City misjudged homeless population

From Crains:

The de Blasio administration and the City Council failed to set aside enough funds for the homeless shelter capacity they would need this year and are now paying for their optimism, officials revealed this week.

Early this year, the administration believed that its systemic, long-term approach to homelessness would reduce the shelter population by winter.

They were wrong. The census just again topped 12,000 families, where it was at the same time last year.

The City Council voted Wednesday to tack $137.5 million on to the Department of Homeless Services budget for shelters, $88 million of which will come from city taxpayers. That represents an almost 17% increase in the shelter budget for this year.

“These are predominantly for adult shelter and family shelter re-estimates," outgoing Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor said at a City Council hearing last week.

The gap resulted from an incorrect assumption by the administration and the council that the shelter population would trend downward by the end of the year thanks to new subsidy and homelessness-prevention programs, according to council staff. While mid-year budget adjustments are normal, this year’s is remarkable, one aide said.

A mayoral spokeswoman said the funding adjustment was meant to cover population and cost increases since fiscal year 2014, upon which this fiscal year’s estimates were based.

Gilbert gone

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio, still struggling to manage near-record levels of homelessness, announced on Tuesday that his homeless-services chief was stepping down in another shake-up of the administration’s antipoverty efforts.

The departure of the commissioner, Gilbert Taylor, is the latest fallout from the homelessness crisis, which has become a consuming political problem for Mr. de Blasio as he tries to address deepening inequality in New York City.

Since Mr. de Blasio took office, the number of people in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services has jumped to more than 57,000 from about 53,000, peaking at 59,068.

Pan Am contract rejected...for now

From DNA Info:

Comptroller Scott Stringer has rejected a contract for the homeless shelter in the former Pan Am Hotel, citing concerns about the safety of those living there, his office announced Monday.

Stringer said he won't approve the permanent contract between the city and the shelter's operator, Samaritan Village, until his office "receives assurances that anyone staying in these facilities will be safe, all outstanding violations and complaints have been corrected and all documentation that the requirements of the contracting process were met."

The 216 rooms lack kitchens, which are required by law.

Stringer's office sent the permanent contract back to the administration along with a contract for a shelter on West 45th Street in Manhattan run by Aguila Inc., his office said.

When asked about the conditions at the shelter inside the Pan Am, specifically the lack of kitchens that are required by law, DHS Commissioner Gilbert Taylor said they didn't have any immediate plans to add them.

"We don’t have a plan yet to install cooking facilities in that location. We’re not certain that that would be actually the best thing for us to do," he said.

From DNA Info:

Life in the nearly year-old Pan Am homeless shelter is worse than serving time in jail, some residents told DNAinfo New York.

The facility, which opened in June 2015 to help house the record-number of New Yorkers living in shelters, which was 56,602 as of May 5 and included 11,600 families, crams clients into tiny rooms without kitchens — against city, state and federal guidelines.

Instead, the 216-room shelter operator, Samaritan Village, offers three meals a day. But the food is "disgusting" and "garbage," according to nearly a dozen residents, all mothers, who spoke to DNAinfo about how they have found it difficult and expensive to live in a shelter without kitchens.

“The food is still frozen, it’s terrible,” said one mother, who has a 9-year-old daughter. DNAinfo is withholding the mothers' names because they fear retaliation for speaking to the media.

When she moved into the shelter, also know as the Boulevard Family Center, in January she got sick with what she believed to be food poisoning her first week there, she said.

“It’s exhausting when you don’t get enough food stamps because [the] shelter says they provide food," she said. "I did time — the food was better in jail."

Another resident estimates she spends $60 a day on food for her and two teenaged sons, including one with special needs. She usually picks up dinner at McDonald's across Queens Boulevard or at a nearby deli.

“If we had kitchen, I’d spend $20,” she said. “Food is expensive.”

Her tiny room, where her two sons share one bed, is equipped with a small refrigerator but she's forbidden from keeping a microwave.

The one communal microwave broke weeks ago and hasn't been fixed, residents said.

Another mom of three teenagers said she used to buy meals at a local supermarket and heat them in the microwave, but couldn't anymore since it broke.

Millions upon millions of tax dollars given to slumlords

From the Daily News:

In the past five years, the city has spent $241 million housing homeless families in hellholes rife with a catalog of code violations from vermin to lead paint, a Daily News investigation has found.

The money flowed to the operators of 24 fleabag hotels and rundown tenements that, despite being repeatedly cited by city inspectors, have become last-resort housing for thousands of desperate families.

All told, taxpayers have coughed up a stunning $1.7 billion to shelter a steadily rising tide of families since fiscal year 2010, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Law show.

Throughout that time, the city has consistently spent more on family shelters than it did on parks, libraries or senior programs.

During the last four years of the Bloomberg mayoralty and the first six months of Mayor de Blasio’s administration, the annual cost of family shelters rose 34%, peaking at $406.2 million in the last fiscal year.

As the number of homeless families seeking shelter rose from 37,000 in 2010 to top 60,000 in December, city inspectors kept citing many of the shelters for a long and horrific list of infractions.

Inspectors found dead rats and mice, bunk beds and cribs jammed up against windows leading to the fire escape, and numerous nonfunctioning smoke detectors. At one fleabag, staff claimed they weren’t allowed to turn on air conditioning without a doctor’s note.

The DOI found that the city Homeless Services Department routinely gave shelters with serious open code violations a “passing grade,” and in some cases did little to punish the nonprofits it pays to run these flophouses.

So, these places are run like hovels, but they are in the process of giving permanent contracts to the slumlords running them? Wouldn't it make more sense to ban them from providing services and finding new providers?

Check out what the Daily News found at the Pan Am.

A new approach to preventing homelessness

From NBC:

Mayor de Blasio's administration is rolling out some new plans that it hopes will reduce the number of families sleeping in the homeless shelter system. Melissa Russo reports.