Mayor Bloomberg formally announced the plan to revise the city’s strategy for homelessness in a speech yesterday. As an exercise in rhetoric, there are a number of admirable points made. The speech clearly recognizes that distinct issues surrounding the ‘chronic homeless’ population (mostly men, mostly with sustance abuse and/or mental illness problems), and commits to services exclusive of housing that may prove transformative. He also calls for an immedate increase in the amount of supportive housing (which aids the chronic population and those segments in need of services that go beyond economic hardship), though he is unfortunately vague about funding. With a current shelter population numbering 38,000, being fuzzy on the math (the current target for supporting housing is 5,000, meaning the gap is well over statistically significant) is a crucial issue.
What is clearly lacking from the speech is a strong mandate to address the other chronic need in this city: affordable housing. The Times
quotes a statistic not in the speech, to the effect that is costs the city $25,000 to house a family in a shelter each year. Why this cannot be translated into a direct subsidy an interesting question (though it would be useful to frame the discussion by breaking those numbers down; even marginally homeless populations require services, and any long term transitional housing subsidy should be accompanied by education, job training, etc.). The mayor also dances around the fact that the courts still hold sway of most of the emergency housing services, since successful lawsuits demonstrated that the previous administration was none too enlightened on how to deal with the largest homeless population in decades. The simple answer is that the city needs to develop affordable housing (which is mentioned in the speech, but I haven’t seen 65,000 apartments under development, have you?) for a core segment of its population, and it needs to be done outside of federal funding (unless some miracle happens, one that exceeds even the election of a Democratic president) so we can have a humane way of dealing with the most extraordinary income and housing cost gaps in the country. This may rankle the aspiring professionals and creative industry wage slaves that flock to the city each year, willing to live in ridiculous conditions at outrageous rates. But their overall economic and social circumstances and outlook are radically different, and their penury is elective (and at times, embarassingly self-aggrandizing). Compared to any other ‘world class’ city, New York has the least effective (as a matter of design or social programming) affordable housing policy. If we embrace the need to spend (privately or publicly) a half a billion dollars on a single musuem renovation, or a billion and a half on a stadium, we can squeeze out a billion or two for a 21st century Stuyvesant Town, can’t we?
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
Where the heart is, if not the funding.
Mayor Bloomberg formally announced the plan to revise the city’s strategy for homelessness in a speech yesterday. As an exercise in rhetoric, there are a number of admirable points made. The speech clearly recognizes that distinct issues surrounding the ‘chronic homeless’ population (mostly men, mostly with sustance abuse and/or mental illness problems), and commits to services exclusive of housing that may prove transformative. He also calls for an immedate increase in the amount of supportive housing (which aids the chronic population and those segments in need of services that go beyond economic hardship), though he is unfortunately vague about funding. With a current shelter population numbering 38,000, being fuzzy on the math (the current target for supporting housing is 5,000, meaning the gap is well over statistically significant) is a crucial issue.
What is clearly lacking from the speech is a strong mandate to address the other chronic need in this city: affordable housing. The Times
quotes a statistic not in the speech, to the effect that is costs the city $25,000 to house a family in a shelter each year. Why this cannot be translated into a direct subsidy an interesting question (though it would be useful to frame the discussion by breaking those numbers down; even marginally homeless populations require services, and any long term transitional housing subsidy should be accompanied by education, job training, etc.). The mayor also dances around the fact that the courts still hold sway of most of the emergency housing services, since successful lawsuits demonstrated that the previous administration was none too enlightened on how to deal with the largest homeless population in decades. The simple answer is that the city needs to develop affordable housing (which is mentioned in the speech, but I haven’t seen 65,000 apartments under development, have you?) for a core segment of its population, and it needs to be done outside of federal funding (unless some miracle happens, one that exceeds even the election of a Democratic president) so we can have a humane way of dealing with the most extraordinary income and housing cost gaps in the country. This may rankle the aspiring professionals and creative industry wage slaves that flock to the city each year, willing to live in ridiculous conditions at outrageous rates. But their overall economic and social circumstances and outlook are radically different, and their penury is elective (and at times, embarassingly self-aggrandizing). Compared to any other ‘world class’ city, New York has the least effective (as a matter of design or social programming) affordable housing policy. If we embrace the need to spend (privately or publicly) a half a billion dollars on a single musuem renovation, or a billion and a half on a stadium, we can squeeze out a billion or two for a 21st century Stuyvesant Town, can’t we?