Posted on March 10, 2015 by Jacquelyn Simone For most people, waiting in an airport is a tedious but necessary part of traveling. The only thing that makes the hours of sitting at a terminal bearable is the thought of the trip they will be taking when they finally hear the call to board their flight. But for the growing number of homeless men and women who take refuge at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport, there will be no vacation. They are waiting indefinitely, without any indication of when their plight will end. Those who are literally “living out of a suitcase” sit alongside those packed for a vacation, business trip or family visit – both groups dozing while protecting their belongings. As Martin Z. Braun wrote in a Bloomberg Business article, with the record-breaking cold weather, there has been a significant increase in the number of chronically homeless people who seek warmth and shelter in the public portions of LaGuardia. Volunteers of America, which has offices at LaGuardia and JFK, counted a monthly average of 45 chronic homeless people at LaGuardia in 2014, an 80 percent increase over the average month in 2011. On the coldest nights, as many as 50 took refuge at LaGuardia in East Elmhurst, Queens. JFK’s chronic homeless increased to an average of 33 per month, double the number in 2011. “There’s some new faces,” said Sharan Kaur, an assistant general manager at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, who’s worked at LaGuardia for five years. Conditions at the airports reflect the growth of homelessness in the most populous U.S. city. Every night, more than 60,000 people—almost 26,000 of them children—sleep in shelters, an increase of about 20,000 in three years, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, a New York-based advocacy group. City officials estimate that an additional 3,357 homeless people were living on streets, in parks, and in other public places in 2014, an increase of 6 percent over the previous year. Homeless advocates say that number is much higher. The staggering increase in the number of homeless people – both living on the streets and in shelters – is proportional to the increase in average rents throughout the city. Years of short-sighted policies only worsened the crisis. New York’s homelessness crisis stems from a shortage of affordable housing. Median rents rose 75 percent from 2000 to 2012, compared with 44 percent in the rest of the U.S., according to a 2014 report (pdf) by City Comptroller Scott Stringer. In addition, New York lost about 400,000 apartments renting for $1,000 or less. The median monthly rent will reach $2,700 this year, according to the real-estate website StreetEasy.com. That’s $1,300 more than what a resident working 40 hours per week and making the minimum wage earns a month, before taxes. In 2005, New York stopped giving priority for federal housing aid to homeless families and children in shelters. The city started Advantage, a rental-assistance program, jointly funded by the state, in 2007. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended the program in February 2012 after the state cut funding. In the 21 months that followed, almost 50 percent of families enrolled in Advantage returned to shelters. Reversing the trend will not be easy, but there are solutions at hand, and the Coalition is hopeful that one day, all New Yorkers will have a safe place to live.
