Author: Giselle Routhier

Imagine working full time and still living $3,000 below the federal poverty line. This is reality for the over 600,000 New Yorkers earning minimum wage. These folks earn just $15,080 a year. In order to afford a two bedroom apartment at the Fair Market Rent, t ..Read More

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Council member Annabel Palma, and our own Mary Brosnahan co-authored a letter to the editor in the NY Times today in response to an article on record homelessness. They are calling on the administration to enact the Cit ..Read More

Inocente Izucar is a formerly-homeless teenager living in San Diego. As a child Ms. Izucar moved more than 30 times in nine years — sleeping in crowded quarters beside her three younger brothers under one temporary roof after another, and sometimes even out ..Read More

Even as the Bloomberg administration continues to turn away families at the front door of the shelter system, the City has still managed to reach new record numbers in shelter. NY1 reports on the growing problem of record homelessness and the individual live ..Read More

New Department of Education data show that nearly 70 percent of all students in NYC come from poor households. Seventy percent! Moreover, 48 schools have a student poverty rate between 97 and 100 percent. There aren’t really appropriate words to describe t ..Read More

“Recently, the line to get into Bronx housing court was a block long….” As a huge number of families face eviction, it’s hard to get a sense of the true scope of the problem. WNYC’s Cindy Rodriguez reports today on something we’ve known for a whi ..Read More

Saturday’s New York Times highlighted a troubling consequence of New York’s failed homeless policies. By denying families access to permanent housing resources, the City is now forced to open new shelters to meet the increasing need. Newly-released data ..Read More

Climbing out of poverty in the United States is getting harder and harder thanks to ever-rising economic inequality. Today, the Associated Press talked to Joseph Stiglitz about rising inequality and how it is weakening our economy. And while the article does ..Read More

Families entering the shelter system in 2012 differ from those in years prior in a very important way – most of them have been homeless before. In 2005 and the years prior, the percentage of families entering shelter who had previously been homeless remained ..Read More