Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness

By one key measure after another, homelessness in New York City has worsened over the last two years.

The number of people entering city shelters has increased under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and when they enter the system, people are staying longer, striking markers of a crisis that has forced its way to the top of the mayor’s agenda.

As of Thursday, 57,448 people — more than 40 percent of them children — were sleeping in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services, and organizations that aid homeless people are worried that in the coming months, as cold weather sets in, the numbers will return to the record high of December, when the peak was 59,068.

In the most recent annual accounting by the homeless services agency, the length of stay in shelters rose. Single adults stayed an average of about 11 months, or 24 days longer than in the previous fiscal year. Families without children stayed an average of nearly 18 months, up 19 days, and families with children stayed an average of just over 14 months, up by three days.

And in another troubling sign, the number of families re-entering shelters within a year of leaving is increasing as well.

The statistics depict a far different picture than the one Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, promised days before he was sworn into office. His campaign for mayor had tapped into the economic frustrations of New Yorkers struggling with low wages and rising rents, and forced out of neighborhoods by gentrification. He vowed to curb the surge in homelessness under Michael R. Bloomberg, his predecessor as mayor.

“An ever-growing homeless population is unacceptable to the future of New York City,” he said. “It will not happen under our watch.”

But it has happened.

Just as wages have not kept up with rents, Mr. de Blasio’s long-term strategy to combat homelessness — a combination of rental subsidies, anti-eviction efforts and mental health initiatives — has not kept pace with the flow of women, men and children streaming into centers every day.

The mayor has repeatedly defended his administration’s efforts on homelessness, and he did so again last week. But he has also acknowledged that the rise in resident complaints about homelessness is rooted not just in perception, but in reality.

The closing of several drop-in centers by the Bloomberg administration left street homeless people fewer alternatives to the sidewalk, while the de Blasio administration’s less confrontational approach has made it easier for them to stay on the streets unbothered by the police.

As public attention to the presence of homeless people has grown, Mr. de Blasio and his aides have tried to highlight other, more immediate efforts, including the addition of 500 shelter beds at spaces provided by churches and faith-based organizations, and expanded hours at the remaining drop-in centers, where homeless men can shower and eat a meal.

And the administration frequently points to the relocation in the last fiscal year of more than 38,000 people from shelters to permanent housing, including more than 15,000 through the administration’s new rental assistance programs.

Yet as quickly as people move out, others take their place, keeping the shelter population high. And the 57,000 people who are in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services do not include an estimated 3,000 who survive on sidewalks, in subways and huddled in encampments in parks and beneath overpasses. Nor does that figure count the thousands of women and children escaping domestic violence or the runaway youths in specialized homeless shelters run by other agencies.

The number of homeless people “would have gotten a lot higher but for the efforts of a lot of people in this administration and beyond who worked feverishly, rightly, to get people services,” Mr. de Blasio said last month, defending his record on the public radio station WNYC.

Relentless Problem

Homelessness has been a challenge for many of Mr. de Blasio’s predecessors, and across the country, from Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., mayors are facing a rise in homelessness, as meager wages among lower-income workers have left more of them unable to afford housing. But Mr. de Blasio is on a stage all his own, ushered into office with a mandate to address income inequality in a city where the chasm seems to grow wider with the building of each new luxury condominium tower.

Casting himself in the liberal tradition of his political idol, Fiorello H. La Guardia, Mr. de Blasio has taken an expansive view of how a city can address the forces that drive poverty. He pushed through universal prekindergarten, engineered the first freeze in 46 years on regulated rents, won approval for mandatory paid sick leave and wants the $15-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food employees expanded to a much larger pool of workers.

While those initiatives may help reduce homelessness in years to come, the thousands of people packing shelters and dotting sidewalks have become an inexorable concern for the administration. State and city investigators have documented health and safety problems at shelters, the city comptroller has blocked shelter contracts that have not been vetted, and the mayor’s top social services official stepped down just as questions about the city’s homelessness strategy were gaining traction in the press.

Mr. de Blasio and his aides have consistently attributed the rising shelter population and the more visible street population to Mr. Bloomberg’s policies and decisions, particularly the elimination of a rental assistance program called Advantage. After the program ended in 2011, the shelter population grew to about 53,000 from about 37,000 people within three years.

But the de Blasio administration got a late start on its own rental assistance program, called Living in Communities and known as LINC. It did not start until almost a year after Mr. de Blasio took office, and landlords have been reluctant to participate in the program, which limits rents to $1,213 for a single person. The Department of Homeless Services set up a so-called war room to make daily calls to landlords and to entice them with $1,000 bonuses and three months’ rent in advance.

Even if enough landlords can be enlisted, the sustainability of the mayor’s rental assistance programs has been called into question by the Independent Budget Office. One rental subsidy program, aimed at long-term shelter residents, relies on state funds that the city can use for rental aid only if it saves money on shelters. The de Blasio administration had projected the city would save $60 million and invest the amount in rental assistance in the 2015 fiscal year. But with shelter populations remaining near record highs, spending has been rising, and the city was able to manage just $4 million in shelter-program savings.

Another program that began under Mr. Bloomberg, a political independent, has been expanded. Called Homebase, it targets residents at risk of becoming homeless. With an additional $49 million in state funding, the Department of Homeless Services has opened nine additional Homebase offices, where residents can get help, like one month’s rent, to prevent them from losing their homes. Nearly 21,000 families have been able to stay in their homes since July 2014 because of the program, according to the mayor’s aides.

Resisting Shelters

On the street, where homeless people are more visible and often less interested in staying in shelters that can be unsafe or are perceived as unsafe, officials are facing a different though no less complex task: reduce the growing number of people sleeping on the streets without resorting to the criminal justice system.

Fifteen years ago the Police Department had a strict policy of preventing people from lying and sleeping on public sidewalks; that often led to an arrest or a summons. Now police officers are encouraged to move people who are street homeless by other means, preferably to a shelter.

As a result, police officers, especially the more than 70 officers in the Homeless Outreach Unit, are interacting with more homeless people on the street and arresting fewer of them. But the officers are encountering more resistance to shelters. This year, the Police Department recorded double the instances in which of men and women refused to be transported to a shelter, to more than 3,650 through the middle of last month, up from 1,770 over the same period in 2014.

In high-level meetings, police officials, including Commissioner William J. Bratton, have listened to city lawyers wrestle over the options legally available to officers when they approach a person sitting or lying on the street who may or may not be homeless.

Last month, the Police and Sanitation Departments, along with other agencies and nonprofits, began a coordinated effort to clean up so-called homeless encampments, makeshift shelters on the sidewalks, in parks and below underpasses that can include as few as one or two people.

While arrests by the homeless unit are down by roughly 10 percent, cleanups have more than doubled so far this year over last, rankling advocates who see the effort as window dressing and a step back toward the criminalization of sleeping on the street.

“This administration can’t claim compassion for homeless New Yorkers from one side while the other side advances tools of police harassment, intimidation and oppression that perpetuate inequality,” Joo-Hyun Kang, director of Communities United for Police Reform, said in a statement.

Current and formerly homeless people gathered on the steps of City Hall this month to protest police harassment of people sleeping outdoors. Organized by Picture the Homeless, a nonprofit group, protesters held signs reading, “#housekeysnothandcuffs.”

On a Thursday morning last month in the Bronx, nonprofit outreach workers, two police officers and several sanitation workers woke a group of men and women sleeping in cardboard boxes on Park Avenue. “It’s been nonstop this month,” one of the officers said.

“Good morning,” one of the sanitation workers said, tapping on a box. “Good morning, N.Y.P.D.,” one of the officers added.

Five people scattered wordlessly. A sixth spoke to an officer who, in Spanish, offered to take him to a shelter. Instead the man gathered his roller board suitcase and walked off. On the tracks below, Metro-North Railroad trains packed with commuters rushed toward Manhattan.

“They’ll be back,” said Yvonne Martinez, of Boom Health, a needle exchange and drop-in center around the corner. “We’ll clean up, and they’ll be back tonight.”

While economics drive homelessness, especially among families, mental illness has long played an outsize role, particularly with many people who live on the street but are reluctant to enter shelters.

Since July, the administration has been more closely tracking “a few hundred” New Yorkers with mental illness who have a history or propensity for violence, Richard Buery, a deputy mayor, said. The goal is to head off violence by stepping in with treatment and, if violence does occur, to coordinate a response between the mental health and the criminal justice systems.

Changing the Culture

Just as in the Bloomberg administration, the core of Mr. de Blasio’s plan lies in rental subsidies, which provide a permanent place for people to live.

Linda I. Gibbs, who served as commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services and later as deputy mayor of Health and Human Services, said the Bloomberg administration had tried to change the culture of homeless aid from shelter to permanent housing.

She recalled an intake center in the Bronx where families were sleeping on the floor and on benches, and drop-in centers that had become de facto shelters.

“They would sleep in the chair like this all night,” Ms. Gibbs said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes.

The Advantage program gave families with working adults aid for up to two years. More than 30 percent of people in the program returned to shelters. But the shelter population was falling, Ms. Gibbs said, pointing to a graphic that showed homeless people living in shelters (both those overseen by the homeless services agency and those overseen by other agencies) at just over 33,000 in 2008, down from more than 38,000 in 2004.

In 2011, however, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo cut the state’s $65 million annual contribution, which also led to the loss of $27 million in yearly federal funding.

Steven Banks, the commissioner of the city’s main welfare agency, the Human Resources Administration, was the chief lawyer at the Legal Aid Society in 2011 and sued the city, unsuccessfully, to continue funding Advantage.

He said the collapse of Advantage continues to have an impact on homelessness. The city is now trying to “outrun those legacies,” he said.

But the rollout of the de Blasio administration’s new rental assistance programs was hardly prompt since it had to get state approvals before beginning in November. By the time everything was in place, rent levels set weeks earlier were already too low.

Even some apartments within cost guidelines are out of reach for low-income renters. Last month, Legal Aid sued a landlord for refusing LINC vouchers, and more lawsuits are expected.

Inside the war room, the search for willing landlords continues. Rent bonuses of an extra $1,000 per apartment to landlords and a 15 percent fee to brokers, which were supposed to end in June, have been extended through the end of December.