Homeless Back on Streets of New York

In 2004, to great fanfare, Michael Bloomberg launched a plan for a two-thirds reduction in the number of homeless people in New York in five years. Nearly ten years later there are more than 50,000 homeless, including 21,000 children, an increase of 61 percent since his arrival at City Hall. This is a record which, a few months from his departure, has tarnished an otherwise positive performance.

The situation is in large part attributed to the financial crisis, but critics also blame the mayor for having neglected the very poor, while New York has regained much of its economic vitality and even witnessed a new rush on luxury apartments. According to the latest report from the Coalition for the Homeless, last year New York had the largest increase of homeless people in the entire United States.

Michael Bloomberg didn’t depart from his typical sarcasm when responding to the accusations: “You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter,” he said in early March, to expose a system which, according to him, is abused.

Budget Cuts

In the city’s admission center, located in the Bronx, there is no limousine in view this afternoon, but there are many families pushing strollers and luggage. The city doesn’t publish statistics on the different categories of homeless people, but the majority suffer from mental health problems, addiction, domestic violence and chronic poverty.

The building’s interior has the atmosphere of a checkpoint. Candidates are greeted by 15 armed policemen and obligatory passage through metal detectors. David and Suania Torres and their two children try their luck, but an employee tells them that they aren’t eligible because their application was recently denied. They will need to come back. “We were kicked out of our home in January because they got tired of us and since then we’ve spent our nights in hospital emergency rooms,”* explains the husband.

Margaret Green, five months pregnant, isn’t any more fortunate. “They asked me for notarized letters from people who have hosted us these last two weeks. We changed places almost every two days. Who is going to lose half a day’s work and pay a notary for a letter?”* she asks. The 28-year-old woman was employed in a hair salon for a salary of just over $2,300 per month but found herself homeless when, for budgetary reasons, in 2011 the State of New York deprived the city of housing aid for the poorest. The number of people on the street immediately exploded. But the situation had begun to deteriorate seriously in 2006 when the city got rid of its own subsidies, in place for 30 years, to fight against “dependance” on social aid. “Today in New York, there is no longer any housing assistance for the homeless,” says Patrick Markee, director of the Coalition for the Homeless. Associations and local officials are waging a merciless war against Bloomberg in court. Democratic President of the City Council Christine Quinn, his likely successor, was forced to abandon a draconian tightening of the eligibility rules for homeless without children. Likewise, she has had to abandon demands for rent payment from them.

Even so, the city is limiting neither spending nor effort. A number of homes have been opened and in 2013 the city is going to spend nearly $1 billion to combat the situation, compared to $600 million in 2004. But critics also reproach Bloomberg for the mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. The “Pennington” in upper Manhattan is, according to them, a perfect example. For two years, the owner of this beautiful building with subsidized rents progressively replaced its usual tenants with homeless ones, who are much more “profitable.” Indeed, City Hall compensates him more than $3,700 per month per room of eight square meters without a kitchen or bathroom (it spends $3,000 per family in their own homes). The entrepreneur, recently sentenced for illegally renting the rooms to tourists, is today one of the principal operators of rooms for the homeless in the city. Will Machan, one of the last residents, aged 68, is resistant to the pressure. “The owner houses MICA [homeless people suffering from mental health problems] in order to discourage us, but I remain firm, anyway, I have nowhere else to go.”* In his annual speech in February, for the first time the mayor did not mention the homeless. But none of the candidates for succession have yet ventured to propose a solution.

*Editor’s note: These quotes, accurately translated, could not be sourced.