Checkout time
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson couldn’t round up a veto-proof majority for a vote today on a bill guaranteeing a hotel room for every one of the city’s 19,000 single homeless adults to protect them from coronavirus. Good. The over-broad bill is a bad use of increasingly limited city resources, and the wrong kind of help some homeless people desperately need.
Single adult homeless individuals, disproportionately men, are at serious risk of coronavirus; they often shelter in congregate facilities without private rooms, or live on city streets. The city says 76 have died.
Already, City Hall has offered thousands of hotel rooms to single homeless adults to allow for social distancing. By mid-May, 8,000 people were in hotels.
Council members, unsatisfied, would have created a default right to a private hotel room. That may sound like a match of a need — people without places to sleep — with a moment, when thousands such rooms sit vacant. But get beyond surfacelevel analysis and problems mount.
The Council’s bill omitted details of how to deliver the intensive social, medical and behavioral services many of these mentally ill and addicted individuals require. Then there’s the cost.
FEMA covers 75% of hotel costs if isolating in shelter proves impossible, but won’t subsidize “substantial medical care and social and behavioral health services.” That means the price tag for the city could be $750 million, when budget holes are nearbottomless.
Ramp up shelter testing. Isolate the sick. Provide meaningful services. But this idea needs a major rethink.