As the number of people in city shelters swells, homelessness is on the minds of many New Yorkers. In August, Mayor Adams issued an emergency declaration to speed up the process of opening shelters to meet this increased need. With more than 60,000 New Yorkers in shelters and at least 3,500 more living on the streets and subways, homelessness demands urgent action.
The city can start by tackling the issues that the real experts — homeless New Yorkers themselves — highlighted during Homeless Rights Month this July.
The mayor’s “Housing Our Neighbors” blueprint is a step — but there is a wide gap between promising rhetoric and concrete actions to improve the lives of homeless New Yorkers. There are three things that the administration can and should immediately do to make homeless rights a reality.
First, New York City must end the criminalization of homelessness. The mayor is right that no one should have to live on the streets, but punitive tactics like sweeps make it harder, not easier, to encourage people to come inside. After the initial set of 700 such sweeps from March 18 to May 1 of this year, only 39 homeless New Yorkers had accessed services.
Sweeps can also be seriously debilitating. Between the start of enhanced “clean-ups” and reporting in early June, on at least 415 occasions, sanitation officials disposed of homeless New Yorkers’ personal effects. Belongings destroyed by encampment sweeps have historically included medications, sentimental items and crucial personal documents that are essential when accessing housing (and are nearly impossible to replace). Sweeps too often mean city government officials showing up with guns and garbage trucks and breaking the trust that outreach workers strive to earn from unsheltered New Yorkers.
Instead, the administration should offer street homeless New Yorkers an option that many have repeatedly said they would be eager to take: single rooms. If a single room cannot be guaranteed, the city should follow CDC guidelines, which direct municipalities to “allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are” in situations when “individual housing options are not available.” Otherwise, we will continue to cycle through city resources, cruelly sweeping the same sites, without achieving sustained reductions in street homelessness.
The administration should also be working to speed up the conversion of hotels to permanent housing through the state’s Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity (HONDA) fund, which received a new infusion of $100 million this year. There is no excuse to rely on sweeps when we have better options available to get people housed.
A second crucial step that the administration can take to help homeless New Yorkers is to improve conditions in shelters. Providing privacy and dignity in all temporary housing facilities is essential. The administration has committed to significant investments in Safe Havens and stabilization beds — but the devil is always in the details. The number of beds in single-room settings remains strikingly low, and the number of low-barrier beds of any kind is not nearly enough to meet the need, as described by outreach workers and evidenced by the fact that Safe Havens have consistently low vacancy rates.
The mayor’s efforts to increase outreach to unsheltered New Yorkers are laudable, but without expanding the solutions that outreach workers can offer, the outcomes will remain sadly the same. We must drastically increase the number of single and double-room Safe Haven and stabilization beds — which give homeless New Yorkers the conditions they deserve.
Finally, with the average family staying in shelter for nearly 500 days, there is an urgent need to make it easier for homeless New Yorkers to access housing. There are several pieces of legislation in the Council that would do so — by making CityFHEPS vouchers work better, banning housing discrimination against people with conviction records, and more.
We hope we can count on the mayor’s support for signing and swiftly implementing these vital changes.
And in the meantime, the mayor can streamline the path to housing by eliminating the “90-day rule,” a regulation that requires households to spend 90 days in shelter before qualifying for a city-funded voucher. Allowing homeless New Yorkers to access rental assistance immediately is both right and prudent. It would reduce strain on the shelter system at a moment when we need all the beds we can get: this month, the vacancy rate in family shelters was just 0.18%, or 19 available rooms.
We must protect the health and safety of all New Yorkers. And that starts with those who do not have a home.
Restler represents Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Boerum Hill and other neighborhoods in the City Council. Matthews is a leader of VOCAL-NY’s Homelessness Union.
