Shelter fallout
Beware Mayor de Blasio’s shelter game — as in the wallet-emptying shell games run by Times Square hucksters of yore, but with billions and lives on the line. Earlier this year, desperate to show command on a mayoralty-defining homelessness crisis, de Blasio asked New Yorkers to steel for 90 new shelters, to be put in neighborhoods proportionate to local need.
The mayor had already committed to end the city’s use of expensive and shabby so-called cluster apartments as provisional homeless shelter — by end of 2018, scratch that, make it 2021. From a peak of 3,600, they’ve still got 2,600 or so to go.
While many clusters are actually phasing out, some are just getting recategorized.
Whiz, bang, look over here, ladies and gents: Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steve Banks intends to shift 11 cluster buildings in the Bronx and Brooklyn into full-fledged shelters, for $98 million over three years, with more still to come.
These shelters — which won’t count toward de Blasio’s total of 90 — were formerly rent-stabilized apartment buildings whose rents were once within reach of low-income tenants. Now they’re the firm responsibility of taxpayers forking over thousands each month for each homeless family.
Keep your eye on the ball, folks. A newly built building in the Bronx, at first set to include affordable housing, is now coming online as a shelter. Again, with the city paying higher rents than ordinary tenants would have — and too bad again for anyone not in the homeless shelter system who’d hoped to rent an apartment there.
The shelter system, in short, is vacuuming up the affordable housing people seeking shelter can’t find. Meantime, homelessness remains at intolerable levels — with the number of single adults in the system breaking new records this week, to more than 14,200, 40% higher than when de Blasio took office. All in all, more than 59,000 will sleep in New York City’s shelters tonight.
You’d think this is Houston. But New York’s calamity, while stemming from this city’s outrageously costly real estate market, is a largely manmade disaster rooted in a right guaranteeing a bed to anyone — and with it a track to permanent housing those not in the system can’t hope to rent.
Everyone loses but the landlords.