Hiding stats on homeless
City Hall is refusing to come clean about the number of homeless they've actually moved out of shelters and into city-financed permanent housing, a homeless support group is charging.
The Coalition for the Homeless filed a lawsuit Friday after the agencies Mayor de Blasio tasked with bringing down the record number of homeless in city shelters wouldn't turn over the actual data about the precise number of families placed in cityfunded affordable apartments set aside for them.
A year ago Housing Preservation & Development Commissioner Maria TorresSpringer testified at a City Council hearing that since January 2014 only 1,200 families had been placed in cityfunded apartments under the set-aside program.
Late Wednesday, HPD spokeswoman Elizabeth Rohlfing said an additional 500 households had moved into HPD-financed apartments, bringing the total to 1,700. Still, that's a drop in the bucket considering there were more than 15,500 families staying in shelters as of last week.
All told, the city homeless census is now nearly 61,000 individuals, up from 51,000 when de Blasio arrived at City Hall in 2014. During the November 2017 hearing, Councilman Stephen Levin, (D-Brooklyn) called the de Blasio effort to place families in city-funded apartments “underwhelming.” TorresSpringer then promised a more aggressive effort going forward.
In May, the Coalition filed a Freedom of Information Law request asking that the city provide them with the specific numbers of homeless household placements into HPDfinanced housing set aside for the homeless. The agency refused to turn over their data, claiming it didn't exist.
On Friday, the Coalition filed suit in Manhattan Supreme Court demanding the city open up the books. Giselle Routhier, the Coalition's policy director, called the stonewalling “extremely frustrating.”
“We are really trying to get an answer to what we think is a very straightforward question – what impact has the mayor's affordable housing plan had on homelessness,” she said. “We don't know how many people who are currently homeless have been moved into units that were created with this financing.”
The Coalition said HPD has acknowledged it maintains this data on placements of shelter users into HPD-sponsored housing, and argues in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, “It is ludicrous to believe that HPD is incapable of fully providing the records which (the Coalition) requested.”
Rohlfing told The News, “We are more than willing to work with the Coalition to try and provide the data they requested to the extent we can given the need to protect the privacy of the residents we serve.”
Controller Scott Stringer recently pointed out that while de Blasio has promised to set aside 5% of the 300,000 affordable apartments he's promised to build or preserve, so far only 1% of those apartments have gone to the homeless.