The average nightly population in city homeless shelters last December was 63,495 — a record high, the annual State of the Homeless Report from the Coalition for the Homeless found.
“It’s a huge amount of people,” Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, said. “There’s only nine cities in the entire state that have populations greater than our shelter system.”
It comes a year into Mayor de Blasio’s “Turning the Tide Plan,” which only aims to cut the shelter population by 2,500. The coalition has been calling on de Blasio to help the homeless through one of his other plans — to build affordable housing. They want him to set aside at least 10% of units for the homeless.
29 comments:
Bus ticket therapy + 6 months relocation expenses. This is New York City: stop this "affordable housing" nonsense already.
It's become a mashup of "the tale of the two cities" and "how the other half lives"
This is unsustainable and inhumane. Keep building towers.
First step, END the archaic "right to shelter" law. Then put the proper programs in place so that being "Homeless" is not a career path as it seems to be now.
Build proper shelters and make the people in the shelters who are NOT working, to do chores, etc in the shelter to earn their keep. The shelter can be designed to have several different sizes of rooms, such as a room that is made for 4-6 people and as each earn their keep, they get moved to another room with less people till they have their own room and then during this process put things into place to eventually get them out of shelters and into the work force.
Not his bullshit that is going on right now, just not in NYC but all over the country. The way it is now, it sounds like the horrible dependent welfare of the 60's, 70's were people were career welfare cases.
There is plenty of jobs for these "lost souls" can do, hell, just sweeping up litter can be an 8 hour job.
"There is plenty of jobs for these "lost souls" can do, hell, just sweeping up litter can be an 8 hour job."
The Doe Fund and City B.I.D. groups already provide that. The thing is even they don't have enough jobs to fill, although with the amount of filth on the streets piling up every day you think there would be 4 sweepers on every block.
I think the reason a lot of homeless are on the streets is because of the lack of privacy in shelters. I saw a clip of one where there were beds only inches apart in what look liked a gym basketball court. I wouldn't want to dwell there either, much less with 4 other people, especially when three of them could be unapologetic recidivist criminals that were let loose from Rikers because of the idiot plan to shut it down. This whole system is rotten to the core and irreparable because of all who are in charge right now.
Let them work for their stay. Heck. Even when I go visiting friends I help cook and clean! These people are just plain LAZY and were never taught how to be independent, grateful, and responsibility.
Soon we'll all be homeless. Rents are reaching the stratosphere and taxes are skyrocketing. Where will
our children and grandchildren live? Not in NYC unless their annual income is at least $250,000-$500,000!
North Dakota here we come!
Many people who are homeless have jobs, they just can't get housing for many reason.
Many slum lords illegal won't rent to people with kids or minorities. So these people are left with slim pickings when it comes to apartments they can afford.
Many come from a life where their parents traded them for sex for drugs. Many have drug problems and or mental health problems.
Many had apartments that were unsafe so they complained and then had their lease cancelled or were evicted on trumped up charges. Then they get black listed. Then they can't rent anymore.
We need more housing and lot of it.
Unless you think the city can survive without waiters, line cooks, drivers, store clerks and all other low paying jobs, then something needs to be done about housing.
If you are poor and homeless most likely you maxed out all friend options or you don't have friends that can help.
>> Let them work for their stay. Heck. Even when I go visiting friends I help cook and clean!
>> These people are just plain LAZY and were never taught how to be independent, grateful, and ??responsibility.
I see the Doe Fund street cleaners a lot. They do what they are supposed to do and are friendly. They need more support and training in other fields.
Many people who are homeless have jobs, they just can't get housing for many reason.
Yeah, that also includes the 90+% of the rest of the country living perfectly fulfilling lives with gainful employment who happen to not be in New York, SF, L.A., or Chicago and have the common sense of any normal human not to try because they cannot afford it. Some of them even came from New York.
Responsible adults get priced out. It's a fact of life. The irresponsible long term poor (NOT people who have a sudden catastrophe) lose their "housing rights". Gimme a break!
When your lease is ending and you are poor, working a low wage job, it is difficult to apartment hunt in NYC. Especially when you don't have a car and you can't get off work. Once you become homeless and try to rent again, that person struggles to find a place because landlords don't want to rent to people who are homeless.
Ship the homeless back to their own countries or states! Most people who are homeless here are not even from nyc to begin with! Ship them out!
Yes, there are some that abuse the system but NYC is also becoming expensive. Married couple that make 50K a year and have kids It's hard with the increases to cable, gas, water, phone, mta. Everyone wants to charge more for everything while salaries are staying the same. We make a good living and are considering moving out of NY. 1,700-2,000 rent for a 1 bedroom is insane. Those Ghetto's that no one wanted to live in are now expensive.. affordable rent will never happen. It's like the gas prices and airfares never going back down after people were willing to pay the high prices. No one wants government to step in but all the big companies are making a fortune out of charging too much.
JQ, that's called "seeing the writing on the wall", and time to start looking for a transfer to a more affordable place to live, or applying online/over the phone to new employers in such an area. Not time to do nothing but protest about affordable housing and hope that magically causes a new place in your price range to pop up and land in your lap.
“Turning the Tide Plan”
soon to be rebranded as:
"Take the Tide Pod Challenge"
"The average nightly population in city homeless shelters last December was 63,495" and the NYC Department of Homeless services has a yearly budget of 1.07 BILLION dollars (2016 figure). Yet with all this money the problem just keeps getting worse. This is mind boggling.
Come one, come all! Get your free shelter spot!
With a limitless supply of human beings, that's a great policy...
Most of the jobs in NYC pay minimum wage...most of the apartments are well over $1,000/month - even in shitty Queens. How does one pay that when their gross income for the month is $1,200 ($10/hour, $400/week). There are no rentals for the working poor and most of the available jobs keep people in that bracket.
Playing the part of King Canute, will be Bill Deblass-hole-io
1.07 billion is alot of money. But when you break it down per person, it's just under $17,000 per homeless person. Even if we cut out the agencies and just gave people $17,000/year...hell, make it double for removing the agency overhead....you can't survive in NYC on $34,000/year without additional government subsidies like rental assistance. There needs to be a national answer to this. Either every jurisdiction has a right to shelter law or nobody has one. Making NYC responsible for the country or the world's homeless is not going to get us anywhere.
Has the druggie couple from Ohio, who lost their two kids when the radiator valve popped (and you can be rest assured they were too drugged up to notice) become millionaires yet?
We can provide nothing if we try to house absolutely everyone. We can provide everything if we elect to house almost no-one (eg only the very rich can live here). We can provide a modest amount, if we elect to house a modest population. Which these three paths is most reasonable?
Anonymous said...
1.07 billion is alot of money. But when you break it down per person, it's just under $17,000 per homeless person
Not accurate. Many of the homeless are in family units. You need to look at per household.
"We can provide a modest amount, if we elect to house a modest population"
From the article:
“It’s a huge amount of people,” Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, said. “There’s only nine cities in the entire state that have populations greater than our shelter system.”
[No one]--------[Modest Amount]--------[Everyone]
Where do you think we are on this spectrum? Methinks pretty far to the right.
Anonymous said...
Most of the jobs in NYC pay minimum wage...most of the apartments are well over $1,000/month - even in shitty Queens. How does one pay that when their gross income for the month is $1,200 ($10/hour, $400/week). There are no rentals for the working poor and most of the available jobs keep people in that bracket.
-------------------------------
AND that is when common sense comes into play. If you work a minimum wage job and live in the most expensive city in the country, then you move to another city/state where the cost of living is not high. Minimum wage jobs are all over the country and not all places in this country a small room doe snot cost you $1000 a month. This is what normal smart people do, they live where they can afford it, not somewhere where they can't and end up in a homeless shelter or packed in a one bedroom with four other people.
Enough with that response, it just does not cut it anymore. Just like if you cannot afford a Mercedes Benz, then you don't buy it.
The reason why nobody leaves to a supposed place they can afford is because there's no guarantee you'll get a job somewhere else. And most of the jobs are in big cities and they are going through the same shit NYC is going through with the hyperdevelopment and income inequality. And the victims are the lower skilled workers who continue to be taken for granted by their employers.
Making transitions should be simple but it isn't by a long shot, just like my similarly named poster said.
This is where the right to shelter comes in, the thing is it's being abused not only by recidivist shiftless derelicts but by politicians and their donors, which happen to be the hoteliers. (It's funny how the hotels complain about Airbnb and vice versa, when it seems they are co-existing quite nicely and profitably, and they are both responsible for the worsening of the homeless crisis, which it now officially is one)
The new affordable housing being created is geared toward gentrification and is influencing rapacity among private owners. Not only is the amount of apartments small, but the qualifying incomes don't match the average incomes of the neighborhoods they're in.
Common sense doesn't matter anymore thanks to the avarice of real estate and tourist industries and opportunistic oblivious politicians. As the citizens continue to argue over it.
Sorry JQ, but there is no guarantee in life period. And while many of your points are very valid and other cities are seeing this "gentrification" shit (but not all cities are as expensive as NYC and there are jobs in smaller cities too), so then one just stays in limbo with no job and plops in a homeless shelter. I still would like the see staistics broken down on the homeless in NYC, San Fran, Seattle, LA and Denver, like how many have actually lived in those cities from the get go and did not come from somewhere else, how many are drug addicts that have never entered a program, how many have been chronically unemployed for years and years, how many people have been put back on their feet from all these so-called "programs", etc. We would get a much better picture of this "crisis" if the powers that be would break these numbers down, which you know damn well they never will.
Hell that certainly is not what the immigrants of yore did (granted back then were more jobs and more industries), but too many today are just content with doing nothing and letting the government take care of them, especially those with kids. AND speaking of kids and jobs, even if things were totally wonderful in this country, there still are not the amount of jobs that were here decades and decades ago, due to plant moving out of the country and the biggest reason is the automation of jobs. SO, people need to stop over populating a world that cannot sustain them nor produces the jobs that it once did. Yet how many times are we reading about families in these these hotel shelters with 2, 3 and more kids. People don't need to have 2 or more kids, especially if they cannot afford a roof over their head or a pot to piss in.
AND even in the best of time, all these derelicts we see on the E train, on the corner with their signs and shaking their cups, would still be there, because that is the life they choose. Personal responsibility.
In the meantime, US hard working folks have to deal with all this bullshit and everything else. I mean fuck you cannot even ride the fucking E train in peace without having a shitload of homeless and all their garbage on almost every train.
My empathy for this homeless shit has long expired. The powers the be help to cause the issue and now it is US regular folks that have to bear the brunt of it.
I see and agree with your points and experience the same sights too, Joe. I assure you I have no tolerance for the obvious lazy and blatantly violent and olfactory offensive derelicts. But it's a little deeper now considering all the money spent to produce and manufacture this crisis that needs professional diligent reporting to figure it out. The daily news is off to a good start with their reporting on the de Faustio's homeless debacle a few weeks ago.
But you know what I assumed was guaranteed in this city as well as the nation:
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And it's clear that these have now become luxury items. Even the right to have shelter, which has now been as abused by political and appointed machinators with the same deftness as the NRA has done with the second amendment for owning military grade weaponry.
Joe, you forgot the birth and inspiration for the moneyed hipshit zeitgiest, Portland. This gentrification shit is also happening in places you wouldn't expect, Minnesota, Atlanta, Detroit, and Philadelphia.
Cheaper housing needs to be an overall solution for everyone - not just the homeless and the poor. Saying well don't work a minimum wage job if you want to live in NYC isn't the answer, as so many people are quick to say. It's nice to get a high paying job but let's be honest and say not most employers aren't looking to do that.
You have many tiers of workers and NYC needs the low paying jobs to continue as well. Local store workers, deli's, cleaning services, babysitting, etc. Are you willing to pay more for all these services so that the minimum wage can get to $20 an hour? I don't think anyone here wants to pay more for grocery's(yes those cashier's working), cable(cause customer service is a minimum wage job, UPS drivers for those deliveries. There aren't enough high school kids living at home or lets say illegal workers to cover all these things. Minimum wage is what it is. Being priced out of every neighborhood in NYC is the bigger issue, in my opinion. Anything close to the train has become for the wealthy or well off. I'm not saying giving for free but the Ghetto's were there for a reason and where are they now?
Joe, the total number of shelter families as per the latest data available shows that the last address given either missing or outside NYC by shelter entrants is at least 10%, to as high as about 18% given the type of family and month (<a href="https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dashboard/dhs_data_dashboard_charts_FY-2016-Q2.pdf>https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dashboard/dhs_data_dashboard_charts_FY-2016-Q2.pdf</a>)
Bear in mind, that is percent of FAMILIES, not individuals. Also, it would not count people who may have had a relative or friend or 2 who put them up temporarily who would receive their mail, and so would be an address the entrant could use, even though the family never really did live in NYC.
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