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.
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