Back in May, as New York was on the precipice of reopening after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions, the city submitted plans to the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA) seeking permission to begin transferring around 9,000 homeless adults from hotel rooms back to the group shelters the city had used before the pandemic.
The rooms, rented by the city at the start of the crisis at some 60 hotels across the boroughs, were intended to help curb the spread of the virus by providing shelter residents with access to more private space instead of the often crowded, dormitory-style sites that make up the shelter system.
The effort worked—just 0.4 percent of the city’s total COVID-19 cases
have been among New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, officials
say—but their use was always intended to be temporary, Mayor Bill de
Blasio repeatedly stressed.
In seeking the state’s permission to
cease using the hotel sites, the city’s Department of Social Services
(DSS) and Department of Homeless Services (DHS) submitted detailed plans
to the state on how it would do so in order to minimize COVID risks,
including meeting a series of specific criteria laid out by the city’s
Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).
But a month later, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo lifted the state’s COVID-19 restrictions
and social distancing guidelines in light of increasing vaccination
rates, meaning the city no longer needed state permission to move
forward on the hotel phase-outs. Those earlier required plans, a spokesperson for the former governor told City Limits at the time, were “moot.”
In the months since, the city has pushed forward on the controversial hotel transfers, despite legal challenges that temporarily
halted the practice this summer. And the moves have been carried out
without needing to meet the requirements the city set for itself in
those May plans sent to the OTDA, since it was no longer required by the
state to do so.
But those earlier draft plans, obtained through a
Freedom of Information Law request by advocates from the Urban Justice
Center’s Safety Net Project and shared with City Limits, offer a look at
the city Health Department’s initial recommendations for the moves, at
odds with how the actual transfers have been carried out since.
The
letter city agencies sent to OTDA on May 18 includes a list of Health
Department “shelter reopening metrics,” and recommends that shelter
populations should “remain in hotels until the criteria laid out in this
document are met.” The criteria included, among other things, that the
7-day average hospital admission threshold for COVID-like illnesses
remain below 50 cases per day, and that the city sees “no unforeseen
changes in the COVID-19 disease landscape” such as “a major increase in
COVID-19 variants of concern.”
The Health Department also
recommended that the hotel-to-shelter relocations should be
“discontinued (if not yet complete) or there should be a return to the
use of hotels” if those factors are no longer met. The city’s average
COVID-19 hospitalization admissions began to surpass that 50-case
threshold beginning in July; it was 54 on Thursday, city data shows.
Meanwhile, the highly contagious Delta variant now accounts for 98 percent of positive city COVID tests
over the last four weeks, what advocates argue constitutes a major
change in the city’s “COVID-19 landscape” that the DOHMH warned about in
its draft recommendations.
11 comments:
Could they be making room for the mass invasion of illegals from the southern border ?
They will be treated better than our poor American Homeless. Prove me wrong...
The biggest problem of the inevitable return of the pandemic is not red-neck Southerners ...
(although those Black folks - labeled as 'Southerners' in the media giving everyone the impression they were ignorant whites instead of ghetto darlings - taking a slug at the cash register lady is so classic because she likely did not greet them with a rapturous smile like we see on woke TV propoganda)
but the Democrat's Open Border Migration policy forces you and me to pay taxes to support the unvaccinated illegals as they get on their feet, brought here for one purpose and one purpose only: become voters for the Democrats increasingly shaky base.
@“ Could they be making room for the mass invasion of illegals from the southern border ”
Rather them than a bunch of fat useless southerners, of any color.
Send them to the military base where Jumanne Williams lives.
They will be treated better than most law-abiding citizens in NYC.
"If you don't take this damn vaccine, you ain't black. And hurry the hell up, too. Damn peasants." Xiden and Bolsheviks
I wish I could get the city to pay so I could get a shuttle bus to take where I need to go.
But unfortunately, I am just a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen stupid enough to pay the $2.75 for the bus that is too slow and takes too long since NYC has the largest traffic congestion in the whole country.
And yet, alot of homeless people still get to take the bus for free.
@"since NYC has the largest traffic congestion in the whole country.'
Too many over privileged car drivers insist on taking their big hunks of scrap metal into the city.
We are looking more like China with FEMA housing for non-jabbers.
"Privileged car drivers" Go ride your skateboard soy boy !
@" Anonymous Anonymous said...
"Privileged car drivers" Go ride your skateboard soy boy !"
Actually I prefer oat milk, Fat Boy!
If you don't protest vax mandates..."you ain't black!"
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