Homeless digs not safe for babies: audit
Infants in New York City’s homeless shelters are living in deplorable conditions that include exposed electrical outlets, mold, roaches and unsafe cribs, a scathing new audit released Monday by the city comptroller found.
The review of city Department of Homeless Services shelters found health and safety risks in all 13 shelters that auditors visited and 92% of the 91 units they inspected.
“As a parent, I find the conditions we uncovered shameful, distressing and unacceptable. Our young children are the most vulnerable among us; they rely completely on us, as adults, to protect and care for them,” Comptroller Scott Stringer (inset) said in a written statement. “Our investigation into infant safety in homeless shelters found that the city has utterly failed in its responsibility.” Even after being cited, five of the 13 shelters that were audited were permitted to continue to operate with “no apparent consequences,” Stringer concluded.
Shelters managed by the city’s Department of Homeless Services house 46,454 children, including more than 4,800 infants.
Mayor de Blasio’s administration pushed back on the report’s findings almost immediately after its release. Homeless Services spokesman Isaac McGinn described its contents as “sensationalism,” saying that the audit “appears to have deliberately overlooked and omitted” the city’s efforts to ensure infants’ safety while in shelters.
“The death of even one infant is an awful tragedy — and one death too many — but despite the sensationalism of this report, the fact is, through our redoubled and intensified infant-safety efforts over the past few years, we had reduced the number of infant deaths by more than half, and now we have achieved zero Safe Sleep-related deaths in [fiscal year 2021] to date based on preliminary data.”
The Department of Homeless Services has a Safe Sleep policy in shelters to ensure parents adhere to safe sleeping protocols for their kids, including on the use of cribs.
But Stringer’s audit found that 12 of the 13 shelters it reviewed did not have complete Safe Sleep forms for parents to show whether they “accepted or refused the shelter-provided crib.”