The Auburn Family Residence has been cited for over 400 violations. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
N.Y. TIMES
In the face of New York’s mounting homeless crisis, Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce on Friday that his administration is removing hundreds of children from two city-owned homeless shelters that inspectors have repeatedly cited for deplorable conditions over the last decade, officials said.
The city has begun transferring over 400 children and their families out of the Auburn Family Residence in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and from the Catherine Street shelter in Lower Manhattan, while vowing to improve services for the swelling population of 22,000 homeless children, Mr. de Blasio and other officials said in interviews this week.
The administration is trying to find either subsidized permanent housing or suitable temporary shelter for the families and will be converting the Auburn and Catherine Street facilities into adult family shelters, the officials said.
For nearly three decades, thousands of children passed through Auburn and Catherine Street, living with cockroaches, spoiled food, violence and insufficient heat, even as inspectors warned that the shelters were unfit for children.
State and city inspectors have cited Auburn for over 400 violations — many of them repeated — for a range of hazards, including vermin, mold, lead exposure, an inoperable fire safety system, insufficient child care and the presence of sexual predators, among them, a caseworker.
“We just weren’t going to allow this to happen on our watch,” the mayor said.
The Catherine Street shelter in Lower Manhattan. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The conditions at Auburn, which were detailed in a recent series in The New York Times, prompted the City Council to schedule hearings next week on family shelters. Records and interviews show that similar lapses have dogged Catherine Street, which, like Auburn, is an aging residence with communal bathrooms that children share with strangers. Families live in rooms without kitchens or running water, preventing them from cooking their own meals or washing baby bottles.
Since 2006, the state agency responsible for overseeing homeless shelters has routinely ordered the city to remove all infants and toddlers from Catherine Street, citing at least 150 violations in that time.
That agency, the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, could have sanctioned Auburn and Catherine Street by withholding state funding, but chose not to because that “would have meant defunding services that help tens of thousands of New Yorkers in need at a time when New York City had the highest number of homeless residents in its history,” the office’s commissioner, Kristin M. Proud, said in an email.
In the fall, a resident at Catherine Street took five children and two caseworkers hostage, barricading them in a room on the second floor, according to police records. In August 2012, a group of teenage boys took “over the building,” threatening children in bathrooms and assaulting others on the street, according to state records.
In a somewhat surreal twist, the city is exploring a plan to convert part of Auburn’s ground floor — the site of a cafeteria notorious for its mice and rancid food — into a “culinary arts” training program for adult residents. In the meantime, the city has added six more microwaves to the cafeteria, where people used to wait in lines to heat food that was sometimes served cold.
Both Auburn and Catherine Street were converted into family shelters in 1985 and, in the intervening decades, have remained a thorn in the side of homeless advocates.
“Until today, no mayor was willing to say no children should be treated this way, and that’s a historic breakthrough,” said Steven Banks, the attorney in chief at the Legal Aid Society, which has battled the city in court over shelter conditions.
Yet only a small fraction of the city’s homeless children live at Auburn and Catherine Street. Its temporary housing system includes 151 family facilities of varying quality, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will address complaints about conditions at other shelters.
Advocates for the homeless have pressed Mr. de Blasio to reinstate several policies that ended under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. From 1990 until 2005, the city placed more than 53,000 homeless families in permanent housing by giving them priority referrals to federal subsidy programs, according to an analysis of city data by Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.
The Bloomberg administration canceled that policy and in its place created a short-term rent subsidy program that ended in 2011 when the state withdrew its portion of the funding. By the time Mr. Bloomberg left office at the end of last year, the homeless population had peaked at more than 52,000 — the highest number on record since the Great Depression.
“There are major American cities that have the same population as we have people in shelter,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We have to look this in the face. This is literally an unacceptable dynamic, and we have to reverse it.”
In interviews, Mr. de Blasio, his deputy mayor for health and human services, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, and the newly appointed homeless services commissioner, Gilbert Taylor, laid out the broad outlines of a still-evolving plan to address homelessness.
A homeless man sleeps on stairs in Grand Central Station, on Christmas Eve in New York. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
The de Blasio administration is also exploring a plan to enhance anti-eviction legal services for families, and an “aftercare” support program intended to prevent newly housed families from becoming homeless again.
The city is less likely to depend on federal housing programs as a solution because of the dwindling supply, Mr. de Blasio said. “It will be a tool we use as needed, but I think the central thrust has to be getting at the root causes,” he said. “Greater supply of affordable housing. Pushing up wages and benefits. More preventative efforts.”
The family’s room is the scene of debilitating chaos: stacks of dirty laundry, shoes stuffed under a mattress, bicycles and coats piled high.
To the left of the door, beneath a decrepit sink where Baby Lele is bathed, the wall has rotted through, leaving a long, dark gap where mice congregate.
The subject of the series in The Times, Dasani Coates, 12, spent three years at Auburn, sharing one room with her parents and seven siblings before the family was transferred to a shelter in Harlem, where they have remained since October. The Department of Homeless Services is trying to place the family in one of the city’s few supportive housing programs, which provide affordable apartments with on-site services for vulnerable families.