With some 54,000 homeless people currently living in New York, the city is faced with its greatest housing crisis since the post-World War II era.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the city struggled to cope with the needs of growing families with Baby Boomer children. Today’s crisis, however, is largely the result of evergrowing financial burdens upon working class New Yorkers-which, for many of them, has reached the inevitable breaking point.
How the city handles this challenge will not only define New York for decades to come, but also the true meaning of its government, which-under state law-has an obligation to ensure shelter for its residents. Does it want to make cosmetic, halfhearted gestures to make the problem seem to go away, or genuinely solve the problem for the betterment of the city and its people?
In the last decade, New York City boomed where others busted. Neighborhoods gentrified and transformed into thriving communities, but this led to spikes in rents and property values. As the cost of living ballooned, wages remained relatively stagnant. Moreover, the working class lost out on higher-paying industrial and manufacturing jobs that left the city, settling instead for jobs that pay just above a paltry minimum wage.
Ironically, the city couldn’t even reintroduce industry in former manufacturing centers around the five boroughs if it wanted to, as many of them were converted into residences and count among the hottest real estate markets in the city.
Working class New Yorkers bore, and continue to bear, great financial stress from this one-two punch of economic pain-and disturbingly, many of them are now beginning to break. Homelessness is up 6 percent since Jan. 1, the day Mayor Bill de Blasio took office, and a whopping 50 percent since 2009.
Compounding this problem is an influx of impoverished residents from other states that don’t seem to care for the poor as much as New York does. Many of these individuals come to the city seeking services knowing they can’t be turned away.
People tend to stigmatize the homeless as dirty squeegeemen to be vilified, but the numbers shatter that stigma. Entire families in this city are no longer making ends meet, and as a result, they’re being thrown out of their homes and onto the street-or into cramped, restrictive and/or dilapidated homeless shelters.
This problem will only get worse unless the city does more for its transitional residents than warehouse them in facilities that charge the city $4,000 per month per family.
Mayor de Blasio has a housing plan to build more residential units across the city, but that will take years. A near-term solution is needed, and we believe it starts with reintroducing discontinued housing subsidies for qualified, working-class families. Offering subsidies at half the standard homeless shelter rate would allow thousands of families to afford their own apartments with some semblance of safety, security and independence.
Knowing that good-paying jobs are the key to reducing poverty and homelessness, the city must also invest in attracting new industries and higher wage positions. People need decent jobs to stay in their homes-and that requires industrial and manufacturing zones where these jobs can be housed.
The state should also change the city’s shelter mandate to give native New Yorkers first priority for assistance.
The city’s current homeless policy keeps changing bandages on a gaping, bleeding wound. It’s time the city stitched the wound, stopped the bleeding and began healing its working class people.
