Cuomo's Focus On Subway Homelessness Ignores Root Causes Of Crisis He Helped Create, Advocates Say

Appalled by the conditions on a subway system that he hasn’t ridden since 2016, Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote a letter to the MTA in July, directing them to do something about the homeless people who seek refuge underground.

“Society serves no one by allowing homeless individuals who need help to inhabit the subways,” Cuomo wrote. “Let's actually focus on helping the homeless, rather than political posturing.”

Yet elected officials and advocates for the homeless say that Governor Cuomo and the state legislature could be doing much more to help the growing number of homeless in New York City.

“Governor Cuomo’s failure to address homelessness is his failure to focus on the root causes of homelessness, and in lieu of that, focusing on press releases that don’t end up meaning anything,” said Giselle Routhier, the policy director for Coalition for the Homeless.

Last week, Cuomo ordered the MTA to hire more police officers to deal with “quality of life issues” for riders caused by the homeless and the “dangerously mentally ill.” Routhier calls that “a superficial approach to the problem.”

Manhattan State Senator Liz Krueger, who is co-sponsoring a bill that would create a state rental subsidy plan for homeless families—that the governor has refused to support—argues that “the state should be taking a much more activist role.”

“Anyone who says, ‘first you wait for them to be homeless then you deal with it,’ I don’t think they live on planet Earth at this point,” Krueger told Gothamist. “It’s so much more of an expensive and emotionally damaging model.”

The governor has successfully championed initiatives like raising the minimum wage and reforming and strengthening the city’s rent laws, and he announced his own $20 billion plan to address affordable housing and homelessness in 2016. Meanwhile, New York’s homeless population has continued to climb.

According to the most recent report from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, New York City has the highest rate of homelessness in the country and also the largest increase in its homeless population from 2007 to 2018, at more than 46 percent. Around 60,000 people sleep in New York City’s shelter system on a given night, including more than 21,000 children; the number of families sleeping in municipal shelters has increased by 64 percent over the past decade, and the number of single people in shelters has shot up 143 percent over the same time period. The homeless are disproportionately black and Latino.

“Look at the fact that 89,000 people are living in shelters [across the state] to understand that those things, while important, are not going to solve our housing crisis,” said Paulette Soltani, the political director for VOCAL-NY, referring to the minimum wage and rent reform campaigns.

“Fifteen dollars an hour can’t pay the rent in New York City. There are homeless people now, in the shelters, working full time jobs. The need is so great, and what’s available for people is just crumbs on the table.”

Felix Guzman found himself homeless in late 2017 after he had some trouble with his family while he was getting out of an abusive relationship. The 38-year-old said the one-time rental assistance program provided by the city wasn’t enough to find a decent place for him and his toddler son to live, so he bounced around the shelter system for 15 months.

“If the apartment you’re looking at is $1,550 for a one bedroom, but your voucher maxes out at a lower amount, that means you’re looking for a studio in a really bad neighborhood,” Guzman said. (The median rent for a one bedroom in the city recently hit $2,980.)

Eventually Guzman was able to move back in with his family in a rent-stabilized apartment in Crown Heights. “Having an apartment—a safe apartment, affordable apartment—is the difference between me being able to stay sane, healthy, be a productive member of society,” said Guzman, who now facilitates debate classes with the Rikers Debate Project and works as an organizer for VOCAL-NY..

Senator Krueger, who spent more than a decade administering antipoverty programs in New York City before being elected to the Senate, said that long-term rent subsidies were an effective way to keep the homeless population from growing.

“At the bottom line: save families from losing their homes when the reason they’re losing their homes is they don’t have enough money to pay the rent,” Krueger said. “It’s not really brain surgery.”

A $140 million annual rent subsidy program called Advantage, which paid a large portion of the rent for homeless families for up to two years, was ended by Governor Cuomo and then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2011, who cited budgetary constraints. While homeless advocates had deemed Advantage seriously flawed, more people entered the shelter system after the program’s demise. Federally funded Section 8 vouchers are scarce for the homeless—just 491 were issued to homeless people last fiscal year (convincing landlords to accept them is another matter). The city helped around 8,000 people leave or avoid the shelter system through rent subsidies last year, but many of those were part of a program that only lasts 12 months.

“That was a very bad move, and again, one can always fix it,” Krueger said of ending Advantage. “So then the question is, why haven’t we fixed it, since we have years more evidence that not only did these models work, but real people are suffering?”

The current shelter system costs the state more than a billion dollars a year. The city will pay $2 billion in shelter costs this fiscal year, and nearly half a billion on programs designed to help people get out of the shelter system. The city pays over $5,600 a month for each family with children receiving shelter.

Supporters of the Home Stability Support legislation say that it would help 80,000 households at an annual cost of $400 million, funded by the state and the federal government, ramped up over a five-year period. An analysis done by City Comptroller Scott Stringer showed the measure would save the city more than $300 million a year by its tenth year.

The rent subsidy bill had bipartisan support in the state legislature this year, but still failed to pass.

“Even as a fiscal conservative I think I look at this bill not as a giveaway but as a make-sense way of keeping people in their homes,” said State Senator Phil Boyle, a Long Island Republican. “And hopefully making a system whereby people can stay in their homes and not be on the street, or having to go to finding government-funded housing, which is going to cost a heck of a lot more.”

Asked why he thought the governor opposed the legislation, Boyle replied, “I cannot speak to the motives behind the governor’s actions, but I am disappointed by them.”

The bill’s main sponsor since 2016, Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, has accused the governor of personally profiting off of the status quo because the governor founded a nonprofit that operates homeless shelters, that is now run by the governor’s sister, Maria Cuomo Cole.

Last month, Cuomo’s spokesperson called that assertion “garbage,” and then pointed out that Hevesi’s father is disgraced former Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo helped put in jail for taking nearly $1 million in kickbacks.

“It’s never about the substance, it’s only because I’m mad about something that happened to my dad a decade ago,” the assemblymember said. “What they’re arguing is, look, we’re gonna build more affordable and supportive housing, so it’s okay that we’re letting tens of thousands of people fall into homelessness every year. It’s absolutely absurd,” Hevesi added.

Cuomo’s press secretary, Caitlin Girouard, maintains that the governor “has been on the frontlines fighting homelessness in New York and across the country for decades.”

“Under Governor Cuomo’s $20 billion housing plan we are well underway to creating and preserving 100,000 new affordable homes and 6,000 more with supportive services, and three times during the course of his administration he signed rent laws that greatly strengthen tenant protections for all New Yorkers,” Girouard said in a statement.

Girouard declined to answer questions about why the governor doesn’t support the Home Stability Support bill.

“I would say, treat us how you would like to be treated yourselves,” Guzman said. “Before building more shelters, how about redirecting some of that money to keeping people in their homes?”

Guzman added, “Being homeless can happen to anyone.”

“The simple and plain truth is that too many mentally ill people are housed in our jails and left to our streets,” Governor Cuomo wrote in his letter to the MTA in July.

Yet the governor’s own state prisons act as a pipeline to the city’s shelter system. In 2018, 16 percent of single adults entering city shelters, around 3,500 people, came from New York State prison facilities.

“From the state’s perspective, they can release somebody to the city, the city has an obligation to shelter folks, and so they can release that responsibility to them,” Routhier said. “At the same time, with the state not actually providing any real investments into housing and solutions to homelessness, the problem just keeps getting worse, and so it’s just piling on.”

This transfer of responsibility is emblematic of Cuomo’s tenure as governor, as New York City has been forced to shoulder more of the financial burden of taking care of homeless New Yorkers. According to a report from Coalition for the Homeless, between 2011 and 2018, after Cuomo helped kill the Advantage program, the city’s costs for sheltering the homeless increased by $800 million, while the state’s share increased by $71 million.

This year, the state budget required the city to pay an extra $125 million on shelter costs and cash subsidies, a figure cited by the city Independent Budget Office and confirmed by the de Blasio administration.

“The state’s contributing less, so the city has to contribute more, which leaves less room for [the city] to actually invest in real solutions to homelessness like housing,” Routhier said. “It’s hugely problematic for actually moving the needle.”

Senator Krueger explained that “the state, under the Cuomo administration, has quite successfully pushed much of its costs onto the localities.”

“Is it right? I don’t believe it’s right. Is it doable? Yes, because the state controls both the state budget and tax policy,” Krueger said. “And the governor seems to ideologically believe that localities can do more with less, and therefore he’s going to give them less and expect more.”

The governor’s office pointed out that the vast majority of people entering the shelter system from state prisons only stay for a month or less.

Cuomo’s spokesperson did not answer questions about why the state has continued to shift costs to municipalities.

“The governor wants to be seen as a progressive, especially in the political landscape that we’re in today,” said Soltani, the VOCAL political director. “But you cannot call yourself a progressive while starving cities of the resources they need.”

The number of single adults in the city’s shelter system has more than doubled over the last decade.

“Single adults often are more impacted by serious mental illness rather than families who may be displaced because of eviction or domestic violence,” said Routhier, the policy director at Coalition for the Homeless.

Supportive housing gives people who find it hard to live on their own because of an illness or disability a permanent place to stay, along with the attendant services they need. It’s a proven method with a 95 percent retention rate.

In years past, the city and state teamed up to fund supportive housing units, but political differences between the mayor and the governor resulted in two different funding streams. The city unveiled its initiative in 2015: it would create 15,000 units over 15 years using $2 billion in capital and tax credits. The governor announced his own plan in early 2016 to create 20,000 new units over 15 years as part of a larger affordable housing plan.

But it wasn’t until April of 2017 that the governor released the first tranche of funding to start financing the units. By then, the governor promised to create 6,000 units of supportive housing over the next five years.

Routhier called the delay “hugely significant.”

“It takes two to three years to build new housing,” she said. “At the same time we’re experiencing a housing crisis and a homelessness crisis, we can’t really afford those delays.”

The governor’s office says the state has funded 5,348 units of supportive housing since 2016, but only 1,426 are “operational” statewide. While Cuomo hasn’t mentioned his goal of 20,000 units within 15 years recently, his office says they are still committed to reaching it. (The city claims it is similarly on track to make their target, with 3,756 units awarded to operators, and 1,294 units occupied.)

“We have agreed to spend that money over way too slow a timetable,” Senator Krueger said, noting that she hears from nonprofit providers who are stuck on state waitlists to receive funding for supportive housing units. “Just speed up the timetable for approving the projects. We already made the commitment to do it, let’s do it faster, on a ten year timeline, given the sheer numbers of people who need this kind of housing.”

We the Commuters goes live at The Greene Space with a look at homelessness in the subways on September 24th, hosted by Shumita Basu along with her fellow WNYC and Gothamist reporters. The evening will include conversations with State Senator Liz Krueger, MTA Board Member Larry Schwartz, Coalition for the Homeless Policy Director Giselle Routhier, the former homeless, and more. More details here.