Month: December 2015

I spend my days fighting poverty in New York City, so this time of year I get asked a lot at holiday parties what people can do to help the poor. I like the question. At the Robin Hood Foundation, we’ve spent 27 years trying to answer it. As with any complex ..Read More

In Part One of The Long Way Home, we met Shakira Crawford, a homeless mother of three who is hoping to take advantage of a new citywide voucher program designed to lift people into permanent, independent housing. In Part Two (click above to listen), Crawford c ..Read More

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered a top-to-bottom review of the city’s bureaucracy to address homelessness following the resignation Tuesday of the Department of Homeless Services commissioner. The move, which comes about three months after the depa ..Read More

As New Yorkers continue the eternal struggle with high rents in Manhattan and Brooklyn, they’re increasingly setting their sights on Queens, according to a report. Demand in the borough is set to rise in 2016, according to real estate site StreetEasy, with J ..Read More

The New York City housing voucher program is designed to get homeless people off the streets, but an Eyewitness News investigation has uncovered that it not easing the problem. It allows homeless people to use vouchers to rent an apartment, much like food stam ..Read More

Meet Shakira Crawford, 39, and her three kids, ages 8 to 13. She emigrated from Jamaica as a child, became a U.S. citizen in New York, and graduated from high school in the Bronx. She now works full-time at a Manhattan hotel earning $17,000 a year. She’s a s ..Read More

Advocates for affordable housing hate it. The mayor’s own chief investigator called for it to be cut back. But so-called cluster housing for the homeless is about to get another $200 million from the de Blasio administration, which is proposing contracts tha ..Read More

The scene of neighbors hanging holiday decorations at their tidy Bronx apartment building was nothing remarkable, except to the people doing it. Like everyone else at Haven Apartments, they had been homeless and mentally ill. And now they have their own apartm ..Read More