indeed, they are members of the Partnership, have sat on our Board, and have important governance roles.

And we are proud that the Network is one of the most successful public-private partnerships in the country, providing shelter and community to hundreds of homeless adults each night in our great city.

And we as a city should not want to lose the depth of this relationship nurtured over all these years. The churches and synagogues who are members of the Emergency Shelter Network are not just turning over space; they are motivated by their spiritual beliefs to serve single homeless men and women.

Further, this faith-based shelter system is unique in that it is entirely volunteer-run; the rewards of bringing aid and comfort to a fellow human being are the most important incentives for continuing to participate.

As one Brooklyn volunteer noted, “the blessings that emanate from this program go way beyond it—to the volunteers who have the opportunity to serve and to the community as a whole. The Partnership’s faith-based shelters change attitudes of people throughout the community about homelessness.”

And as I noted, The Partnership plays a pivotal role in making the Emergency Shelter Network run smoothly, applying lessons learned over many years to recruit and train volunteers, set up new shelters, coordinate activities between congregations, and monitor overall effectiveness.

The Emergency Shelter Network is now much greater than the sum of its parts; over the years, it has become a model of ecumenical unification and cooperation that plays a vital and irreplaceable role in helping the city meet its obligation to protect and house its most vulnerable residents.

Sure we acknowledge that there are ways to improve efficiencies in the system as we work simultaneously to finding permanent solutions to homelessness. Areas for improvement include Drop-in Center operations, guest transport to faith-based shelters, and greater standardization of shelter supplies and equipment.

And we’re prepared to collaborate with the Department of Homeless Services on these issues. We may not have a two-thirds decrease in the number of homeless people on our streets but, in the absence of housing, what we can ensure is that they are off our streets and sleeping on a bed in of one of the Partnership’s network of churches or synagogues.

But we’re not sure what the Department of Homeless Services is planning – other than to try to meet the Mayor’s pledge.

For homeless men and women who rely on our faith-bed network these shelters are often their first giant step in leaving the street. Reduce these beds and where will they go? Most likely the streets. That certainly would be a huge step backward for the Mayor, who says that he wants to take 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.

And frankly, we’d like to put ourselves out of business. But if the Mayor is serious about achieving his goals, his rhetoric needs to be followed by a similarly ambitious plan that addresses the most fundamental cause of our skyrocketing homelessness – enough housing for all.

Thank you Ladies and Gentlemen.

Can We Open For At Least Five Days?

SHELTER CLOSINGS

The Partnership for the Homeless is being forced in the face of budget cuts and cost reduction to reassess the present structure of our Emergency Shelter Network. The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) has informed us that they will no longer be able to service shelters that are only open from one to four days a week.
In analyzing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of our operations DHS has determined that we can no longer afford to service shelters with faith beds that are not open for at least five days.
We fully appreciate and take pride in the outstanding work of our volunteers who have worked through their churches and temples to provide the comfort of a bed, hot meal and endearing fellowship to many of our homeless guests. Many of the ESN volunteers have been involved with the Partnership for over two decades and are understandably concerned about the fate of our guests once a shelter is closed. They don’t want to see people put into the streets and neither do we.
So what can we do? We can first ask ourselves the question: “Can we open for at least five days?” ESN staff has released a survey that ask this very question, and what is precluding your institution from providing shelter for five days or more. Please complete the survey and return it to us ASAP.
Moreover we will be happy to work with you in every possible way to help you help the homeless by opening your shelter for at least five days.