Be Our Guest: City needs shelter help

Marcus Santos for New York Daily News

Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs (l.) and Deputy Mayor for Operations Cas Holloway, discuss the city’s review of preparedness and recovery following Superstorm Sandy. Gibbs writes that the city needs more help from the state and federal governments to reduce its homeless shelter population

To everyone who cares about the plight of the homeless in New York City, and reads the recently released report on solving homelessness from a well-meaning group of providers and advocates, I have one thought: It won’t work.

Don’t mistake me here. It’s a solid plan. In fact, it is exactly what I did as Mayor Bloomberg’s first commissioner of homeless services: Create first-ever prevention program. Check. Use affordable housing resources to find permanent housing for shelter residents. Check. Expand and target supportive housing. Check. Need I go on?

But here we are, a stronger and saner shelter system, a new state-of-the-art family intake center, better ties to employment and economic mobility, far fewer people living on the street — but more people in shelter than when we started in 2002. What gives?

The shelter population has increased in recent years, in large part because of the deep national recession, but also for three key reasons that this report’s authors ignore.

First, reducing the shelter population requires a full federal and state partnership.

At the urging of advocates, the state withdrew funding from a rental assistance program we built, called Advantage, that was specifically tailored to re-housing the homeless. As a result, the program died and there is nothing available to help the homeless afford an apartment.

In fact, state government currently spends very little on family shelter and has nothing to risk if it grows. The city simply cannot afford to do this alone.

The advocates naively believed that, in place of Advantage, the city could issue Section 8 vouchers to homeless families, ignoring the fact that Washington has chronically under-funded the Section 8 program.

As a result, New York City will be able to issue no new Section 8 vouchers — this year or next.

The report’s recommendation that one-third of “new vouchers” — which again, are not being issued — go to homeless families is nothing but an empty promise. The report’s authors need to confront the real world.

Second, when we issued our strategic plan for ending homelessness in 2002, it included a critical component that has never been realized: full client responsibility.

Shelter should be a last resort, and those who arrive at the shelter system should be asked basic questions about whether they have other options — family members or friends who they could stay with.

Yet advocates have fought our attempts to ask those basic questions. Shelter directors often express frustration at being thwarted by clients who refuse to take available steps to move from shelter, and face no consequences for it.

Shelter should not be a way of life; it must be a short-term and temporary intervention of a month or two. Yet the average family is now staying in shelter for one year.

In addition, those with incomes should contribute to the cost of shelter, which is the law in every town in New York State — except New York City. Failure to make reasonable efforts to find shelter should come with a serious consequence: denial of shelter itself. The shelter system is a right, but all rights come with responsibilities.

Third, reducing the number of people living in shelter requires less judicial interference. Lawyers for advocacy organizations — including the group that authored this report — have suffered defeat after defeat in their efforts to stop city government from taking reasonable steps to manage the shelter system.

Yet the procedural delays they win delay implementation and bind the city to policies and expenditures that are outmoded and prevent innovations. Indeed, lawsuits take months and even years to reach conclusion, a well-worn tactic that pervades the shelter system and stymies accountability.

Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has tried more and done more to help the homeless than any other, and it has worked: Street homelessness is down by two-thirds. But if we are going to reduce the shelter population, it will require that we face up to these three realities, instead of ignoring them.

Linda Gibbs serves in the Bloomberg Administration as Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services.

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