Dangerous Generosity
NYC’s housing ‘help’ can hurt
’TIS the season to be generous. But generosity — when it comes from the government — can backfire. Especially when the government has guaranteed it will be generous to everyone.
When you try to help everyone, sometimes you end up hurting everyone.
Consider Ibanez and Scylee McGuire. Both babies, a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old, were scalded to death in a Bronx apartment earlier this month.
The city is still investigating the incident, which may have been because of a damaged radiator in the babies’ apartment, owned by a slumlord.
But even before the girls died, they lived in desperation. As The New York Times reports, the girls’ father posted that (edited for spelling and grammar) “the neighborhood is riddled with automatic gunfire every weekend.” The police “won’t come. I just saw a guy smash the teeth out of this other guy with a pistol, then fire three shots in the air.”
Yet the girls didn’t live and die in such conditions because they were poor. They weren’t poor in a financial sense. Someone spent more than $35,620 on their behalf over the past year, just in rent. That money — nearly $3,000 a month — can rate a nice apartment in a fine neighborhood.
To afford such an apartment, the girls’ parents would have had to make about $80,000 a year, achievable for two people with basic skills. The city’s average privatesector wage, outside of the financial sector, is $69,171. Many people get by on far less.
The problem is that the people spending the money weren’t the girls’ parents, or anyone else that they knew. It was the city of New York, paying top prices to house people in the ghetto.
The girls’ parents came here a year and a half ago, from Maine, and went right into the city’s shelter system. They weren’t totally out of options: They had places to stay in Maine, as the Times found.
But New York is one of the only places in the country, by inclina- tion and court order, that will give a free apartment to any family from anywhere in the world. That’s as long as the adults in that family are persistent enough to keep trying after they’re rejected. The girls’ parents, Danielle McGuire and Pete Ambrose, were.
Let’s not romanticize it: These aren’t young adults coming to the city with nothing in their pocket, willing to sleep on couches and work odd jobs to make their way. People come to New York every day to do that, with or without kids.
Instead, Danielle was a 24-yearold young woman with two needy babies and no way to support herself or them, far away from family and friends. New York is a fairy tale on TV — but it’s a brutal place if you have nothing except a naive view of the big city, and no means to make even the most modest living.
Pete, with a history of drug addiction, couldn’t support himself, let alone help support his two youngest children. But the city government claimed to be able to support the Ambrose family, at any cost — and so New York attracted them here, where it failed them.
The city deluding itself that it can competently house everyone in the world, for free, didn’t only harm the Ambroses. It harms the people who are trying to make their way. New York had 60,382 people in its homeless system as of last week, more than 6,600 from out of town.
To house some of these people, New York has rented more than 3,200 “cluster” apartments like the one in which Ibanez and Scylee died. That’s 3,200 apartments not available to people who can afford modest rent, but who are being outbid, essentially, by the government.
Mayor de Blasio is trying to stop relying as much on those apartments. But to do that, he’s using hotel rooms — 2,069 each night.
Low-end hotels are no place for kids. And when the city rents highend rooms, it pushes more tourists to Airbnb, also harming the supply of apartments.
Though de Blasio has tried, there’s no way around it: The city cannot provide free, safe apartments to everyone who comes. Maintaining the illusion that we can — to people who, like the Ambroses, had other options — isn’t generous. It’s cruel.