With everyone and their mother sounding off on Bloomberg's big soda ban, it's easy to forget the city's biggest problem isn't the infringement upon our right to consume buckets of high-fructose corn syrup. Today, advocacy group the Coalition for the Homeless released its annual State of the Homeless report, and found that the population of people living in municipal homeless shelters in the city has skyrocketed to an all-time high.
The data, which was compiled using various reports from the NYC Mayor's Office of Operations and the Department of Homeless Services, recorded a ten percent increase in the city's homeless shelter population from 2010-2011, as compared to last year's also jaw-dropping documented eight percent increase. Nearly 113,000 New Yorkers spent at least a night in a municipal homeless shelter; over 43,000 homeless individuals, including 17,000 children, slept in shelters this past April alone. The report also found that the time families spent in shelters increased as well, with an average stay lengthening from nine months to twelve.
The report noted that the rise in the city's homeless population marks a 39 percent increase overall since Bloomberg took office ten years ago, and urged the mayor to make room for more Federal housing program assistance in his penultimate city budget, even though his administration scrapped plans to subsidize rents for homeless families in September. And it's not just homeless shelters that have seen increases. In April, results from the annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) survey showed the number of New Yorkers sleeping on the street had increased over 20 percent last year.
