What we need is an expert – someone with experience on the ground and at city hall.
Mark Hurwitz certainly qualifies. He was deputy commissioner at the Department of Homeless Services during the Bloomberg administration and has ridden with social workers to attract homeless people on the streets to shelters.
In a New York Times op-ed On Friday, he presented an idea we’ve all heard before: funding permanent housing instead of emergency shelter.
Who isn’t for that? (Well, maybe shelter developers and operators.)
The problem, Hurwitz explained, is that this shift in spending cannot happen within the city’s right-to-shelter policy, which consumes nearly $4 billion a year. I also agree with him.
The timing to change the policy is right, he wrote, because Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s counsel, Steven Banks, is uniquely positioned to do so. Banks was its chief architect, having obtained a consent decree from the Koch administration in the 1981 case Callahan v. Carey.
The shelter mandate was originally intended only for homeless men, but was later expanded. No other city has one like this.
Why would Banks turn back the most important achievement of his career? Because he is sure we can do better. Are in good faith being an advocate for the homeless insulates him from progressive attacks — a luxury billionaire Michael Bloomberg did not have. Think of Nixon in China.
However, I’m not sure the banks will do that. I know him a little because he ran for my neighborhood City Council against Bill de Blasio in 2001, losing 32 to 22 percent in a six-way primary.
I suspect Banks would prefer to keep the right to shelter intact And increase funding for permanent housing, even though it hasn’t worked in 45 years. It’s hard to let go of a dream.
The problem is math. The right to shelter is mandatory and therefore always given priority in the city budget. This has become clear to his boss, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who must close a $5.4 billion budget gap before July 1.
The two components of Hurwitz’s spending plan are supportive housing and rental vouchers.
Supportive housing includes services. It is for people with problems that go beyond poverty. The city has many of these people, but has only built 32,000 supportive housing units since its pioneering phase in the 1980s.
A study found that only 1 in 6 qualified applicants were placed in one of these units in fiscal year 2022 due to low supply. Today is probably not much better.
Surprisingly, the “housing first” model, where people get housing first and then their addictions, mental illness, and other problems are treated, has not It has been proven to improve health more than the Trump administration’s new policy, which aims to subsidize housing only for people who have overcome their addictions and behavioral problems.
But ‘housing first’ is save money and it has been proven to cure homelessness, especially among veterans. If we want to get people off the streets, this is essential.
This in itself would not come close to eliminating homelessness in the city, as fewer than 1 in 10 homeless people sleep outside. To get the rest out of shelters and permanent housing, Hurwitz is calling for more rental vouchers.
I recently wrote that vouchers do not increase supply, but I forgot to mention that they actually do this indirectly – because developers can get financing to build housing for voucher holders. A reader reminded me that many buildings in the Bronx are going up based on this model.
Section 8, which is federally funded, has been a reliable funding stream for such projects, but CityFHEPS vouchers also contribute. If the city were to shift $2 billion from the shelter budget to vouchers, more projects would happen. So I agree with the second phase of Hurwitz’s plan.
However, the devil is in the details. Should the city completely replace the right to shelter with the right to housing? Who would qualify? Once in that housing, would people ever leave? Probably not.
We should continue to build more so that units would be available for anyone facing eviction, fleeing an abuser, or being kicked out by their cousin. If a new system created what economists call a moral hazard, it would outpace NYCHA in no time.
Better to replace the $4 billion right-to-shelter policy with the right-to-voucher policy. Set a three-year transition date so developers can align financing with expected city funding. Then build, baby, build. This would ease the housing crisis for everyone.
Mamdani should process some proposals in AI and have the results elaborated.
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#time #replace #shelter