NYC Pilots ‘Housing First’ Plan for Handful of Homeless Adults By David Brand . Published November 15, 2022
A new city pilot program is moving 80 formerly street-homeless New Yorkers into vacant supportive housing units while bypassing a series of grueling and time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles, Mayor Eric Adams said Monday.
The program launched in early September at four single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan run by the nonprofit Volunteers of America-Greater New York (VOA-GNY). It’s an example of the “Housing First” model, in which people with mental illness who experience homelessness are given keys to apartments with on-site supports without having to prove they are “ready” for permanent housing or complete onerous paperwork. A growing body of research shows that Housing First is effective for reducing homelessness and keeping people stably housed.
A new city pilot program is moving 80 formerly street-homeless New Yorkers into vacant supportive housing units while bypassing a series of grueling and time-consuming bureaucratic hurdles, Mayor Eric Adams said Monday.
The program launched in early September at four single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan run by the nonprofit Volunteers of America-Greater New York (VOA-GNY). It’s an example of the “Housing First” model, in which people with mental illness who experience homelessness are given keys to apartments with on-site supports without having to prove they are “ready” for permanent housing or complete onerous paperwork. A growing body of research shows that Housing First is effective for reducing homelessness and keeping people stably housed.
Adams told reporters that the city decided to launch the program with just a few participants through VOA-GNY to assess its effectiveness and consider how to bring the model to scale at other supportive housing sites.
“We had to get it right,” Adams said. “The worst thing we can do is start with 10,000 and figure we have to shift and pivot and shift without doing the proper analysis. We’re going to get it right and make sure that we can expand it.”
Advocates for the rights of homeless New Yorkers, on the other hand, have said that Housing First is already a tried and true model and could be the basis for filling all the vacant supportive housing units amid a record-high shelter population. The 80 units “are a positive option for 80 people,” said Kathleen Cash, a homeless and benefits advocate with the organization Safety Net Project. “But there are some 2,600 vacant supportive housing units, more than when this administration began, and there are serious actions the city can take— that it has power over—to fill those units. They’ve simply refused to do so.”
City Limits reported in July on the potential for true Housing First programs in New York City, as Adams, building on the efforts of his predecessor Mayor Bill de Blasio, ordered city workers to drive street homeless New Yorkers from public spaces and into shelters with the potential for permanent housing down the road. A large-scale Housing First program has proven effective in Houston, where 25,000 unhoused people have moved from the streets into apartments. Adams previously said he was skeptical the model could work in New York City, where it was pioneered but rarely applied.
“In life, I learned that idealism collides with realism,” Adams said at a June press conference when asked about Housing First moves. “There are people living on the street right now who are dealing with mental health illnesses…that can’t make those decisions.”
Several supportive housing providers, meanwhile, said a direct-to-housing program seemed like a no-brainer—ending homelessness by giving people homes—but they worried paperwork delays or eligibility considerations could jeopardize state and federal funding sources or put at risk their low-income housing tax credits—lucrative cash streams that incentivize development but can be revoked for noncompliance with income eligibility and other rules.
By June, however, the VOA-GNY plan was already in the works. The city owns the buildings and will put up the money to house the tenants and provide services until other funding comes through from state and federal housing and mental health agencies. That arrangement serves as a fiscal backstop for VOA-GNY, covering the rent and social service costs, while allowing them to provide case management and offer counseling to tenants in stable housing—a key to stability in other areas of life.
“The obvious goal that we all have is to take these unsheltered individuals off the streets and into housing,” VOA-GNY President and CEO Myung Lee told City Limits. “The second goal is that we really want to make sure that any bureaucracy that stands in the way of clients being housed is something we can work through.”
Tenants in the program were first staying at a Bronx “Welcome Center”— a type of short-term shelter for people who had been bedding down in public spaces—where they were informed of the SRO units, Lee said. In three of the buildings, tenants have their own rooms and share common kitchens and bathrooms, she said. Case management and social service staff work on-site and tenants sign annual leases.
Department of Social Services Commissioner Gary Jenkins said the agency will “evaluate the pilot” over the next six to eight months in the hopes of expanding the Housing First model.
“This is really groundbreaking for us,” he told City Limits by phone Sunday.
Expanding Voucher Access
Along with the Housing First announcement, Adams also described a number of rule changes designed to give more New Yorkers access to CityFHEPS housing vouchers, which pay the bulk of the rent for families and individuals who qualify based on their low income. A number of rules have prevented many New Yorkers from accessing the rent subsidies, however.
The city will increase CityFHEPS eligibility to include single adults who work full-time and earn minimum wage, even if their income is above 200 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $27,180. Families with one person, including a child, who receives Supplemental Security Income (SSI) will qualify for CityFHEPs as opposed to old rules that required the SSI-recipient to be the head of household. As will families with an adult who works 14 hours a week—down from 30 hours.
In the past, parents who worked 30 hours a week may have made too much to qualify for the voucher, but working any less also disqualified them, said Catherine Trapani, head of the organization Homeless Services United. She said the new changes will address that “income cliff.”
Adams said the city also plans to tackle source of income (SOI) discrimination—a pervasive form of bias by landlords and brokers against people who use rent subsidies that can stand in as a proxy for racial and anti-poor discrimination. In April, the main municipal enforcement unit tasked with cracking down on SOI discrimination had zero staff members, as City Limits reported at the time.
“This program, the housing voucher program, it puts people in better homes and better places. But you do find discrepancies as far as, because you have [a subsidy] you are, quote, a certain kind of people,” said Ernestine Jackson, a former NYPD employee who secured an apartment for herself and her son with a federal Section 8 housing voucher.
The reforms do not necessarily get at some of the core bureaucratic problems that force many CityFHEPS recipients—and frustrated landlords willing to accept them—to wait months to actually move into an apartment. Many of those problems may come down to staffing. A report Monday by the state comptroller’s office found that the Department of Social Services (DSS) was down roughly 15 percent of its budgeted staff in August.
The city is planning to soon hire 150 new staff members for DSS with many of them set to process CityFHEPS applications, a City Hall spokesperson said following the press conference.
The changes received positive feedback from a number of advocates working to move people out of shelters and into permanent housing, though they had hoped the city would go further by ending a 90-day wait time for access to vouchers.
“They’re encouraging,” Trapani said. “I don’t want perfect to be the enemy of the good. I think there were a lot of positive changes.”
NYC homeless shelter population hits all-time high amid cascading migrant crisis
The city’s homeless shelter population has hit an all-time high as hundreds of Latin American migrants continue to pour into New York every week as part of a crisis that’s driving the local social safety net to the brink of collapse.
The previous record — 61,415 individuals in city shelters on Jan. 12, 2019 — was first cracked over the weekend, data from the Department of Homeless Services show. On Monday, the latest day for which data is available, the tally reached 62,174.
In addition to setting a new population record, the average length of stay has also surged to all-time highs, with single adults now spending an average of 509 days in shelters, according to city data. Families with kids are, on average, in a shelter even longer — 534 days — and adult families spend an astonishing 855 days in shelters on average, the data shows.
As of this Monday, more than 19,000 Central and South American asylum seekers fleeing violence and economic devastation in their home countries had cycled through the city homeless shelter intake system, according to data from Adams’ office. A majority of them remain in shelters, and more migrants are being sent to the city every day after crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
The administration has scrambled to accommodate the migrants, and is in the process of building a controversial tent camp on Randalls Island to house some. City Council members have lambasted the tent plan as inhumane, and urged Adams to house migrants in vacant hotels instead.
On that note, Adams announced in a Wednesday afternoon statement that the city is opening an emergency relief center for asylum seeking families with children at the upscale Row Hotel in Midtown. It will initially have capacity to house 200 families, who will get access to food, medical care and case work services.
Despite having been at the forefront of calling for migrants to be housed in hotels, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) said she was given no heads up on the latest emergency facility announcement, signaling brewing tensions between the Council and the mayor’s team.
“I was not privy to this information,” she told reporters at City Hall. “It’s never ok when you get no notice. But given the situation that we’re in now — the crisis that we’re in now — we certainly understand that things happen.”
Many migrants in New York were sent to the city by Republican governors, including Texas’ Greg Abbott, as part of a political stunt aimed at criticizing Democratic immigration policies.
The Daily News spotted roughly 60 Venezuelan migrants being dropped off Wednesday morning at the 30th Street intake center in Manhattan — the same location where dozens of people were forced to sleep on floors and benches last month in apparent violation of the right-to-shelter law after the city failed to provide beds for them in a timely manner.
The migrants included teenagers, and several wore clothing emblazoned with the words “Save the Children,” a humanitarian organization that helps asylum seekers with accessing services.
While the migrant crisis is undoubtedly straining the shelter system, the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said some dysfunction can be attributed to “bureaucratic bottlenecks” at city agencies and a drastic slowdown in affordable housing production.
Adams, the advocacy groups said, has not done enough to address the matter.
“Mayor Adams must commit to financing at least 6,000 apartments per year for homeless households and 6,000 apartments per year for households with extremely low incomes. We have urged the administration to take these necessary steps for months,” the groups said in a statement. “Should the city fail to act, the shelter census will only continue to rise even higher and more people will needlessly suffer homelessness.”
In his Wednesday announcement, Adams also affirmed that the tent city on Randalls will “soon” open, and added that his administration is looking into building several more similar facilities in the city.
The mayor has pushed back against criticism over his tent plans by accusing Council members of publicly voicing support for the migrants, but privately expressing reservations about housing them in their districts.
“Some of the loudest that are saying we need to make sure we house asylum seekers have been some of the loudest of saying not on our block,” he said Tuesday before predicting that “every community is going to see asylum seekers” if the crisis continues at its current pace. He declined to name the Council members whose views he’s taking issue with.
By Chris Sommerfeldt and Michael Gartland
New York Daily News
•
Oct 12, 2022 at 6:00 pm
NYC Issues Thousands of Federal Housing Vouchers, But Finding an Apartment Remains Tough
Just 19.4 percent of the 7,788 federal Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHV) issued to New York City by the Biden Administration in May 2021 have been used to secure an apartment, according to city data. That’s compared to a national rate of 48.7 percent.
Seventeen months after New York City received a trove of much-needed Section 8 housing vouchers, homeless recipients are still finding it hard to actually use them as the city’s sluggish lease-up rate trails far behind the national average.
Just 19.4 percent of the 7,788 federal Emergency Housing Vouchers (EHV) issued to New York City by the Biden Administration in May 2021 have been used to secure an apartment, according to city data. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provided 5,738 of the new subsidies to NYCHA and another 2,050 to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), accounting for about 11 percent of the 70,000 vouchers issued nationwide as part of the administration’s American Rescue Plan stimulus package.
Before closing the application window on Sept. 30, HPD and NYCHA released an additional 1,000 vouchers to allow more households to try to secure an apartment. But in the city’s tight rental market, where voucher holders face administrative hurdles and rampant discrimination—with little enforcement—finding a unit can be nearly impossible.
All told, New York City households have used just 1,515 of the vouchers as of Oct. 3, HPD said. That’s a lease-up rate of about 17 percent when factoring in the extra 1,000 vouchers, but 19.4 percent of the actual total provided by HUD. Either way, New York City lags behind the statewide rate of 27.5 percent and the national rate of 48.7 percent, according to a database maintained by HUD.
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https://citylimits.org/2022/10/05/
Migrants use charity cash to flee NYC when they can’t get into shelter By Bernadette Hogan, Kevin Sheehan, MaryAnn Martinez and Bruce Golding August 11, 2022 7:57pm
From south of the border, to the front of the line.
The city rolled out the red carpet for a group of migrants at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter who could be seen on Thursday boarding a yellow school bus headed to a homeless assessment center in Brooklyn.
The 17 migrants were escorted from Manhattan to their next accommodations while carrying identical, brand-new black backpacks and wearing clothing that also appeared new.
One, Daniel Reyes, said he was from Honduras and had been at the shelter for around a month after arriving in the US about a year ago. Reyes said eight others — one from Colombia, one from Guatemala and six from Venezuela — showed up at the shelter three days earlier.
“The gangs — no good. They come to the United States,” he said. We’ve all been here waiting, going through this process, and let me tell you: They’re getting everything real quick,” said Ronald Francois, 55, a Navy veteran from Queens. “They got more in four or five days than I got in 29! They’re brushing us aside.”
The preferential treatment wasn’t enough for some asylum-seekers. Four people who braved trekking to the US-Mexico border and across it got so fed up waiting for beds in New York City that they used charity money to head to Washington, DC, The Post has learned.
The unidentified men arrived in the Big Apple within the past three weeks and went to the city-run Bellevue Men’s Shelter in Manhattan’s Kips Bay, which also serves as an intake center for the Department of Homeless Services, sources said.
“They were either turned away or confused by the situation because there were a lot of people waiting for intake that day,” a source said.
The men — who don’t speak English — returned to the shelter “a few times” during about two and a half days in the city but “ultimately they decided to go to Washington,” the source said.
They had spent a night in the nation’s capital while traveling to New York, and they used $50 gift cards they received from Catholic Charities to pay for their bus fares back there, the source said.
The Post exclusively reported this week that City Hall was scrambling to open a dedicated migrant intake center with enough room to house 600 families in Midtown by Monday.
Mayor Adams last month revealed the city’s shelter system was overloaded by migrants, some of whom told The Post that they were directed to the city by Biden administration immigration officials in Texas.
The Department of Homeless Services didn’t respond to a request for comment.
‘Forced’ busing?
Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott started sending busloads of migrants to the city to protest what he called President Biden’s “irresponsible open-border policies.”
Since Friday, at least 160 migrants have arrived on five buses chartered by Abbott, with 92 dropped off outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal over the course of about 45 minutes Wednesday morning.
On Sunday, Adams alleged that Abbott had sent some migrants to New York unwillingly.
“Some of the families are on the bus that wanted to go to other locations, and they were not allowed to do so,” he said. “They were forced on the bus.”
Abbott’s office has said all the migrants voluntarily sign waivers before being put on the buses.
The Post on Thursday was prevented from interviewing migrants at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter about Adams’ accusation. Three uniformed city Department of Homeless Services officers ordered a reporter off the sidewalk in what appeared to be a blatantly illegal act.
“If you need to talk to our clients, call 43 Beaver St., 17th floor!” one officer said.
At that point, two migrants from Venezuela who arrived on the Abbott-chartered bus Wednesday — and who agreed to be interviewed — got scared and retreated inside the shelter.
Also Thursday, two other Abbott-chartered buses left Del Rio, Texas, en route to Washington, DC. It was unclear if the buses would continue on to New York City, as others have.
Javier, 25, a migrant from Venezuela, told The Post that he was boarding the first bus in hopes of making his way to the Big Apple, where he said a friend was living.
“I’m a lot closer to New York in Washington than I am here,” he said. “I heard there is a shelter where you can stay for some time until you’re able to get on your feet financially.”
Javier said he was penniless after getting robbed and having to pay bribes to officials during his trek to the US, and he called the free bus ride “a blessing because I don’t have money to keep going.”
“Any help that I can get is a godsend,” he added. Other migrants interviewed by The Post in San Antonio, Texas, said they were also hoping to get to New York City.
“The only thing I want right now is to be able to stay in a shelter where I can stay for at least a week, so I can work and earn a little money to find a place to live for my family,” said Cesar Sandoval Guerrero, 26.
Guerrero said he, his wife and their kids, ages 3 and 4, left Venezuela on June 19 because he couldn’t afford to live on his wages as a national-guard member and was told to extort bribes from his neighbors to make ends meet.
A short time later, 17 migrants came out and got on a yellow school bus that was apparently headed for a homeless assessment center in Brooklyn.
The men were all carrying identical, brand-new black backpacks and wearing clothing that also appeared new.
One, Daniel Reyes, said he was from Honduras and had been at the shelter for around a month after arriving in the US about a year ago.
Reyes said eight others — one from Colombia, one from Guatemala and six from Venezuela — showed up at the shelter three days earlier, apparently after being transported on an Abbott bus.
NYC Now Leasing 11 Hotels for Families as Homeless Population Rises By David Brand . Published August 10, 2022
New York City is now leasing 11 hotels for homeless families as the shelter population continues to rise amid record-high rents, lingering inflation and the well-publicized arrival of a number of asylum-seekers and other new immigrants.
Officials from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration disclosed the number of hotels rented out for families during a Council hearing Tuesday, just over seven months after the city phased out commercial lodgings for children following a substantial drop in the overall shelter population last year. City Limits first reported on the return to hotels last month.
But attempts by councilmembers to gain more concrete information about New York’s rising shelter census yielded little substantive information as the commissioners of the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs pleaded ignorance when asked for specific details.
Adams and his agency heads have said that more than 4,000 newly arrived immigrants have entered the shelter system, or at least visited an intake facility, since May. On Tuesday, Department of Social Services (DSS) Commissioner Gary Jenkins, who oversees DHS, repeated that estimate, but could not say how many of the new immigrants in shelters were children—a key consideration as the administration pins the rise in family homelessness on immigrants.
Jenkins told Bronx Councilmember Kevin Riley he would get back to him with specific data, reciting a common refrain throughout the proceedings that keeps concrete numbers out of the public record. DHS did not provide a response when asked by City Limits.
Overall, the DHS shelter census has increased from 46,591 people on Jan. 2 to 52,370 on Monday, according to data tracked each day by City Limits. The number of families with children in shelter has approached 10,000, up from less than 8,500 on Jan. 1.
“This uptick has been largely driven by an increasing migrant population seeking asylum,” Jenkins told the General Welfare Committee, adding that evictions, by contrast, have accounted for just 1 percent of people entering DHS shelter (The state’s eviction moratorium, in place during the pandemic to keep New Yorkers in their homes throughout the crisis, ended in January.)
Still, some advocates for homeless New Yorkers and a handful of councilmembers have questioned the figures that Adams and his agency heads have cited. In a statement ahead of the hearing, The Legal Aid Society and Coalition for the Homeless criticized the mayor’s“unsupported claims that recent increases in the shelter census are due primarily to an influx of asylum seekers.”
The two groups say they have unsuccessfully sought more complete information about the asylum-seeker tally from DHS—which does not ask for a person’s residency status at intake and instead relies on interviews and assumptions.
They also accused the Adams administration of using the presence of a certain number of immigrants to distract from broader problems with shelter capacity, rising homelessness and delayed move-outs into permanent housing. About 200 people a week are leaving shelters with housing vouchers, Jenkins told the Council. Meanwhile, he said, roughly 100 newly arriving immigrants are entering the system. That does not include an as yet untold number of New Yorkers seeking shelter for more traditional economic reasons—namely, that the rent is too high.
“I really hope that you can get clear data to understand what’s happening,” said Councilmember Lincoln Restler, a former aide to ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio who worked on issues around homelessness. “My strong suspicion is that we are experiencing an increase in the families with children census as a result of the eviction moratorium ending and a regular spike we see in the summer months [but] we are pointing to the immigrant community that is growing in New York City and asylum-seekers as the rationale.”
New York City is under unique court-orders to provide temporary shelter to any single adult who requests a bed and any family who proves they have nowhere else to stay. Historically, the vast majority of shelter residents come from within New York City, according to records reviewed by City Limits.
It is clear, however, that a sizable number of newly arrived immigrants and asylum-seeking families have entered the DHS shelter system—including some bused from Texas in a state-sponsored political stunt by far-right Gov. Greg Abbott—contributing to a steady rise in the number of people in emergency accommodations each night. City Limits encountered eight men outside the city’s homeless intake shelter Friday who had arrived via bus that morning after completing arduous journeys, mostly by foot, from Venezuela and Colombia and into Texas.
One who has a working cell phone and has been in consistent contact with City Limits said he is now staying at the cavernous Bedford Atlantic shelter in Brooklyn with just one set of clothes and no money.
The head of the New York City branch of Catholic Charities, Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, testified that his organization has so far assisted 1,100 newly arrived immigrants, predominantly young men from Venezuela. Some said they have entered city shelters while “some are sleeping in the parks,” he said. Most of all, the men say they want to work, Sullivan said.
“Some of them say, ‘I’m coming to New York because that’s where you make it,” he added.
The immigration issue has ignited a cross-country feud between Adams and Abbott, who began commissioning buses loaded with immigrants to New York City Aug. 3. The first arrived early Aug. 5. Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Manuel Castro told the Council that city officials only learned of the bus after they were alerted by the organization Grannies Respond. The bus company hired by Abbott to transport immigrants to New York signed non-disclosure agreements preventing them from sharing more information, Castro added.
Abbott’s spokesperson Renae Eze said Tuesday that five buses with 250 people have departed Texas for New York. Two buses pulled up at Port Authority on Wednesday morning, where they were greeted by aid groups and city officials. Not every immigrant on the buses has ended up in city shelters, and in at least one instance, the majority of passengers left for other destinations.
Eze said Texas plans to continue busing asylum seekers to both New York City and Washington D.C., where over 6,500 immigrants have been sent in over 160 buses.The Abbott buses coincide with efforts by nonprofits working near the Southern Border to help recently arrived immigrants travel to New York City.
During the hearing, General Welfare Committee Chair Diana Ayala acknowledged the unexpected increase in newly arrived immigrants, but attempted to separate the issue from other systemic problems. She questioned why DHS did not act to open additional shelter capacity earlier knowing that statewide eviction protections had come to an end, rents were soaring and a typical summertime surge was on the horizon. The shelter vacancy rate for families with children dipped below 1 percent in June, according to city data shared by Legal Aid.
“I think you had a little bit of a heads up and enough time to come up with a plan,” she said.
Jenkins in his opening remarks said the agency can meet the need. “While challenges have arisen, our existing system is withstanding the many stresses placed upon it,” he said.
Councilmembers, service providers and formerly homeless New Yorkers also criticized the shelter intake process, which forces families to visit a facility in The Bronx where more than half are initially denied a long-term placement.
“The clear solution is for the city to get serious about housing for homeless New Yorkers no matter where they come from,” said Karim Walker, an organizer with the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center who has experienced homelessness.
DHS shelters are a last resort for most residents squeezed by a housing crisis and failed by other systems. With homelessness on the rise, Jenkins urged councilmembers to welcome new shelters in their districts to add capacity rather than oppose every site put forth by the city, as is often the case with the placement of such facilities.
The agency should soon get some more breathing room. An emergency declaration announced by Adams earlier this month will allow the city to bypass public review and quickly tap nonprofits to open an immigrant referral center and new shelters inside hotels, including a potential 600-unit facility outlined in a request for proposals first reported by the New York Post.
Adams has also requested reimbursement from the federal government to cover the costs of housing and serving newly arrived immigrants. But there, too, Jenkins and Castro avoided concrete answers.
Jenkins said the administration is still trying to determine “what the ask will be.”
Additional reporting by Daniel Parra.
Mayor Adams joins homeless advocates at ‘sleep out’ in Manhattan
By Steven Vago and Patrick Reilly July 31, 2022 2:31am
Mayor Eric Adams sat on a park bench alongside homeless advocates at a “sleep out” in Manhattan’s Morningside Park Saturday night amid a city-wide homelessness crisis.
The mayor joined homeless advocate Shams DaBaron, also known as the Homeless Hero, on the bench where DaBaron had slept regularly while he was homeless.
DaBaron organized the Homeless Rights Month Sleep Out to show “solidarity with those who have to spend the night on these benches, those who have to sleep in encampments, those who have to sleep on the trains, those who are in these shelters. We are trying to make sure that that is not our reality,” he said.
New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams — along with his baby daughter — and commissioner of Human Resources and Social Services Gary P. Jenkins also joined the pair on the bench.
About a dozen other advocates were in the crowd, some with lawn chairs prepared to spend the night.
“I come to this bench almost every week,” DaBaron said, who said his “biggest fear” at that point in his life was “dying on this bench.”
“We are here in real-time saying we are not going to let the decades, centuries … of failed policies to keep us in these conditions,” he continued. “We are not doing shantytowns. We are not doing encampments. We are not riding on the subways. We are not doing that.”
He said Adams inherited the problem but pledged to hold him accountable.
As the Homeless Hero praised the mayor, a woman from the crowd shouted, “we don’t want Safe Haven! We want permanent housing!”
“I cannot find housing. There is no way into these housing,” added the woman, who lives in a shelter. She was later escorted away.
Another woman, East Harlem mom Kimberly Tyre, ripped the mayor for school budget cuts.
“If our black and brown students do not get educated, where do you think they will be? They will be homeless and they will turn to guns. The cycle continues and continues and continues,” she said as the mayor sat on the bench in silence.
“The only thing I’m not afraid of is being among the people because I am the people. I’m used to all the energy that comes from all the people … all day, every day,” Adams said as he briefly noted following the criticisms from the crowd.
“I came here for one reason, to support Shams. Period. End of statement,” said the mayor to the gathered press.
Adams said earlier this month that the city’s homeless shelters are being overrun with asylum-seeking migrants with nearly 3,000 arriving in recent weeks.
NYC Council Considers Bill to Probe Why Homeless Are Denied Supportive Housing
Each year, thousands of New Yorkers living in shelters and on the streets apply for permanent supportive housing, a service model championed as a key solution to the city’s homelessness crisis. And each year, the majority of those applicants fail to secure a home.
It’s largely a supply problem. Most of New York City’s 35,000 supportive apartments—affordable units where tenants can also access support services, like counseling and mental health care referrals—are already occupied by tenants and, as nonprofit providers and their trade group point out, there are only so many available units to go around. But some New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, supportive housing residents and their advocates contend that there’s another factor when it comes to who gets selected: the housing shortage allows providers to “cherry-pick” applicants who require the fewest services, a process known as creaming or screening.
Department of Social Services (DSS) records, obtained through Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests by the advocacy group Safety Net Project, illustrate the charge. Supportive housing is, by definition, designed for people with mental illness, but on dozens of occasions over the first 10 months of 2020, providers cited an applicant’s “lack of insight” into their mental health needs as the reason for rejecting them.
“Client never lived independently or paid bills. Client had difficulties staying focus[ed] and had no insight in regards to his mental illness, and poor historian,” staff wrote in one April 2020 rejection.
An applicant “has no insight into her mental health diagnosis. At the interview she denied a diagnosis and medication,” wrote another provider in October 2020.
With so many applicants and so few units, rejections are bound to occur. It’s baked into the city’s new multi-agency placement system, which refers three people for each available unit and instructs the nonprofit supportive housing provider to select one.
A four-year-old piece of legislation before the City Council would enable more consistent scrutiny of those rejections, highlight trends in supportive housing placements and, advocates say, allow for closer examination of the gaps in the Coordinated Assessment and Placement System, known as CAPS. The bill’s fate remains up in the air as lame-duck lawmakers approach their final meetings and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration attempts to amend key parts of the measure.
The legislation, sponsored since 2018 by Councilmember Stephen Levin, would compel the city’s DSS to publish an annual report listing the number of New Yorkers referred to, accepted to, rejected from and awaiting placement in supportive housing. The report would also detail rejections, creating a database that would allow policymakers to identify and amend trends like creaming by specific providers or a lack of necessary services across the supportive housing sector, Levin said.
“It’s important to have transparency, but not just for transparency’s sake. We want to be able to amend policies based on what the data is showing,” he said. “We put a lot of responsibility onto supportive housing to take care of a lot of issues and I think it deserves a really comprehensive discussion.”
Mayors past, present and future have included supportive housing in their plans for providing affordable homes and services for people with mental illness, HIV/AIDS or other health needs. Policymakers have held up the city’s network of dozens of nonprofits with at least 86 different funding streams as a sort of catchall solution to the homelessness crisis, even if supportive housing isn’t the best fit for many New Yorkers who simply can’t afford a place, or others who need more intensive services.
There are about 19,000 apartments in buildings built or redeveloped specifically for supportive housing. Providers rent out another 16,000 so-called “scattered-site” units from private landlords, with services offered by visiting case managers and social workers. More supportive apartments are in the pipeline, and Mayor-elect Eric Adams has pledged to facilitate the creation of 25,000 additional supportive housing units inside converted hotels.
As it stands, just about 1-in-5 supportive housing applicants get an apartment, according to the Supportive Housing Network of New York (SHNNY) and the Coalition for the Homeless. A total of 1,035 people living in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters moved into supportive housing during the first nine months of 2020, a Human Resources Administration (HRA) administrator testified at a Council hearing last year. Another HRA deputy commissioner said about 5,000 people are awaiting placement at any given time, meaning they have been deemed eligible for supportive housing, but not placed in an apartment
About 16,000 people have moved from shelters and other settings into supportive housing since de Blasio took office in 2014, according to DHS.
Intro. 147 faces little public opposition, but in internal emails obtained through FOIL and shared with City Limits, DSS officials and SHNNY administrators said the legislation would impose a reporting requirement on city-funded supportive housing that does not apply to state-funded units. In emails from 2017 and 2018, they also said the reporting would fail to capture the “nuance” in finding the right housing placement for an applicant. SHNNY said it is no longer involved with the bill and has not seen recent versions.
In recent weeks, DSS and the mayor’s office have attempted to water down the bill’s reporting requirements, allowing providers to choose a predetermined list of rejection reasons from a dropdown menu rather than specify their determination. The legislation’s supporters, including the Supportive Housing Organized and United Tenants (SHOUT), say that change is unacceptable. The group urged the Council to pull the bill after viewing the last-minute changes from the mayor’s office.
A Council spokesperson said the bill continues to go through the legislative process. And a spokesperson for de Blasio said the “administration is committed to making supportive housing data more transparent and accessible.”
But recent data is hard to come by. DSS and the mayor’s office said the acceptance and rejection figures for the past two years are only available through FOIL. For the past seven years, Safety Net Project staff have filed records requests for the numbers from DSS and shared them with City Limits.
The most recent response provides data that would be publicly reported under Intro. 147. During the first 10 months of 2020, nonprofit providers scheduled nearly 3,000 interviews with supportive housing applicants, including some returning for follow-up appointments, according to the DSS records. About 361 of those applicants were definitively accepted for an apartment, according to the data, while at least 340 applicants declined the units they interviewed for.
Another 560 people were outright rejected and at least 720 people were listed as a “no show,” meaning they did not attend their interview, the data shows. A final decision for hundreds of other applicants was still pending based on apartment availability, additional information or other factors, according to the records.
Craig Hughes, a social worker at the Safety Net Project, said his organization has used the data to flag examples of “clear disability discrimination by providers” and brought those to the attention of city agencies.
Nonprofit providers and city officials acknowledge that creaming does occur, but say finding the “right” placement for a tenant can be complicated. Often, they say, the level of services available at a particular site do not go far enough to meet an applicants’ needs. That raises another problem: New York state has cut funding to licensed mental health beds, which serve people who require more intensive services.
“What is not generally understood is that there has been a disinvestment by the state in various types of licensed housing that offers a higher level of care than supportive housing,” Association for Community Living Executive Director Toni Lasicki told City Limits in 2018, a few months after Intro. 147 was introduced.
Many supportive housing applicants were rejected after interviewing for units because the provider staff determined they needed a “higher level of care”—a phrase used 72* times to justify rejections in the first 10 months of 2020, according to DSS records.
Advocates say Intro. 147 would allow for a better examination of the disconnect between the HRA referrals and the services the nonprofit supportive housing provider offers. “The bill is trying to illuminate what comes out of a referral,” said Homeless Services United Executive Director Catherine Trapani.
She said the reporting requirement could also shed light on the effectiveness of the system that the city uses to make supportive housing referrals and move people out of shelters. CAPS is a federally-mandated system for identifying the most vulnerable New Yorkers and prioritizing them for limited housing and resources. The multi-step CAPS process allows a person experiencing homelessness, usually working with a case manager or social worker, to complete a standardized survey to determine their eligibility for supportive housing or other options, like rental assistance vouchers. If they are found potentially eligible for supportive housing, they complete an application which goes to a team of HRA staff members.
The HRA unit then determines the person or family’s final eligibility based on their application and a Standardized Vulnerability Assessment, which seeks to identify the New Yorkers most in need of housing and resources based on a number of factors, like their use Medicaid, history of incarceration and the amount of time they have been homeless.
HRA staff use this pool of applicants to make referrals to providers with vacant supportive housing units. The team typically refers “three similarly situated individuals for each vacancy” and allows the provider to “select the people that they feel are a good match for their program,” said Jennifer Kelly, deputy commissioner of the Office of Supportive Affordable Housing and Services, at a Council hearing in December 2020.
Trapani, a member of the Continuum of Care coalition that developed CAPS, said the better data reporting would highlight where the system is working well and what problems need to be addressed.
“It’s a way to spot gaps and needs and errors,” she said. “When data becomes available, we’ll notice what if there’s a lack of inventory for a specific housing type or person and need to focus specific supportive housing agreements on a specific population. Wouldn’t that be healthy?”
*Correction: A previous version of this article referred to a higher number of rejections that included instances from late December 2019 and early November 2020.
https://citylimits.org/author/david-brand/
AUTHORDavid Brand
Number of Homeless NYC Students Surpasses 100K For 6th Consecutive School Year
More than 100,000 city public school students were homeless at some point during the past school year, according to new state Education Department data.
For the sixth year in a row, more than 101,000 city kids lived in unstable housing, including 28,000 who spent time in shelters while 65,000 lived “doubled-up” with friends or relatives, according to state Education Department data compiled by Advocates for Children.
The number is down roughly 9% from the total during the 2019-2020 school year, but still 42% higher than the totals at the start of the decade.
Some of this year’s drop may trace back to an overall dip in enrollment in city public schools in 2020, and advocates warned it was also more difficult for school officials to confirm which kids were homeless.
The challenges of keeping up with school while experiencing homelessness are steep in a normal year, and were even more daunting last year with the pandemic and remote learning, families and advocates said.
Shelters often had nonexistent or spotty Wi-Fi or cell phone service, and kids sharing cramped rooms with multiple family members had a hard time concentrating on schoolwork.
Like in past years, homeless students were not spread evenly across the city.
More than one in five students in the South Bronx’s District 9 were homeless last year, compared with fewer than one in 20 students in Staten Island’s District 31.
Dozens of groups that advocate for homeless kids released a set of recommendations Monday urging incoming mayor Eric Adams to use federal stimulus funds to hire an additional 150 Education Department employees based in shelters who work directly with families on issues like arranging transportation and setting up school placements.
“With the right support, schools can transform the lives of students who are homeless,” said Advocates for Children Executive Director Kim Sweet. “The next administration should bring together city agencies and charge them with ensuring every student who is homeless gets the support needed to succeed in school.”
Michael Elsen-Rooney
Education Reporter
CONTACT
Mike Elsen-Rooney covers education for the Daily News. He previously covered education for The Teacher Project at Columbia Journalism School and The Hechinger Report, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Bloomberg, and the Boston Globe Magazine, among others. Mike’s a former high school Spanish teacher and afterschool program coordinator.
Abandoned NYC dining sheds are now havens for the homeless
These dining disasters are turning into hovels for the homeless, giant garbage dumps, and traffic-blocking storage sheds.
Outdoor dining structures that were once meant to pump life into the struggling restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic are now standing abandoned after the eateries have shuttered, or refocused on indoor dining.
Three forsaken al fresco setups sat until recently on just a single previously busy block of LaGuardia Place in Greenwich Village between Houston and Bleecker Streets.
One graffiti-covered outdoor hut belonged to Bosie, a French restaurant that served afternoon tea and whose doors have been padlocked since August. It was removed only late last month.
Next door at Le Souk, which in its pre-COVID glory days boasted belly dancers and a hookah lounge, another wooden structure stood empty.
And the third abandoned setup provided outdoor space for the former GMT Tavern, which closed after a damaging fire on April 19.
“These sheds are an eyesore — people are now depositing garbage in them. Why are they up months after restaurants have shut down?” someone griped in a July complaint to the Department of Buildings, which said no violation was warranted.
But one local resident called the area beneath the dining sheds a “breeding ground” for rats and expressed little hope the structures will be removed anytime soon.
“It’s not economically feasible for the landlords or (former) tenants to take them down, and the city doesn’t have the political will to get it done,” he said.
Leif Arntzen said he sees the homeless sleeping in the dining sheds on his Cornelia Street block “‘all the time” after restaurants close for the evening or on days they are not open.
The covered shed outside the Uncle Chop Chop restaurant, which is a step up from plain plywood, is a popular one, he said.
“I think they pick it because they’ve got this sort of AstroTurf on the pavement that they can just kind of lay down on,” said Arntzen, who is part of the CUEUP alliance which opposes making the “open restaurants” program permanent.
Residents complained last spring about an unused and filthy shed outside Ajisen Ramen on Mott Street in Chinatown becoming sleeping quarters for the homeless. Then the restaurant put doors on it and began using it as a storage locker, with only a lone diner seated inside one recent night, according to a local observer.
The only thing occupying the outdoor shed for Michelin-starred Jua, a Korean restaurant in the Flatiron district, one recent weekday night were cardboard boxes.
Restaurants are not allowed to use their outdoor huts as storage, according to the Department of Transportation, which oversees the open restaurants program.
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who represents Greenwich Village, Soho and Tribeca, tweeted Tuesday about an empty structure outside a restaurant that never opened saying “huge structure remains from JUNE with various violations- cease & desist @NYC_DOT & still no action.”
The shed is not abandoned, according to the DOT.
Nearly 12,000 outdoor setups dot city streets, including 1,202 located in the roadway; 4,295 on the sidewalk; and 6,047 that are a combination of both sidewalk and street, according to DOT stats.
The DOT said it considers a dining setup abandoned only if the restaurant is permanently closed. It has directed the Sanitation Department to remove only 21 of these deserted dining dens citywide.
But there are many more that remain.
A total of 136 complaints about abandoned dining setups were placed to 311 between May 6 and Sept. 23, although some were for the same restaurant, city records show.
The Village Den, the restaurant venture from “Queer Eye” host Antoni Porowski, shut its doors in July, leaving the plywood framework for its outdoor dining setup standing empty on West 12th Street.
It took more than two months and many complaints to remove the shed — which had become a storage area — belonging to the former Fabiane’s restaurant on North Fifth Street in Williamsburg.
“It took up metered parking for over two months,” said Shannon Phipps, the head of the Berry St. Alliance in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, who noted there were several other unused setups in the area. “I suspect the longer this program exists, the more these conditions will surface, especially because there is no enforcement, management or oversight.”
Two apparently unused wooden corrals flank the Slaughtered Lamb Pub on West 4th Street. The bar manager said the structures kept getting hit by cars or trucks and he did not want to seat patrons there.
The D.O.C. Wine Bar in Brooklyn had two sheds, one of which was used for storage. A restaurant manager said it was removed last week after the city said it was too close to a fire hydrant.
The restaurant wasn’t the only one flouting the rules.
A City Council survey of 418 downtown Manhattan restaurants released in August found that 93 percent were not complying with at least one DOT guideline including blocked fire hydrants, barriers that extended too far into the street and setups on streets that were too narrow.
The DOT said it was reviewing the locations in the report and would be meeting with Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s office “soon to discuss next steps.”
By Kerry J. Byrne and
October 2, 2021