Posted on March 5, 2015 by Jacquelyn Simone As one of the worst winters in memory continues to pummel the city, who among us can walk past the countless homeless men and women we see huddled against the bitter cold without wondering what is being done to help them? And with tens of thousands more men, women and children bedding down each night in homeless shelters, the situation is even worse than most people realize. An article by Jarrett Murphy in City & State offers an insightful overview of the numbers and the City’s current efforts to move more people out of shelters and into permanent housing. As the Coalition has explained previously, a devastating combination of escalating housing prices and failed Bloomberg-era policies left Mayor de Blasio with a homelessness crisis of historic proportions. Although the shelter census has continued to increase in de Blasio’s first year in office, there is hope that a number of new programs might finally help reverse the upward trend. Month after month last year, the tally [of families entering the shelter system] rose—by 132 in February, 206 in May, more than 300 over summer and 800 or so in the fall—so that by the end of his first year in office, the mayor had presided over a 14 percent increase in the shelter census of families with children. But in January, the family homeless number dropped by 1.18 percent. On one hand, that was barely a budge of the needle. On the other, it was the largest month-to-month decrease in nearly four years. More important than the slight ebb was the likely reason for it: that new programs created by the de Blasio administration were finally gaining traction at moving people out of shelter and into housing. So far, it seems homelessness-policy advocates have given the mayor room to accomplish the enormous task of reversing the failed policies bequeathed to him by his predecessor in City Hall and complicated by his old friend in the governor’s mansion.
