The city saw a record number of homeless people sleeping in municipal shelters last year, with one in 43 New York City children spending at least one night in a shelter, according to the Coalition for the Homeless's annual State of the Homeless report.
The report [pdf], which was released today, reveals that over 60,000 people slept in municipal shelters last year, including 25,000 children. That's up from last year's record of 53,615 people and nearly 23,000 homeless children per night. And according to the report, at least 42,000 children spent at least one night in a shelter in 2014; those numbers include 1 in 17 African-American children and 1 in 34 Latino children citywide.
"Last year’s rise in homelessness was the result of New York City’s worsening housing affordability crisis; the lingering effects of Bloomberg-era elimination of housing for homeless children and families; and the failure of the State and City to act quickly enough to restore desperately-needed permanent housing resources for homeless New Yorkers," Patrick Markee, the Coalition's Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy, wrote in the report.
The good news, according to the report, is that Mayor de Blasio's affordable housing push and rental assistance programs for homeless families may mitigate some of the city's homelessness problem, and since December, the city's seen about 300 fewer homeless families. Still, the group says both City Hall and Governor Cuomo need to do more to address the issue.
"The Governor has opposed efforts to enhance rental assistance for homeless families and has proposed a deeply inadequate supportive housing plan that falls far short of the need," Markee writes in the report, suggesting Cuomo bolster rental assistance programs and de Blasio allocate at least 2,500 public housing apartments to homeless families per year.
De Blasio claims to be making affordable housing a cornerstone of his term as mayor, and the Coalition is urging him to set aside 10 percent of the 200,000 "affordable" housing units he plans to preserve or create in the next decade for homeless families and individuals.
