Acacia Network's poverty profiteering off the city's homeless population

Sludge


Annie was already retired when she lost her apartment. With no source of income save for her Social Security work benefits, it wasn’t long before she ended up in the New York City shelter system. That’s where she would learn the name Acacia Network. 

Acacia is the largest provider of homeless housing in New York’s metropolitan area, but it is not just a shelter operator. Over the decades, Acacia has built a small empire with connections running up the ladder of city government. It has amassed a web of interconnected nonprofits and for-profits that offer shelter, affordable housing, addiction and medical services, and security. According to the city’s Department of Homeless Services website, Acacia manages “750 individual family units and four buildings for approximately 550 homeless adults.”

Annie, whose name has been changed for this article, has been living in one of these for the last several years. But right away, she knew things were askew—and it wasn’t just that another resident had threatened to murder her. She would soon come to realize that the problem was multi-tiered: a pattern of mismanagement that left the shelter understaffed, undersupplied, and dangerous for its residents. 

“No nurse practitioner is ever there to give out the medication. The staff has to give out the medication,” Annie tells Sludge, noting that this leaves residents frequently out of sync with their individual treatment regimens with some dire consequences. Every other day, she sighs, “the ambulance seems to be there for one reason or another.” 

Compounding the issue, she says, is a lack of adequate security—something online reviews of the establishment have touched on. One reviewer says they never “felt safe” while living there.

“They’re supposed to have a guard on every floor,” Annie explains. “That rarely happens because people are always calling out. So one guard usually has to do two floors or sometimes three.”

On one occasion, Annie tells us someone at the shelter was hit over the head with a lead pipe smuggled in from a nearby construction site. Another time, she says, someone got hot water thrown on them in the dining room. 

There are other issues caused by Acacia not sufficiently treating residents, Annie says. This past summer, she explains, there was a string of toilet backups due to people flushing entire rolls and other objects.

Frustrated, Annie notes that the shelter tends to respond to these incidents in ways that hurt residents. After the hot water attack, for example, management removed hot water for tea and coffee from the dining room altogether. To address the toilet problems, the shelter’s cleaning staff stopped stocking rooms with toilet paper as soon as the facility’s annual “Callahan” inspection—named for the 1981 court case that established the “right to shelter” in New York City—had completed. 

“When you need toilet paper you have to go down to the front desk and they give you a wad…and you have to ration,” she laments.

What Annie describes is a complete culture of neglect, which doesn’t square with the large amount of money Acacia rakes in from the city. In the 2019 fiscal year alone (July 2018 through June 2019), it received $259 million in contracts from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), which accounted for 18.5% of the department’s contracts that year. Acacia gets additional funding from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Since the 2011 fiscal year, it has received over $1.1 billion worth of city contracts. 

 Acacia has seen its funding increase since Mayor Bill de Blasio took office. As luxury condominium developments rose and more of the city’s available housing stock was left empty, de Blasio found himself facing a simultaneous rise in homelessness. In response, he set out to increase the number of homeless shelters in the city. In 2017, he announced a plan, called “Turning the Tide on 
Homelessness in New York City,” to close unsafe and expensive cluster-site and hotel shelters and build 90 new shelters over five years.

Acacia and its multiple linked entities have been the biggest beneficiaries. In total, 10 Acacia entities have received roughly $1.17 billion in city funding since 2010.

de Blasio's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications; plenty of city money that's in the wrong hands

NY Daily News

The city’s scandal-scarred tech agency was overcharged millions for an electronic procurement system, according to an investigative watchdog.

Ivalua Inc. was first hired by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in 2016 to come up with a a system that allows 40 city agencies to buy products and services online.

In the years since, the contract has ballooned from $30.5 million to a whopping $46.9 million, the watchdog Checks and Balances Project found. The city has spent $27.5 million on the contract so far.

A similar system made for Dallas, Texas, cost just under $50,000 a year, according to documents obtained by the watchdog and shared with the Daily News.

“It appears new York City taxpayers were ripped off,” said Scott Peterson, executive director of Checks and Balances Project.

 Ivalua, a software company founded in 2000 and headquartered in California, had no prior experience contracting with American governments before it was chosen to build New York’s e-procurement system.

The city said Ivalua had worked with public sector clients in France. After being hired by New York, Ivalua secured more public contracts in Arizona, Ohio and Maryland.

The system Ivalua is constructing is intended to streamline and shorten the city’s procurement process – making it easier for dozens of agencies to buy goods and services from more than 11,000 vendors.

 Two years after the contract began in April 2016, Ivalua’s design still hadn’t been completed, an internal 2018 document obtained by Peterson shows. But the cost for the Procurement and Sourcing 

Solutions Portal – dubbed PASSPort – still went up by $15 million.

Ivalua did not respond to an email seeking comment Friday. Phone calls to the company went unanswered.

The city insisted Ivalua’s product has been a success so far – even through it’s not finished.

The city approves plan to stack sandbags four feet high to mitigate flooding from hurricanes

New York Times


After Hurricane Sandy devastated New York in 2012, city officials considered some drastic responses to storm surges, like long concrete sea walls and tall earthen berms.

But as the seventh hurricane season since then approaches, the city is relying on something more modest as the first line of defense against another inundation of Manhattan: a row of glorified sandbags.

In the next few months, the city’s Office of Emergency Management plans to oversee the installation of four-foot-tall sacks of soil along the East River esplanade, from Wall Street to just north of the Brooklyn Bridge.

For up to five years, they essentially would form the only barrier to keep water from again rushing into the low-lying neighborhoods around the South Street Seaport.

City officials say they are a temporary step while permanent solutions to New York’s vulnerability to big storms are still being planned and debated.

But the barriers have already provoked derision.

“Six years of studying it and you come up with sandbags? Really?” said Marco Pasanella, whose family owns a 180-year-old building with a wine shop that faces the river on South Street. He said he felt no less vulnerable than he did on the night that Sandy flooded his shop and left the district without power for two weeks.

Along with the doubts about their effectiveness, the barriers have also been panned as unsightly interlopers along a stretch of waterfront popular with pedestrians and bicyclists — one woman called them “atrocities.”

They will cover only about one mile of the waterfront, leaving the area below Wall Street unprotected, possibly for another decade or longer.

NYC Ferry subsidy costs are INSANE

NY Post

 

The city’s ferry system is taking taxpayers for a ride, with each individual trip costing $10.73 more than passengers pay, according to a government watchdog.
 
In a report titled “Swimming in Subsidies,” the Citizens Budget Commission said the $2.75 fare covered just about one-fifth of the cost of the waterborne-transit system.
 
The $10.73 subsidy is 10 times the $1.05 that the government kicks in for each subway trip, which costs the same $2.75.
 
And it’s nearly twice the $5.46 paid to subsidize each trip on the free Staten Island Ferry.
It was only a few months ago that city officials pegged the ferry subsidy at $7 to $8 a ride.
 
A planned expansion of the ferry system will hit taxpayers even harder.
 
A Coney Island line due in 2021 will need an eye-popping $24.75 per passenger from the city to stay afloat, the CBC estimated.
 
“They have created a ferry network that serves a small number of New Yorkers, is expensive to operate and requires a high subsidy that will only grow higher,” said CBC researcher Sean Campion.
The ferries carried 4.1 million passengers last year, less than the subways did in on an average day.
 

 Also:

City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s recent warnings about massive waste at NYC Ferry were alarming enough. But a Citizens Budget Commission report out Thursday truly, uh, rocks the boat.
 
For every ferry ride, the CBC found, the city kicks in an average of $10.73 of its own funds to meet costs. Every ride!
 
And, to be clear, that $10-plus is on top of the $2.75 fare.
 
That’s 10 times the average subsidy for the New York City Transit system. And double the one for the Staten Island Ferry.

And get this: A new route Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced will run from Coney Island to Wall Street — and cost the taxpayers a mind-numbing $24.75 in subsidies for every ride.
 
That’s $247.50 for five round trips a week — or $12,375 a year. Is the mayor nuts?
 
Based on Kelly Blue Book figures, de Blasio could buy each regular commuter a late-model Jaguar XE and save more than $2,000 a year on each one. Or put three riders in an Uber: The cost of that trip at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday was $35. Even with a $10 tip, the city could save $5,000 a pop each year. What in the blue seas is he thinking?

We all know damn well this mayor has no modicum of fiscal sense or is even capable of thinking. But there is something that wasn't mentioned in the CBC report and that is the free shuttle bus service that acts as a transfer to and from the ferries that traverses east and west Rockaway...

...which are also operated by Hornblower

Chirlane McCray's crazy, ineffective mental health program has cost the city close to a billion dollars and projected to cost another billion more

NY Post

Chirlane McCray’s mental health initiative is on track to spend $1 billion over five years — but city officials can’t provide a detailed breakdown or prove it’s making a positive difference, it was disclosed Wednesday.

The revelations came at a City Council hearing where legislators panned the first lady’s “Thrive” initiative for its slow response time and failure to treat the city’s mentally ill homeless.
“
I like the fact that money is going toward mental health, but when they say we’re seeing a benefit in all areas, I take exception to that, because I don’t see it everywhere,” Queens Councilman Robert Holden told The Post. “I’m not sure anybody does.”

Under pressure from Holden and fellow members of the council’s mental health committee, Thrive director Susan Herman admitted that the program — budgeted for a total $850 million between fiscal years 2016 and 2019 — will now cost $1 billion every four years.

She said Thrive would receive $250 million a year going forward, including $2 million to cover its 21 office staffers.

Politico

Since its inception in 2015, ThriveNYC — the city's sprawling $850 million initiative to address a variety of mental health issues — has operated without much scrutiny or accountability.

With few public metrics by which to measure its success so far, and the broad strokes used by city officials to describe its operations, the city has offered little insight into how it has assessed Thrive's efficacy since it began.

And because Thrive encompasses a variety of initiatives — some new, some already in existence — across more than a dozen agencies, it is difficult to establish a central, line-item budget delineating how the city is spending taxpayer dollars on the program. 

 Representatives from four advocacy and service organizations said that Thrive does not fund greater access to inpatient treatment or intensive outpatient services for those with serious mental illnesses, further burdening the social safety net.

“Thrive NYC is really best understood as a ‘tale of two cities’ initiative,” said Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and an expert on homelessness and urban policy. “It’s about trying to give people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged access to the same kind of mental health care that people in upper middle income or affluent communities have enjoyed as a matter of course for a very long time.”

But that kind of programming won’t address institutional problems like homelessness and serious mental illness, which are financial and safety burdens to the city, he said.
I
f we’re not addressing those two problems, then whatever we are doing is lacking,” Eide said.
McCray acknowledged in October 2018 that the city does not often discuss Thrive’s programming for violent individuals due to stigma.

“It promotes that misconception that too many people have, that people who have mental illness or people suffering from substance use disorders are violent, which is not true,” she said at a health care conference. 

The Post also has a biting editorial on Chirlie and Butthead and used my own description of her  anointed position in city hall to excoriate her profligate spending.

Flushing Meadows still flooding

Hey Crappy:

The City just spent months and millions fixing this road and area in Flushing Meadows Parks. The result: it still floods!

Chris

Cost of housing homeless skyrockets

From the Wall Street Journal:

New York City has increased spending on housing homeless people in shelters in recent years, but the population continues to hover at more than 60,000 despite efforts to move many into permanent housing, a new city report shows.

During the 2017 fiscal year, the city spent an average of $99 a day to house single adults in facilities in New York City, according to a management report released Monday by Mayor Bill de Blasio. In fiscal year 2018, that number grew to $117 a day.

The increased cost reflects a larger investment in service providers, repairs and security at shelters, according to New York City’s Department of Homeless Services.

The cost of housing homeless families was also more expensive in fiscal year 2018, when more than 22,340 children were living in shelters. During that time, the cost to house families with children averaged $192 a day, up from $171 in fiscal year 2017. In fiscal year 2014, it cost the city an average of $102 each day to house shelter families with children.

Meanwhile, the cost to house adult families rose in fiscal year 2018 to $147 each day, compared with $138 a day during the same period a year earlier, according to the report.

The total budget for the Department of Homeless Services is more than $2 billion, with $172 million added in fiscal year 2018 for shelter operations, according to New York City’s Office of Management and Budget.

A spokesman for Homeless Services said the increased costs reflect a greater investment in the department’s shelter system and more services provided at these shelters.

BQX somehow became shorter and more expensive

From Crains:

The de Blasio administration today released plans for its Brooklyn-Queens Connector, a streetcar officials envision running along the waterfront between the two boroughs. It has been delayed by complex infrastructure challenges.

The original streetcar was expected to cost $2.5 billion and run roughly 16 miles between Astoria, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. But the updated plan calls for a shorter route to Gowanus instead and will cost $2.7 billion. That translates to an increase in per-mile cost from roughly $156 million to $248 million.

De Blasio first announced plans for the streetcar in February 2016. But as officials looked further into potential routes, they found that the rat's nest of underground infrastructure presented enormous potential for increasing costs and would need to be thoroughly studied. As Crain's reported late last year, the problem presented officials with a catch-22: By studying the infrastructure more carefully, the city insulated itself from risk in the event it had to scrap the project, but doing so caused delays and drove up costs.

The original project was supposed to be completed in 2024 and be paid for through property tax revenue as the land around the route increased in value. The updated version of the project is now expected to be operational in 2029 and would require $1 billion from the federal government, according to a report in The New York Times, which noted that the city tax revenues originally thought to be available for the BQX are being spent on other priorities, including affordable housing.

City allocates additional $8M for Middle Village sewer project

From the NY Post:

The city has finally earmarked $8 million to fix ­aging sewer lines in Middle Village, Queens, that have caused fecal flooding in residents’ basements — a day ­after The Post revealed how the repairs had been promised for a decade.

“My God, I can’t believe it,” said longtime resident Vito Cascione, 60, whose 1985 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham was flooded with sewer water during a recent heavy storm.

“The Post’s article really raised eyebrows and a lot of questions, so hopefully we can get this resolved once and for all,” Cascione said.

The 74th Street and Penelope Avenue sewer project, which was first proposed in 2007, sat unfinished for nine months after contractors dug up contaminated soil at the site and needed the extra dough to safely excavate it.

City Hall confirmed to The Post Friday afternoon the money has been allocated and will be processed through the comptroller’s office “soon.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Design and Construction expects work to resume “by the end of the year.” The contractor in charge of the project said about another year of work is still needed.

March 2021 is new end date for Van Wyck project

From CBS 2:

“I am a Queens boy,” the governor said right before cutting the ribbon for the newly repaired Queens Midtown Tunnel, damaged during Superstorm Sandy.

But if you want bragging rights for having Queens roots, you have to take the pain with the acclaim, Kramer reported. Right now, there are some borough residents who have a bone to pick with “Andy from Queens.”

“Construction is horrible around here. You can’t go nowhere,” one driver said.

“Very annoying,” said another.

“It’s not easy to travel everywhere,” another said.

“I’m always late,” a man added. “I have to leave an hour earlier to get on the Van Wyck.”

The work began in 2010, but that was just phase one, which, according to the state’s records, was a year and a half late and millions of dollars over budget.

They’re now working on phase two, phase three and the yet-to-be started phase four to replace six decaying overpasses, rehab four more and widen the highway from six lanes to eight – a complex and intricate project that first required widening everything else to accommodate more lanes.

As the phases have multiplied, so has the cost.

King of the hill, top of the heap!

From Metro:

New Yorkers may feel like this is one of the best cities in America, but a new report has named New York City one of the worst-run cities in the United States.

New York City ranked as the third-worst-run city in the country according to a WalletHub study published on Monday.

This is the second year in a row New York landed near the bottom on WalletHub’s ranking of the best-run cities. Out of 150 cities measured on a variety of “quality of services,” New York came in at number 148, above only Detroit and Washington, D.C. Gulfport, Mississippi and San Fransisco came in above New York, rounding out the top five worst-run cities.

WalletHub's list looks at how effective the local leadership is, but how can that be measured?

"One way is by determining a city’s operating efficiency," per the report. "In other words, we can learn how well city officials manage and spend public funds by comparing the quality of services residents receive against the city’s total budget."

The study’s “quality of services” score looked at different details across several categories: financial stability, education, health, safety, economy and infrastructure and pollution.

New York fared well in the safety area, but its finances and economic issues dragged down its overall score. According to the report, New York has some of the highest long-term outstanding debt.

The report also dinged New York City when it came to education. The high school graduation rate here is 74.3 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in February.

Time to drop the dead weight

From the NY Times:

Despite a high-profile effort by Mayor Bill de Blasio to reduce the number of city teachers without permanent jobs who draw full pay and benefits, the city spent $136 million this school year to keep them on the payroll, according to a study released Thursday.

The unassigned employees are part of a pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, and there were 1,202 teachers and other staff in it at the start of the school year, according to the report by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. Despite buyouts, mandatory placements in schools and a rule that all unassigned teachers must look for permanent posts, there were still 756 teachers in the pool in April.

Like teachers with full-time classroom assignments, those in the pool are entitled to regular pay raises, step increases and longevity increases, providing “no incentive for unmotivated or unsuitable teachers to secure new permanent placements,” the report notes.

Teachers in the pool have an average of 18 years on the job, and an average salary of $98,126. With a 3 percent raise for all city teachers going into effect on Saturday, combined with a 2 percent raise teachers received in May, senior teachers in the pool could now earn up to $119,472, the report found.

Teachers land in the reserve pool because their schools have been closed, or their budgets cut, or because they were the subject of unsatisfactory performance evaluations or disciplinary actions. They can stay in the pool indefinitely.

The United Federation of Teachers contract with the city expires in November, and the budget commission urged the city to use the contract negotiations to cap the time teachers can spend in the pool at six months.

State made unnecessary Medicaid payouts

From Crain's:

Thanks to a lack of oversight, the state Health Department doled out $1.3 billion in six years in Medicaid premiums for people who were already enrolled in other comprehensive health plans, according to a new report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

The report found that the state Health Department is not quick enough to disenroll people when they sign up for coverage with another insurer. The overwhelming majority of those funds—about $1.2 billion—are not recoverable.

"Glitches in the state Department of Health's payment system and other problems led to over a billion dollars in unnecessary spending," DiNapoli said. "The department needs to improve its procedures and stop this waste of taxpayer money."

Gentrification trolley has already cost taxpayers a pretty penny

From the NY Post:

There’s not a single rail in the ground, but the mayor’s plan to create a trolley along the Brooklyn waterfront has already cost the city at least $7 million in taxpayer money, The Post has learned.

That’s the current price tag on a delayed feasibility study — spearheaded by the consulting firms KPMG and WSP — that will determine whether the controversial project is even plausible.

Economic Development Corp. officials had initially said the review would be completed in the fall of 2017, but this week they wouldn’t put a timeline on its release.

Homeless not-for-profit's math doesn't add up

From the Daily News:

A nonprofit that has become a major homeless shelter provider in a short time frame is being audited by the city — less than a year after it scored $407 million in contracts.

Childrens Community Services lassoed two mega-contracts with the Department of Homeless Services last June to operate hotel shelters in four boroughs and charge as much as $270 a night to house a family in a room.

The city inked the deals even though the nonprofit only started four years ago and its most recent tax filing showed it was $6 million in the red.

One contract was for three years and $360 million to house homeless families. The other was for $47.7 million to house single adults.

When the Daily News inquired about the nonprofit's debts and murky financials, Homeless Services said it planned to procure an independent accounting firm to review Childrens Community Services and pare down the number of shelters the nonprofit operates.

Lots of dough thrown down the homeless hole

From the Daily News:

It costs a lot of money to keep the homeless shelter system's population flat.

Both the City Council and Controller Scott Stringer questioned the precipitously rising budget for the Department of Homeless Services Tuesday, even as the homeless population of about 61,000 New Yorkers has yet to drop.

Councilman Steve Levin said that actual spending for the Department of Homeless Services was $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2016 — and had grown to $2.14 billion in the current fiscal year, after the city twice modified the budget mid-year, twice, to add cash. That's a $700 million jump.

"But we have not seen a significant decrease in the shelter census despite that increase in spending — 50% over what it was in fiscal year 2016," Levin said during a City Council budget hearing on the budgets of the city's welfare agencies.

Levin said the spending was worthy — and that the city had underfunded the system in the past. But he questioned what results the money was getting if the city had the same shelter population — and if those in shelter were still unhappy with conditions.

Simple: hotel rates went up.

Your tax dollars at work, DHS edition

Partying like it's 1975

From Crains:

Mayor Bill de Blasio portrays his preliminary $89 billion budget as a fiscally responsible plan to make the city a fairer place—his No. 1 priority—and to meet the demands of the city’s growth (the very first chart in his budget summary shows the increase in the city’s population, which reached 8.5 million in 2016).

He certainly has spent a lot of money in pursuit of those goals.

The $89 billion figure represents an increase of $16.5 billion from the last Bloomberg budget, according to figures from the Citizens Budget Commission that adjust the numbers for the rollover of surpluses, intergovernment transfers and reserves. The percentage increase is 22.7%, which is more than double the rate of inflation during the period. If he had merely kept pace with inflation, the budget would be a little over $80 billion—a big difference.

The Citizens Budget Commission and others have criticized the mayor for not protecting the city from the three major threats it faces: the prospect of significant budget cuts from the federal government, which sends the city something on the order of $7 billion a year; the potential loss of millionaire taxpayers to other states because of the impact of the Republican tax bill; and the fact that the city’s amazing economic boom, which next month will set a modern record for its length, will come to an end sooner rather than later.

Bill sticking taxpayers with quite a tab

From the Daily News:

Add another $2.6 million to the city budget — to cover Mayor de Blasio’s legal bills.

The city quietly posted notice of a proposed $2.6 million contract between the Law Department and Kramer Levin Naftalis and Frankel LLP — Hizzoner’s law firm — in the City Record Friday.

The contract is “to provide Legal Services to the mayor in connection with an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and related work” from 2016 to 2018.

The firm represented de Blasio and others at City Hall in a series of investigations into his dealing with fund-raisers — including Harendra Singh, the businessman who pleaded guilty to bribing the mayor. The mayor and his staff were not charged or convicted of any crimes during the year-long probes — but racked up quite a legal bill.

And the taxpayer-funded tab is expected to keep climbing.

“No,” spokesman Eric Phillips said when asked if the $2.6 million was the full legal bill to the city. “When there is a final, complete amount we will release that figure.”

Queens College president paid to not live in school's mansion

From the NY Post:

Queens College has let a historic $2.5 million waterfront mansion with sweeping views of Little Neck Bay stand empty for three years after its current president chose to live in his Westchester home while getting a $5,000 monthly housing allowance.

While Felix Matos Rodriguez collects $60,000 a year to live in his own house, the CUNY-owned Douglaston manse collects dust, used only sporadically for college functions.