Photo by iheartfishtown, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

When the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) announced in July that it would soon move 200 homeless families into two residential West 95th Street Buildings, community members, elected officials and Community Board 7 (CB7) objected. The buildings were designed as single room occupancy units for low income residents, they argued, and were not equipped to provide treatment for the homeless’ large population of addicts and the mentally ill.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, City Council Member Gale Brewer, Assembly member Linda Rosenthal and Community Board 7 chair Mark Diller sent a letter to DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond at the time asking him to suspend efforts to place the homeless families in the two buildings, 316 and 330 West 95th Street.

Yesterday, DHS decided not to listen. The Department moved 10 of the families into the former building, with plans to add the remaining 190 – a total of over 400 new residents – to both buildings over the next few months, according to Diamond.

“We’re absolutely furious about it,” one of the buildings’ 71 existing residents told New York Post. “No one was told anything at all.”

Now, Stringer, Brewer and Rosenthal are joining with State Senator Adriano Espaillat, Community Board 7 and Upper West Side residents in calling on DHS again to suspend immediately all efforts to refer clients to the buildings.

“[T]he proposal to house 200 adults, who are currently homeless, in 100 tiny rooms at 316 and 330 West 95 Street on a temporary basis is poor planning, poor policy, and includes little if any transparency,” said Brewer in a statement. “The process should have included a substantive planning discussion with Community Board 7, elected officials, current residents of the two buildings, and responsible neighborhood leaders to find a solution to the need for shelter for homeless individuals.”

Stringer agreed. “New Yorkers understand that all neighborhoods share in the responsibility to provide housing to those in need,” he said in a statement. “But abruptly moving a 400-person shelter into a residential neighborhood in the dead of summer with no community consultation, no contract and no long-term plan only creates bad will and sets back the cause of fighting homelessness.”

“By failing to conduct a dialogue with the community and the elected officials who represent it,” said Rosenthal, “DHS and its former commissioner Robert Hess have disrespected thoroughly this neighborhood.”

According to a letter sent to Community Board 7 on July 19, DHS will be contracting with a company called Aguila Inc. to operate transitional housing facilities at 316 and 330 W. 95th St. They will house 200 adult families, which could mean upward of 400 individuals.

When determining where and how to house its homeless residents, the city is pulled by two laws that sometimes place a greater burden on certain communities. New York is a right-to-shelter city, meaning that DHS is responsible for providing a bed for every resident, every night. It also has to adhere to the fair share doctrine that calls for every community district to house an equal number of the city’s homeless population—in other words, the city can’t place a cluster of shelters in one neighborhood in the Bronx and leave other neighborhoods without any shelters.

But when the number of homeless New Yorkers comes close to the number of available beds, an emergency situation is created that allows DHS to site temporary transitional housing in neighborhoods without regard to the fair share rules. It’s this emergency loophole that has Upper West Siders upset.

“All of [the elected officials] have gotten lots of emails from residents in the community who are just fed up with the city placing people on 94th and 95th Street corridors when there’s a homeless emergency,” said Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal. “This is a decade already that they’ve looked at this area as the go-to place. This is a very generous and giving neighborhood, but I think the people in the neighborhood have just reached their limit.”

Rosenthal joined City Council Member Gale Brewer, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Community Board 7 chair Mark Diller in sending a letter to DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond, strongly urging him to suspend the efforts to move people into the West 95th Street facilities.

Part of the objection from local officials stems from the fact that these buildings were designed as single room occupancy (SRO) units, small, inexpensive rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities that could provide permanent housing for low-income residents. But owners and landlords of SROs have a greater incentive to rent to DHS, which Rosenthal said pays $111 per room per day, adding up to much more than a typical $600 or $700-per-month rent on an SRO unit.

Locals insist that they don’t object to housing the homeless in their community, but that they shouldn’t be burdened with a sudden influx of homeless adults when they already have a high number of shelters.

“The Upper West Side in general, and this corridor of the West 90s in particular, currently provides shelter to the homeless and other vulnerable populations through a variety of facilities. These buildings collectively serve thousands of people,” read part of the letter to Diamond.

“This is not NIMBY,” said Diller in an email. “In fact, there are existing buildings being used to serve vulnerable populations as close as a half-block from the location. Rather, it is about achieving the right kind of balance for the vulnerable population, the other residents of the proposed buildings and the surrounding community.”

DHS did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, and Rosenthal said that the agency has not been forthcoming with the community.

Robert Hess, a former DHS commissioner who is now the chairman and CEO of Housing Solutions USA, which will be merging with Aguila and operating the facilities, wrote in a letter to the Community Board that his company “seek[s] to meet [clients’] needs through a comprehensive continuum of care, knowing the lasting, positive change cannot occur unless the complexity of the problems our clients face is acknowledged and addressed.”

Hess would not speak with a reporter for this story, and his company repeatedly refused to answer any questions about the operations planned for 316 and 330 W. 95th St.

Homeless New Yorkers face new challenges in light of cutbacks

Some advocates and politicians say the City has turned its back on its homeless population, which had close to 40,000 people in the shelter system in Dec. 2011. PHOTO BY Patr icia voulgaris

It’s no shock that a still-struggling economy, an ever-more-expensive city and a continually burgeoning population have combined to produce record-high rates of homelessness in New York. What may shock some, however, is how difficult it is for the city to help its homeless population. In a time of fiscal cutbacks, the subsidies, grants and programs in place to help these most vulnerable people have all but dried up, leaving advocates on all sides scrambling to find solutions to keep New Yorkers off the streets and out of shelters.

According to data from the most recent available census of homeless people in the municipal shelter system, conducted Dec. 31, 2011, there were 39,787 individuals in the system, including 8,530 families with children. An Oct. 31 count found 16,934 homeless children in the shelter system, an all-time high number.

And these numbers don’t take into account homeless people living on the street or outside the shelter system. The Homeless Outreach Population Estimate survey, conducted across the city earlier this year, aims to approximate those numbers, but results are still being processed. Last year, it counted 2,648 individuals.

City officials, legislators and advocates for the homeless have differing views on what has caused these high numbers as well as the best ways to address them. “Setting aside the economy, which certainly has contributed, one of the biggest factors is the policies of the Bloomberg administration, particularly cutting off homeless families from receiving federal subsidies,” said Giselle Routhier, policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless. “Right now, for the first time ever, there is no housing assistance whatsoever to help homeless families get out of the shelter system.”

She’s referring to the administration’s decision in 2004 to stop giving homeless families priority for federal housing subsidies like Section 8. That decision, based on the idea that continuing to do so gave people incentives to use the shelter system as a sure path to landing cheap housing, has been loudly criticized in recent years as the homeless population grows.

Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Department for the Homeless (DHS), said in an interview that bringing back that prioritization program wouldn’t be the panacea that some groups claim. “The reality is that there are very long waiting lists for the available programs,” Diamond said. “The Section 8 program has a waiting list of 140,000 or more. For public housing, the chairman of NYCHA [the New York City Housing Authority] just testified, the waiting list is 160,000. There is a seven year waiting list for public housing.”

Diamond also spoke about how DHS has prepared for the effective end of the Advantage program, which provided rent subsidies for formerly homeless families for up to two years. When the state cut funding for the program last year, the city determined that it could not sustain the program without the roughly $68 million in state and federal aid it had lost.

The city was still paying subsidized rents for about 16,000 formerly homeless families and individuals up until last month, however, while a lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society was ongoing. A judge recently ruled that the city could stop paying its portion of these rents, and the fate of the families who had been benefiting is unclear.

“We have been preparing for this for a while,” Diamond said. “We’ve done a lot of outreach to people who are Advantage recipients to help prepare, to talk to them about their individual situations. Most people have been in the program
for at least a year. People have had time to establish themselves, look for options, see
what’s coming.” Diamond said that close to 85 percent of those who took part in the Advantage program have not come back to the shelter system and that it has been successful.

But others dispute that characterization and say the city and state need to not only provide more assistance programs but expand on the Advantage model to offer more long-term solutions. “We can’t just scoop people up and stick them in temporary housing, kick them out, move them somewhere else. It just doesn’t work. It’s not really a compassionate or practical approach,” said Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, whose district, which includes parts of Hell’s Kitchen and the Upper West Side, contains several of the city’s shelters as well as housing for formerly homeless individuals.

Rosenthal said that one current priority in the Assembly is to restore funding to several programs that have been axed this year, all designed to provide emergency assistance or intervention for families facing homelessness. Local not-for-profits have also noticed an uptake in need for their services, like the New York City Rescue Mission on Lafayette
Street, which provides hot meals, a daily food pantry and 71 beds for transient
stays.

Tom Hall, development director for NYCRM, noted an uptake in meals served in the past year. According to Hall, in 2011, the NYCRM doled out roughly 495 per day while in 2008 they only served 416 daily meals. NYCRM will soon break ground on an $11 million project to renovate three floors of its building to add 100 more beds.

“Usually, in mild weather like the winter we just experienced, our dorm might not be full but in this year, far more people, irrespective of the weather, have come here,” noted Hall. “We have never seen so many and there are quite a few people we have to refer to other places of shelter.”

While Hall and NYCRM public relations manager Joe Little note that their organization
handles short-term housing and hunger solutions, they did add that one factor in an increasing need for these services is a reduction in homeless service funding a few years ago. Both pointed to the 2009 closing of Peter’s Place in Chelsea, which was the city’s only drop-in center exclusively for homeless people at the time.

City Council Member Jessica Lappin, who recently chaired a hearing of the Committee for the Aging on the alarming number of elderly New Yorkers facing homelessness—up 18 percent between 2010 and 2011 for people over 65—said the best thing the city can do to curb homelessness is to help people before they’re out of their homes.

This is especially true, she said, of older people who may have extra difficulty surviving in a shelter due to health issues. “The most important thing for that population is to try to get them the services they need as quickly as possible, to try to help them remain in their home as long as possible if that’s the right thing for them,” Lappin said.

She pointed to a Department for the Aging program that pairs seniors facing eviction with legal counsel as one way the city can step in. “Maybe your landlord tried to evict you because you’re a hoarder,” she said, naming one example of the cases seniors might face. “Sometimes what happens with older people is they stop paying their bills because they get confused about what bills they’ve paid.”

All of these problems are fixable with the right help, Lappin said, but it requires outreach on the part of the city. Many advocates echo the call to focus on keeping people in their homes and providing more affordable housing options.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said in an email that the high numbers of homelessness are “directly linked to scarcity of affordable housing.” He cited a study his office conducted in 2007 that found 2,228 vacant properties in Manhattan he says could be used to build more affordable housing, as well as his suggestion that the city convert foreclosed properties into affordable housing.

Stringer also contested the administration’s rescinding of priority status for homeless families for public housing. “Each year, approximately 5,313 NYCHA units are vacated; many of these units have more than one bedroom and can accommodate families,” Stringer said. “By reinstating priority for the homeless on the NYCHA waiting list, even if it was only done on a temporary basis, the city could take immediate steps toward placing a substantial percentage of its homeless population into permanent housing,” he said.

While the city works to address the immediate needs of the city’s homeless population—New York has a right-to-shelter law that requires the city to provide a bed for every homeless person—it also has to work on preventing and reducing their numbers.

It’s a problem that won’t be going away any time soon, and some say we won’t see any effective changes until the next mayoral administration takes over. “Homelessness is a national problem,” said Rosenthal. “But New York City, which has grappled with this problem for so many years, really ought to have some new ideas about how to deal with it.”