Posted on February 28, 2017 by Rosa Goldensohn and Erik Engquist in Crain's Crain's, By Rosa Goldensohn and Erik Engquist A chastened Mayor Bill de Blasio laid out a new approach for addressing the homelessness problem that has dogged him since he promised in his inauguration speech three years ago to make the city “a place where everyday people can afford to live, work and raise a family.” Noting that “it’s taken us three years to realize some of these hard truths,” the mayor announced plans to reduce the city’s reliance on hotels to temporarily warehouse homeless families by building new shelters that will house people from nearby neighborhoods. He pushed back by three years, to 2021, a deadline to move the homeless out of much-maligned cluster sites—landlord-operated apartment buildings that have been criticized as taking permanent housing off the market.
