Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio of New York has promised to address the city's affordable housing crisis, a product of recession and years of bad choices by city, state and federal officials. The crisis has driven record numbers of families into often grim and inhospitable homeless shelters that can be hard, if not impossible, to escape.
There are considerably fewer homeless people on New York's streets than there were a decade ago. But there are more than 52,000 people in homeless shelters, including about 22,000 children — both record highs. One of the tragedies behind those impersonal numbers was the focus of a five-part series, titled "Invisible Child," by Andrea Elliott of The Times. The series focused on the heartbreaking circumstances of Dasani, a 12-year-old girl who spent three years in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, where she shared a small room with seven siblings and her parents, both of whom have struggled with drug addiction.
Over the last decade, that shelter has been cited hundreds of times for problems like nonfunctioning bathrooms, insufficient heat, mice, roaches, bedbugs, mold and asbestos. Such facilities are unsuitable for anyone, but especially for children like Dasani and her siblings, two of whom have asthma and one of whom is legally blind. Chaotic shelter life makes it difficult for even bright children to do well consistently at school.
Mayor-elect de Blasio said on Thursday that the city had a duty to "take care of kids like Dasani."
The Bloomberg team says Dasani's family is an exception; the average length of stay for families with children is about 13 months. The city argues that Dasani's parents have been given a whole range of social services but have failed to achieve a steady footing, partly because they have made poor decisions and did not capitalize on work opportunities. Nevertheless, the city's data show that about a quarter of shelter families with children have at least one working adult.
For decades, the city's homeless policy recognized that permanent, affordable housing was necessary for moving people out of shelters. Mr. Bloomberg seemed to accept this reality when he took office in 2002. But he quickly moved away from it. In 2004, the city ended the policy of setting aside a portion of Section 8 vouchers and public housing apartments for homeless families in emergency shelter. The change was motivated by federal cuts to Section 8 and by the city's belief that the benefits encouraged people to declare themselves homeless as a way of getting cheaper housing.
By 2007, the city had moved to a subsidy program called Advantage, under which people received rental subsidies for two years while working or taking part in job training. The city maintains that the program worked and that only about a quarter of those who participated in it returned to shelters. The program ended in 2011, after the state cut its support and, with it, federal matching dollars.
The Great Recession would have increased the homeless population in any case. But Bloomberg policies probably made matters worse. On Thursday, Mr. de Blasio's newly appointed deputy mayor for health and human services, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, said the de Blasio administration would restore rental subsidies in some form.
That's a good start, but more is needed, including from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who can aid that effort by ponying up money for the subsidy program as well as for services that save poor people from eviction.
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