New York at a Crossroads

By Jacquelyn Simone, Policy Director, Coalition for the Homeless

The Coalition for the Homeless’ State of the Homeless 2022 report, New York at a Crossroads, provides a comprehensive look at the causes of – and solutions to – homelessness in New York as the city works to recover from the pandemic and the vulnerability of our unsheltered neighbors has tragically become even more clear.

The recent attacks on homeless New Yorkers underscore a disturbing trend: In FY2021, a record number of New Yorkers died while homeless, amidst the City’s and State’s continued failure to address the underlying causes of the homelessness crisis. The report finds that affordable housing production has lagged population growth, leaving about a half million households with incomes below $30,000 at risk of homelessness – paying more than half of their incomes on rent. Meanwhile, an unprecedented eviction crisis looms for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers following the expiration of the State’s eviction moratorium, in the absence of additional emergency rental assistance or expansion of needed rent subsidies.

The Coalition strongly urges Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul to cease treating unsheltered homeless individuals as a public nuisance requiring an aggressive law enforcement response – an approach not only inhumane, but ineffective – and instead embrace the solutions proven to work, including permanent supportive housing, more mental health resources, and safer, low-barrier shelters. The report notes that Mayor Adams inherited a dysfunctional and often dangerous shelter system that temporarily houses a near-record number of single adults in congregate dorms, placing residents at high risk of contracting airborne infectious diseases like COVID-19 and depriving them of the safety and dignity of more private, accessible accommodations.

State of the Homeless includes a report card that grades the City and State on their efforts to meet the needs of unsheltered New Yorkers, provide access to shelters and permanent housing, and prevent homelessness:

“Mayor Adams is focused on getting unsheltered New Yorkers off the subways and streets, but has not yet created safer places for them to go. No one wants to sleep on the streets: They do so because the City and State have failed to offer them better options. Police sweeps haven’t worked before and won’t work this time. We must address the problems that lead so many people to decide that a sidewalk or subway car is their safest option: dorm-style shelters where people feel unsafe, a lack of mental health services, and a dearth of affordable housing. Fixing those fundamental problems is hard but urgent work. Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul have an enormous responsibility to correct the mistakes of the past, protect unsheltered individuals, and deliver affordable, accessible, and supportive housing on a scale that actually meets the need,” said Jacquelyn Simone, Policy Director with the Coalition for the Homeless.

Recommendations

State of the Homeless also outlines key steps that the City and State can take to immediately address the growing crisis, including:

Helping Unsheltered Homeless New Yorkers
Mayor Adams must:

• Prohibit NYPD from responding to 311 calls requesting assistance for homeless individuals and remove NYPD from all homeless outreach functions. Calls to 311 should only result in the deployment of properly trained DHS-contracted outreach workers.
• Cease encampment-clearing operations and street sweeps and focus instead on connecting people to resources they want, including low-barrier shelters and permanent housing.
• Open at least 3,000 new Safe Haven and stabilization beds in single-occupancy rooms and offer them to all unsheltered homeless individuals, with a focus on expanding the number of these facilities for women and transgender or gender-non-conforming individuals, and increase drop-in center capacity citywide.
• Administratively clear all summonses for “quality of life” offenses issued to people as a result of their homeless status.

Governor Hochul must:

• Immediately fund at least 1,000 units of supported housing with mobile mental health services similar to the original “housing first” or “Pathways” model for unsheltered individuals with mental illnesses at $50,000 per unit per year.

Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul should together:

• Halt the deployment of additional police in response to homeless people located in transit facilities and trains.
• Reopen 600 NYC inpatient psychiatric unit beds that had been diverted to COVID-19 care, and assure that all admissions, whether for observation or inpatient care, include full care management and discharge planning services.
• Expand access to low-barrier physical and mental health care, including virtual care and street medicine.
• Avoid characterizations of homeless people that stereotype them as mentally ill and violent.

Emergency Shelters 
Mayor Adams must:

• Reduce the City’s reliance on large congregate facilities for homeless single adults, and shift the creation of new capacity toward single-occupancy accommodations with full accessibility features for those with disabilities as well as smaller, low-barrier shelter designs such as Safe Haven shelters, which are more home-like and have better staffing for those with complex needs.
• Initiate the redesign of all shelter facilities with the expectation that possible future outbreaks of airborne infectious diseases will require the provision of private rooms and bathrooms for each individual or household, and with attention to the principles of safety, public health, accessibility, and individual autonomy.
• Ensure that shelters are sufficiently staffed and that staff are appropriately trained to help residents apply for and secure permanent housing.

Governor Hochul must:

• Reverse harmful cuts to New York City’s emergency shelter system that have resulted in the State short-changing the City by hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade, and share equally with the City in the non-Federal cost of sheltering homeless families and individuals.
• Replace the grossly inadequate $45 per month personal needs allowance for those living in shelters with the standard basic needs allowance provided to all public assistance recipients.

Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul should together:

• Implement reforms to eliminate the unnecessary and inhumane bureaucratic barriers to shelter for homeless families with children and adult families, which force them to reapply for shelter multiple times before ultimately being found eligible; and make permanent the pandemic-era changes that allow families to reapply from their provisional shelter placements and that no longer require them to bring minor children to the PATH intake center.
• Increase the oversight of shelters so that maintenance and poor conditions are promptly identified and addressed, with adequate funding for cleaning staff and capital repairs.
• Ensure that shelter residents have adequate internet access for needs related to education, employment, housing searches, health care, and other critical issues by ensuring that i) there is WiFi access in all private and common areas of all shelters, and ii) all residents have access to computers, tablets, or other devices.

Permanent Housing and Homelessness Prevention
Mayor Adams must:

• Ensure full coordination between the City’s housing and homeless services agencies so that housing investments are properly calibrated to meet the most urgent needs of homeless and extremely low-income New Yorkers.
• Provide $2.5 billion in additional new construction financing each year for the next five years for apartments specifically built for homeless and extremely low-income New Yorkers, by:
  • Doubling the set-aside in new affordable housing developments for homeless households to 30 percent in order to produce at least 6,000 new apartments per year; and
  • Building an additional 6,000 apartments per year for households with extremely low incomes.
• Accelerate the creation of 15,000 City-funded supportive housing units by scheduling their completion by 2025 rather than 2030.
• Exempt agencies providing housing, homelessness prevention, and shelter services from budget cuts so as not to worsen existing staffing shortages and administrative delays.

Governor Hochul must:

• Implement the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP) to create a State-funded, long-term rent subsidy for homeless and extremely low-income households.
• Implement an increase to Cash Assistance grants, including raising the shelter allowance to cover market rents.
• Short of a universal increase in Cash Assistance, implement the Home Stability Support (HSS) program to create a State-funded, long-term rent subsidy for households receiving public assistance who are homeless or at risk of losing their housing due to eviction, domestic violence, or hazardous housing conditions.
• Remove all State budget appropriation restrictions on New York City’s authority to claim reimbursement for all rent subsidy, rent supplement, or other rental assistance programs.
• Accelerate the pace of production of the 20,000 units of supportive housing pledged by former Governor Cuomo in 2016 by completing them by 2026 instead of 2031, fully fund the construction and operation of the remaining 14,000 units, and initiate a robust supportive housing preservation program to keep at least 6,000 units in service over the next 10 years.
• Enact Good Cause eviction legislation.
• Add funding to the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, using both Federal funds and State funds as necessary to fully meet the need.

Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul should together:

• Fund the production of more housing for homeless single adults, separate and apart from existing supportive housing commitments.
• Expand access to supportive housing and other permanent housing for adult families – a population with disproportionately high levels of disability and complex needs.
• Ensure effective reentry planning for individuals being released from prisons and jails in order to identify viable housing options prior to each individual’s scheduled release date, fund the creation of supportive housing specifically for individuals reentering the community after incarceration, and prohibit housing discrimination on the basis of an arrest or conviction record.