The City's New 'War' on Homelessness
The de Blasio administration has spent $11 million on a new operations center to reduce the number of people living in homeless shelters.
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
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Deputy Mayor Lilliam Barrios-Paoli in the Department of Homeless Services' new operations center (Jennifer Hsu/WNYC)
On a recent day, 10 people sitting behind computers on the 17th floor at the Department of Homeless Services were calling up landlords across the city with an offer: participate in the city’s Living in Communities program, and get four months of rent in advance and a $1,000 bonus just for signing up.
“We’re calling landlords and asking them if they have vacant apartments,” said Rick Fromberg, a senior advisor to the mayor, who runs the landlord phone bank and who organized outreach for last year’s pre-kindergarten campaign.
The city created LINC last year to get the homeless out of shelters and into private apartments and is paying at least 70 percent of the rent for those who qualify for the program. But many landlords are afraid of getting caught up in bureaucratic snafus and the travails of indigent tenants.
Fromberg’s team is part of an $11 million dollar operation to reduce homelessness. The city needs to find thousands of new apartments to meet its target of moving 6,000 families into private housing by September.
As of Monday, there were 57,089 people living in the shelters and dozens of new people are coming in every day. Last year the administration had to open 24 new shelters to accommodate them.
The Mayor began the outreach to landlords last month by sending a robocall. Deputy Mayor Lilliam Barrios-Paoli said it was now up to these mostly young community organizers and social workers manning the phone bank to ensure success.
“They're the ones who really have to bring it home and make it happen,” she said. “We’re hopeful we can get a number of apartments out of this, probably in the hundreds. And that would be terrific.”
DHS has also hired 154 new caseworkers and inspectors at a cost of $10.5 million. They also spent more than $300,000 to renovate the space. The room across the hall is filled with projectors and video conferencing equipment.
“We are in a war against homelessness,” said Barrios-Paoli. “It’s not an acceptable status, so yes, we have to be very focused and very targeted and very serious about it because it is not a good thing for anyone to be in that situation.”
The DHS team crunches a slew of stats at the "war" room every day: from the number of people coming into the shelter system to those leaving it. In the past few weeks, they say, they have also helped a few thousand people get back on their feet before they enter the shelter system. DHS Commissioner Gilbert Taylor said there’s a reason this is a windowless room.
“There’s no distractions here, right?” he said. “You’re in the work.”
The number of people living in the shelter system has decreased by 1,000 since January. The data and technology, Taylor said, help continue that trend.
“The goals really are related to moving the census in one direction, the right direction — downward,” he said.
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MIRELA IVERAC, Reporter, WNYC News
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