A few of Mayor de Blasio's tactics for moving homeless families out of shelter and into permanent housing appear to be working, according to a new report [PDF] from the Coalition for the Homeless. But these gains aren't making a dent in the overall shelter population as people continue to enter the system at a near-record pace.
Since 2013, the report shows, the number of homeless families returning to the shelter system has decreased by 13 percent. The number of people entering the system for the first time, however, has increased 45 percent.
"While the City and the Mayor have taken important steps to combat homelessness, bold action is still required to remedy this unprecedented crisis," said Coalition for the Homeless policy director Giselle Routhier.
The report reiterates an argument that Steven Banks, Mayor de Blasio's Human Resources Administration head, makes frequently when trying to put his own homelessness-fighting efforts into context: Governor Andrew Cuomo and former mayor Michael Bloomberg exacerbated homelessness in NYC when they eliminated the Advantage rental assistance program in 2011 (according to the city, the homelessness count spiked more than 5,000 per year between 2011 and 2014). Back in 2005, well before Advantage was wiped, Bloomberg cut off shelter residents' access to public housing apartments and Section 8 vouchers—according to City Limits, because he feared New Yorkers were entering shelters in order to take advantage of city services.
Mayor de Blasio reversed that decision in 2014, ending what Coalition for the Homeless has dubbed the "lost decade." And the results have been positive. In his first two-and-a-half years in office, the city placed about 10,000 homeless New Yorkers into stable, affordable housing. This is about seven times the number of placements the Bloomberg administration made during his entire second term.
Put another way: in 2013, under Bloomberg, only two percent of families who left the shelter system ended up in stable apartments. In Fiscal Year 2015, under de Blasio, 30 percent of families found permanent placements. In the last fiscal year, 40 percent did.
Still, the situation is far from rosy. There were 16,000 families living in city shelters last November, up 14 percent from January 2014.
Here, too, the city has no illusions: Commissioner Banks has often cited New York City's housing crisis, and stagnant wages. Coalition for the Homeless notes that 73 percent of low-income households in NYC were rent burdened as of 2014, up from 71 percent in 2006. This, in turn, has contributed high rates of eviction and overcrowding. In the first 11 months of Fiscal year 2016, 42 percent of families that entered the shelter system blamed one of those two factors.
Within that 42 percent, however, six percent fewer families are blaming eviction than they were last year. For this, Coalition for the Homeless credits Mayor de Blasio's investment in housing lawyers for families facing eviction.
(via Coalition for the Homeless).
But the Coalition says there is much more de Blasio could do. In addition to significantly increasing the rate of NYCHA placements and LINC vouchers, he could do a better job of enforcing landlord discrimination against said voucher holders.
There's also the matter of the mayor's affordable housing plan, which critics say values quantity over quality, building a bulk of below-market rate apartments for middle and upper-class New Yorkers, and gentrifying low-income neighborhoods in the process.
Many of the Coalition's critiques are leveraged at the state. Last year, Governor Cuomo announced a $20 billion 5-year plan to create 100,000 units of affordable housing, 6,000 beds of supportive housing, and 1,000 emergency shelter beds. By June 2016, Cuomo had released just $150 million of the promised amount in starter funding. The legislative session ended without any contractual agreement between the legislative branches as to when the rest of the funding would be released, or from where.
Cuomo mentioned the withheld funding during the New York City installment of his State of the State tour this week, blaming the delay on the Senate and the Assembly.
"The money is there, the largest state commitment in history," Cuomo promised. "Neither the Assembly nor the Senate has agreed to move the funds forward. Today I call on them to advance the plan."
The overture rang hollow for affordable housing advocates, who argue that Cuomo has managed to negotiate agreements with the legislature on his priority issues, like the $15 per hour minimum wage and paid family leave. "If housing were an important goal one would think he could achieve it," Legal Aid attorney Ellen Davidson told Gothamist.
Commissioner Banks focused on the positives in this week's report.
"This report shows our comprehensive reforms are in fact making headway with more New Yorkers being placed in stable housing than at any time since 2004," he said in a statement to City Limits. "While we know we have more work to do, we also know that the lack of affordable housing, the gap between income and rent, and domestic violence are the primary drivers for families entering shelter in the city."
