On Housing the Homeless in NYC Hotels
POST 22: August 27, 2020
Researching and pondering the issue of housing homeless people in New York City hotels has consumed me for the past week as I've attempted to "unpack" what Lucia and I saw last week (see Post 21).
Before you stop reading because you think this doesn’t affect you: yes, actually, it does. New York City plans to take up FEMA on its offer of reimbursement for at least 75% of the estimated $2 million+ cost of housing thousands of homeless people in NYC hotels each night. You may not have a moral stake in whether New York City should be housing homeless people in hotels, but, as a federal taxpayer, you do have a financial stake.
Now that I have your attention, here’s a bit of background about NYC’s homeless situation:
The Law: A 1979 New York State Supreme Court decision in Callahan v. Carey and two years of additional negotiating led to a New York City “right to shelter” consent decree. By law, NYC must provide shelter for anyone who needs it. The Coalition for the Homeless and various plaintiffs have been fighting with New York City and State ever since regarding terms and enforcement of the decree.
The Numbers: The approximate number of homeless people sleeping overnight at NYC shelters has risen from around 12,500 in 1983 to 58,736 in June of 2020. That number has exceeded 30,000 every year since 2003.
The Lodging: A highly informative transcript of a 3-minute NPR Planet Money piece from June 6, 2019, notes that housing a homeless person in an NYC hotel costs “about $40,000 a year,” and that an apartment rental would cost half that amount. NYC has been housing the homeless in hotels on an emergency basis since the 1980s. City officials plan to stop this practice once the supply of permanent housing can accommodate the demand. They say that will take five more years.
My Takeaway: The number of homeless people sleeping in shelters has risen—with a few occasional dips but on an overall upward trajectory—from 12,500 in 1983 to 58,736 two months ago.
Yet, instead of investing in enough permanent shelter to house the (not surprisingly, given the right to shelter law, lack of affordable housing in NYC, periodic economic recessions, and other predictable factors) increasing number of people requesting shelter over the years, the city has utilized the quick-fix, twice-as-expensive, and less-effective (as far as the long-term effort to curtail homelessness goes) option of housing the homeless in hotels. They shouldn’t need “5 more years” (as of June 6, 2019) to create an adequate supply of permanent housing for the homeless: the government should’ve been working on keeping pace with rising demand all along.
As with so many other aspects of our society and our systems, COVID has merely shined a light on what wasn't working well all along, on what shouldn't have been put off year after year because it was easier and less expensive in the short-run to delay.
Then there are what must be the staggering legal fees incurred by all parties during the past four decades of battling over the terms and implementation of the right to shelter law. As anyone who has ever hired a lawyer knows, 40 years of legal fees = a hell of a lot of money that could’ve been spent on actual services and permanent housing for the homeless.