HOMELESS DEPOTS
The city subway stations with the worst ongoing vagrancy problems saw homelessness spike nearly 45 percent over the summer, the MTA’s safety chief revealed on Monday.
The eight stations — all but one in Manhattan — were being used as living quarters by an average of 14.7 people in August, up from 10.2 in May, Chief Safety Officer Patrick Warren said.
The stations include the commuter hubs of Grand Central Terminal, Penn Station, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and Lexington Avenue/59th Street, Warren said at a monthly meeting of the MTA’s Safety Committee in Manhattan.
The other stations are the tourist landmarks Times Square and Union Square, as well as Fulton Street in Manhattan and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.
All of the stations ranked in the 98th percentile of those occupied by homeless people seeking shelter, Warren said.
He said transit officials began conducting their own counts because the tallies done by the city each winter were “not usable.”
The city’s tallies, he explained, are “just a one-point-in-time count, which is interesting at the moment, but we just don’t get the results until four months later.”
“This is a data-driven approach to understanding where the homeless are and how we can support them, provide outreach to that at-risk group,” Warren said.
“We can use our scarce resources by targeting them using information like this.”
Surveys at the MTA’s end-of-line stations, where vagrants tend to congregate overnight, showed Stillwell Avenue and Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College in Brooklyn were the most populated, with an average of three people at each stop on April 1 and Aug. 31.
Kathryn Wilde of the pro-business Partnership for New York City said homeless people living in the subway system are “a significant threat to the city’s recovery” from the pandemic.
“New Yorkers fear catching COVID-19 or being assaulted or harassed by someone who is not wearing a mask, likely not vaccinated, and often evidences mental and physical health problems,” she said.
“The MTA has begged for police enforcement and has hired social agencies to try to relocate people, but the problem has only increased.
“We all understand that there are no easy solutions,” Wilde added, “but our city is used to dealing with tough problems and this should be a top priority.”