Author: Jacquelyn Simone

On a cold December day in 2009, a 32-year old man was brought to Bellevue Hospital. By then, everyone recognized “Joe.” Joe (not his real name) was chronically homeless and had been to Bellevue’s emergency room 430 times during the prior three ye ..Read More

St. Joseph’s Church, in Prospect Heights, was full of angry Brooklynites. It was 2002, and a significant portion of the neighborhood was still industrial, including empty lots filled with barrels of chemical waste. But the outraged crowd was there to pro ..Read More

As New York City grapples with a surge in homelessness, both the city and state governments have unveiled urgent measures to reach out to people living on the street and try to persuade them to move to shelters. The Associated Press interviewed several dozen h ..Read More

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in his latest attempt to address New York City’s homelessness crisis, unveiled a plan on Friday to add 300 shelter beds for older teenagers, an age group that advocates say is underserved and especially vulnerable to suicide and sex tra ..Read More

The City Council in a resolution yesterday called on the state to match the City’s commitment to create thousands of supportive units of housing earmarked for the homeless. The resolution comes days after Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would take unilateral actio ..Read More

This week, as temperatures in New York City dipped below freezing for the first time this winter, Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared to remember that there are homeless people—not only in New York City, but in cities around the state—and issued an apparently u ..Read More

As he grapples with the city’s homeless crisis, Mayor de Blasio took an up close look Thursday night. De Blasio spent nearly two hours visiting one of the city’s largest shelters, the 30th Street Intake Center, also known as the Bellevue Shelter, c ..Read More

As New York City grapples with its homelessness crisis, many of those sleeping on the street have said they’d prefer to be outside than contend with the city’s at-times overburdened, dirty and even dangerous shelter system. Mayor Bill de Blasio, wh ..Read More