Homeless $tonewall
Council rips city’s vague response on cost
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson lashed out at de Blasio administration budget officials on Monday for refusing to provide a price tag for housing the homeless in commercial hotels and scattered apartment units in the wake of a huge spending increase.
At a hearing on the mayor’s $88.7 billion preliminary fiscal 2019 budget, Johnson (D-Manhattan) was incredulous that the administration added $169 million in baseline funding for homeless shelters, but couldn’t identify current spending on hotels and socalled cluster sites.
“This is a budget hearing on the city’s budget. The largest increase in new spending is on shelters. And we need an answer on what is the spending on hotels and on cluster sites,” Johnson told new Budget Director Melanie Hartzog.
“It is not acceptable to give us an amount on adult and family shelters and not give us an amount on hotels and cluster sites. We deserve an answer on that.”
Hartzog repeatedly referred to the average nightly rate for hotels of $175 and for clusters of $85, but claimed providing a total figure wasn’t possible because of the nightly changes in where people are housed.
“It’s all part of the total amount of spending that goes into the homeless budget. I don’t have the breakout for you,” she responded. “As I said, the census changes on a daily basis . . . As that changes, we’re constantly updating and reestimating our costs.”
After several volleys on the matter, Johnson (D-Manhattan) told Hartzog they were “speaking a different language” to one another.
“We keep investing more and more money and the shelter population continues to either remain the same or go up a little bit or go down a little bit,” Johnson said.
“We haven’t seen a huge decrease in the number of homeless individuals, so it’s concerning to the council that we keep adding hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis and but we haven’t seen a significant decrease in the homeless population.”
Council Finance Committee chair Danny Dromm (D-Queens) also called for closer scrutiny of spending on homelessness, citing $2.8 billion in new needs added for shelters since the start of the de Blasio administration.
“We must do our due diligence to know that if the city expends money to combat a problem, that the programs and initiatives that are being funded are working,” he said. “That begins with having a clearly articulated strategy, something that the council has yet to hear on the issue of homelessness.”
His criticism came a year after the mayor unveiled a five-year plan to create 90 new homeless shelters across the five boroughs.
There were 60,384 individuals staying in shelters as of March 1, according to Department of Homeless Services data.
The Post recently reported the number of homeless housed in commercial hotels had surged past 11,000 — up from 7,000 a year earlier.
Housing the homeless in hotels cost the city $102 million in calendar year 2016 — well before the recent surge, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer.