It’s been almost three years since the de Blasio administration first announced “Turning the Tide on Homelessness,” a five-year plan that would, in theory, transform the way the city’s shelter system operates.
Part of that plan includes shuttering all the city’s homeless shelter units in cluster sites and in commercial hotel locations, which have been plagued with problems. To implement that plan, the de Blasio administration announced that it would provide financing to non-profit developers who could then acquire around 30 cluster site buildings, rehabilitate them, and turn them into permanent affordable housing.
Today, the city said that it will be entering the second phase of that program, transforming 14 cluster sites into permanent affordable housing for more than 200 homeless families. Earlier this year, the city completed the conversion of 17 other buildings. (The $173 million deal to acquire those buildings was scrutinized by NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer as they were sold for more than the independently-appraised value of $143.1 million.)
As far as the overall Turning the Tide on Homelessness five-year plan, the de Blasio administration said that so far it has closed more than 200 shelter sites that didn’t meet its standards, and built 55 new borough-based shelters, reducing the DHS’s footprint by 31 percent (of the overall initial goal of 45 percent).
For years, violence and security issues have plagued the city-run shelter system, so much so that some homeless individuals prefer to sleep on the streets than to stay in a shelter. The latest federally-mandated survey on NYC unsheltered homeless individuals (which is conducted on one winter night and thus, has been questioned for its accuracy), showed that there were 3,588 people sleeping on the city’s streets.
But the streets have proven not safe either. Last week, the city launched a new outreach initiative for city agency staffers to request assistance via 311 when they see unsheltered individuals in the subway or on the streets, which came a month after four homeless men were murdered while sleeping on the streets in Chinatown.
Advocates praised the de Blasio administration’s commitment to shrinking the number of cluster sites. “The city is making good on its pledge to reduce the use of problematic cluster site shelters, and this announcement expands the supply of housing available and affordable to those without homes—an important piece of the puzzle in the larger fight to reduce record homelessness,” Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement.
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