THE CITY POLITIC MAR. 13, 2022

New York’s Homelessness Crisis Needs More Than This

 

Addressing subway violence requires a major investment in social infrastructure.

By Errol Louis

Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

As the state and city budget seasons shift into high gear, we’re already getting a trickle — soon to be a raging river — of big-budget proposals coming from private-industry groups, advocacy organizations, and politicians. There are calls to spend nearly $2 billion to pay off delinquent utility bills. $5 billion to provide universal child care. $1.7 billion to build out CUNY over the next five years and make the university tuition-free for city residents.

These are all interesting and worthy proposals. But it’s important that Mayor Eric Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul, and state lawmakers not lose sight of the catastrophe unfolding underground, and that they treat the situation like the emergency it is. They need to follow the strategies — including a dramatic increase in funding — that experts say are needed to get control of a crisis of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers who are living in our subways and showing up in violent incidents as victims and victimizers.

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We’ve all seen the horrific headlines and sickening videos. Michelle Go was pushed to her death in the Times Square subway station by a man named Martial Simon who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized 20 different times over a span of decades.

Another woman was suddenly attacked, while sitting on a bench at the Wakefield-241st station in the Bronx, by a man named Frank Abrokwa who smeared a bag filled with his own feces in her face and hair. A 57-year-old city Health Department researcher named Nina Rothschild was kicked down a flight of subway stairs and smashed in the head 13 times with a hammer in the course of being robbed.

And a single weekend in February saw eight people punched, stabbed, slashed, robbed, beaten with a pipe, or threatened with a hatchet. Felony assaults in the subway increased nearly 25 percent last year despite a drop in ridership, and arrests are up 54 percent this year.

Most of the disorder appears to be the kind of “ordinary” criminal behavior that can be tamped down by a straightforward police response, which Mayor Adams, an ex-transit cop, has promised to deliver. But some of the high-profile violence is coming from suspects who are homeless and clearly mentally ill — and experts say the problem reflects a perfect storm of too little funding, too much turnover, and not enough coordination between agencies.

“The city grew by 400,000 people since 2010 and we’re down about 800 psychiatric beds, which is about 14 percent of the total, between the beds being flipped to medical beds and beds being flipped to be being used for COVID. Not having the beds is an invisible aspect of the problem we’re facing,” says Joe DeGenova, the president and CEO of the Center for Urban Community Services, a nonprofit that provides services to poor and homeless New Yorkers.

“There are less beds available for psychiatric services. There are more people who need them,” DeGenova told me. “And the reimbursement rates for the psychiatric beds have not kept pace with the cost of providing the service. It’s a supply/demand problem.”

Anecdotally, he says, it is harder than ever to persuade hospitals to accept new indigent psychiatric patients.

Homelessness adds fuel to the fire. “Without housing, people rarely have their mental health. Housing is key,” says Amy Dorin, president of the Coalition for Behavioral Health, an alliance of 110 nonprofit community-based agencies. Social-service organizations, she told me, need “more prevention services to prevent mental illness and substance abuse earlier on, and more treatment programs.”

The agencies that do offer these services, says Dorin, are seeing rates of personnel turnover as high as 48 percent. “It’s very hard to provide the care that we want if people aren’t coming into our field or staying. This was a major advocacy issue for the state and for the city,” Dorin told me. “We suggest that the city do things like loan forgiveness, or tuition reimbursement. Things that will encourage the workforce to come and stay and do the work that we need them to do.”

At City Hall, the strategy appears to focus on routine quality-of-life policing, which is much simpler and cheaper than finding and treating mentally ill New Yorkers.

“No more just doing whatever you want. No, those days are over. Swipe your MetroCard. Ride the system. Get off at your destination,” Mayor Adams announced at the Fulton Street station last month. “The system was not made to be housing, it’s made to be transportation.”

The mayor said that NYPD officers would begin ordering all people off the trains at the end of selected lines and enforce MTA rules of conduct that prohibit stretching out on seats, sleeping on the subways, staying in a station for more than a hour, and so on. With assistance from Governor Hochul, the mayor said, the city would begin sending out 30 mixed teams of cops, social workers, and Health Department employees to persuade homeless people to sign in at a shelter and/or accept medical treatment. An additional 500 short-term shelter beds would be made available to help accommodate those in need.

It all sounded logical. But nearly a month later, one could pass by the World Trade Center stop on the E line and see people stretched out in subway cars, dozing as cleaners scrubbed and mopped around them. At the other end of the line, Jamaica Station still has homeless encampments outside a major subway and commuter railroad hub.

Critics warned that the Adams plan, at best, might simply shift the problem from the subways onto the streets.

“It’s a very magical kind of thinking that we’re going to get people out of the subway when you don’t have any place to put them,” said Beth Haroules, an attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union. “You can remove that person, but what are you doing for the person? You make the neighborhood feel better or you make people on the subway feel better, but you’re not solving the problem.”

And that is the heart of the matter. People in need of care often end up on the streets because they can’t find permanent housing, and because far too many New York City homeless shelters are still dangerous places where robbery and drug use take place, leading many people to take their chances on sidewalks or subway cars. The psychiatric or addiction-treatment services some of these folks need isn’t always available because the agencies that provide help are underfunded and stretched thin.

The bottom line is that we need a rapidly expanded, dramatically better funded social-service infrastructure that can step up and bring professional, coordinated, and sustained care to seriously mentally ill New Yorkers. But that requires leadership that understands the problem and is prepared to make a major investment in actually solving it.

Dorin told me her coalition of more than 100 providers asked the state legislature for $500 million to address the staffing and capacity-building needed to take on the problems of homelessness and mental illness. The request, she says, was denied.

That’s a mistake. Legislators may think they have better things to do than prevent a repeat of tragic incidents like the murder of Michelle Go. But they don’t.

Judge Lets City Move Homeless Men Out Of Lucerne Hotel On Upper West Side

 

GOTHAMIST

BY MIRELA IVERAC

The scaffolding outside the hotel is decorated with stars that say things like "Exile UWS Racists and NIMBYS" KATE HINDS / WNYC

A New York State Supreme Court judge has dismissed a case that sought to block the city’s plan to move homeless men out of a hotel on the Upper West Side.

The decision clears the way for the city to relocate the men from the Lucerne to another hotel in downtown Manhattan. Judge Debra James wrote that the group, Downtown New Yorkers Inc., which formed to oppose the move to the Radisson Hotel on Wall Street and sued the city “lack[s] standing to challenge the relocation.” Additionally, she dismissed motions from the Lucerne residents who intervened in the case—both against and in favor of the move—saying the court didn’t have jurisdiction over the requests.

"We are hurt,” said Ramone Buford, also known as Shams, a Lucerne resident who was a petitioner in the case and an advocate against the move. “This decision negatively affects homeless people throughout America and that's really what this fight was about: having our voices heard, challenging an irrational decision made by the mayor to please some rich folk.”

In July, more than 200 homeless men were moved from congregate shelters to the Lucerne Hotel on West 79th Street in an attempt to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Soon after their arrival, some Upper West Siders raised objections over loitering, public urination, panhandling and similar issues that they said were impacting the quality of life in the community -- though it's not clear how much of the behavior could be tied to men living at the Lucerne. The Upper West Side residents formed a group, the West Side Community Organization, and hired a former deputy mayor, Randy Mastro, to represent them.

In September, Mayor Bill de Blasio paid a visit to the Upper West Side and said he observed conditions in the neighborhood that were “not acceptable.” He eventually decided to move the men to the Radisson Hotel. Advocates, shelter providers and some elected officials criticized the move as caving to the pressures of an affluent community.

"We are very grateful to receive today's decision,” said Randy Mastro. “The Court recognized what we have been saying all along—that the city made the right decision here, acting well within is discretionary legal authority, to move this vulnerable population from an SRO hotel on the Upper West Side to a better, safer facility downtown.”

In a statement, Downtown New Yorkers said the group was "deeply disappointed with the judge's decision and we will immediately file an appeal. We intend to continue this fight and we expect to win the case on the merits."

City officials have said the men will be closer to the services they need at the Radisson, that each will get a private room, and that the hotel will eventually be converted into a permanent shelter.

“We're pleased with the Court’s decision, which will allow the City to continue providing critical services to those who need it most in the way we believe is most effective," said Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s Law Department.

City Councilmember Helen Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side, called the judge’s decision “devastating” in a tweet.

THE OTHER NEW YORK: Having a Job, or 2, Doesn’t Mean Having a Home. Shelter Population Remains at Record High.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Alpha Manzueta, who has lived in a homeless shelter for three years, says she feels “stuck.”

N.Y. TIMES

On many days, Alpha Manzueta gets off from one job at 7 a.m., only to start her second at noon. In between she goes to a place she’s called home for the last three years — a homeless shelter.

I feel stuck,” said Ms. Manzueta, 37, who has a 2 ½-year-old daughter and who, on a recent Wednesday, looked crisp in her security guard uniform, waving traffic away from the curb at Kennedy International Airport. “You try, you try and you try and you’re getting nowhere. I’m still in the shelter.”

With New York City’s homeless population in shelters at a record high of 50,000, a growing number of New Yorkers punch out of work and then sign in to a shelter, city officials and advocates for the homeless say. More than one out of four families in shelters, 28 percent, include at least one employed adult, city figures show, and 16 percent of single adults in shelters hold jobs.

Alpha Manzueta holds two security guard jobs, one at Kennedy Airport.

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Mostly female, they are engaged in a variety of low-wage jobs as security guards, bank tellers, sales clerks, computer instructors, home health aides and office support staff members. At work they present an image of adult responsibility, while in the shelter they must obey curfews and show evidence that they are actively looking for housing and saving part of their paycheck.        Advocates of affordable housing say that the employed homeless are proof of the widening gap between wages and rents — which rose in the city even during the latest recession — and, given the shortage of subsidized housing, of just how difficult it is to escape the shelter system, even for people with jobs. “A one-bedroom in East New York or the South Bronx is still $1,000 a month,” said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy and housing services group. “The jobs aren’t enough to get people out of homelessness.” David Garza, executive director of Henry Street Settlement, which runs three family shelters and one shelter for single women with mental illnesses, said that five years ago his shelters were placing 200 families a year into permanent housing. Last year, he said, they placed 50. “Without low-income housing, it’s a maze with no way out,” Mr. Garza said. The employed homeless are constantly juggling the demands of their two worlds.   A 45-year-old woman named Barbara, who works part time as a public transit customer service representative, said she had to keep items like razors and nail clippers at a storage center because they were not allowed in the shelter for security reasons. Sometimes she takes a tote bag filled with dirty clothes to work to take to the laundromat afterward, she said, because the machines at the shelter are always either broken or being used. But, she said, there is no escaping the noise and fitful sleep of a dormitory shared with eight other women. Like most homeless employed people interviewed for this article, Barbara did not want to be identified by her full name for fear of losing her privacy or her job. She has been homeless since 2011, she said, when her unemployment insurance ran out and she could no longer afford her apartment in Brooklyn. No one at work knows, she said. “When it comes to the professional arena, I want people to think that I got it together, that I’m not living paycheck to paycheck, that my only option isn’t to buy secondhand,” she said.     Sometimes homeless workers discover one another. Deirdre Cunningham, 21, who works two part-time jobs — as a bank teller and as a sales clerk for an electronics store in Manhattan, said that at one point a co-worker at the store invited her to an evening event. “I said, ‘I can’t go, because I have curfew,’ and this co-worker said, ‘What do you mean curfew?’ ” “I said, ‘I live in a shelter,’ and she said, ‘I do, too.’ ” Ms. Cunningham, who has a 4-year-old daughter, said she has always been open about her struggles. “A lot of people have problems, too,” she said. She said she left her parents’ home in the South Bronx in 2011 because she did not want to expose her daughter to “family issues.” Two years and three shelters later, she moved in August into her own $900-a-month one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx with the help of a rent subsidy from the Coalition for the Homeless. But the aid lasts for only two years.     Deirdre Cunningham also works two jobs, as a bank teller and as a sales clerk at an electronics store. Jabin Botsford/The New York Times “Now that I got my living situation under control, now it’s time for me to go back to school, get a better job, be more of a mother,” said Ms. Cunningham, who has completed training as a medical assistant but aspires to be a journalist. My daughter wants to take ballet,” she said. A city-commissioned study by the Vera Institute of Justice in 2005 found that “contrary to popular belief,” 79 percent of homeless heads of family had recent work histories and more than half had educational levels, up to college, that made them employable. Most, the study found, had experienced “destabilizing” events before entering the shelter, most commonly the loss of a job, an eviction or the loss of public assistance benefits.   In 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled an ambitious plan to reduce the city’s homeless population — then 38,000 — by two-thirds in five years. The plan envisioned shifting dollars away from the shelter system to create low-income housing with social services. To make the shelter system less inviting, the city also stopped giving homeless families priority for public housing, and made it harder for those who left the system to return. In 2011, when the state and federal support were withdrawn, the city ended a program that gave rent subsidies for up to two years to help families move out of shelters and into their own apartments. Now the number of shelter residents hovers around 50,000, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services. More than 9,000 are single adults and more than 40,000 other residents are in families, including 21,600 children. The average monthly cost for the government to shelter a family is more than $3,000; the cost for a single person is more than $2,300.   Linda I. Gibbs, Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said there were no local resources to keep up with demand for subsidized housing after both federal and state money dried up. Advocates for the homeless say the city should restore housing assistance for shelter residents, including giving them priority for public housing. But in an interview, Ms. Gibbs reiterated the Bloomberg administration’s long-held position that more benefits only attract more people to shelters. “That drives more demand,” she said. “It’s a Catch-22.” Ms. Gibbs said officials were now exploring expanding a city program that helps families at risk of losing their homes to stay in place.   But those like Ms. Manzueta, the security guard, still need a way out. She said she managed to hold on to her $8-an-hour positions and to take courses to learn new skills. But with an eviction marring her credit record and unable to afford more than $1,000 for rent, she has not been able to land an apartment. Deirdre Cunningham also works two jobs, as a bank teller and as a sales clerk at an electronics store. Jabin Botsford/The New York Times “Now that I got my living situation under control, now it’s time for me to go back to school, get a better job, be more of a mother,” said Ms. Cunningham, who has completed training as a medical assistant but aspires to be a journalist. My daughter wants to take ballet,” she said. A city-commissioned study by the Vera Institute of Justice in 2005 found that “contrary to popular belief,” 79 percent of homeless heads of family had recent work histories and more than half had educational levels, up to college, that made them employable. Most, the study found, had experienced “destabilizing” events before entering the shelter, most commonly the loss of a job, an eviction or the loss of public assistance benefits.   In 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled an ambitious plan to reduce the city’s homeless population — then 38,000 — by two-thirds in five years. The plan envisioned shifting dollars away from the shelter system to create low-income housing with social services. To make the shelter system less inviting, the city also stopped giving homeless families priority for public housing, and made it harder for those who left the system to return. In 2011, when the state and federal support were withdrawn, the city ended a program that gave rent subsidies for up to two years to help families move out of shelters and into their own apartments. Now the number of shelter residents hovers around 50,000, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services. More than 9,000 are single adults and more than 40,000 other residents are in families, including 21,600 children. The average monthly cost for the government to shelter a family is more than $3,000; the cost for a single person is more than $2,300.   Linda I. Gibbs, Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said there were no local resources to keep up with demand for subsidized housing after both federal and state money dried up. Advocates for the homeless say the city should restore housing assistance for shelter residents, including giving them priority for public housing. But in an interview, Ms. Gibbs reiterated the Bloomberg administration’s long-held position that more benefits only attract more people to shelters. “That drives more demand,” she said. “It’s a Catch-22.” Ms. Gibbs said officials were now exploring expanding a city program that helps families at risk of losing their homes to stay in place.   But those like Ms. Manzueta, the security guard, still need a way out. She said she managed to hold on to her $8-an-hour positions and to take courses to learn new skills. But with an eviction marring her credit record and unable to afford more than $1,000 for rent, she has not been able to land an apartment.