New York City spent over $3 billion in fiscal year 2021 providing services to the homeless. In August, 2021 almost 50,000 people were housed in the municipal shelter system. The last census of street homelessness found about 4,000 sleeping in public spaces. That’s a great deal of money for what appears to be a problem that has not been sufficiently addressed by the billions of dollars invested in services for the homeless over the last three decades (The number of homeless individuals in shelters was about the same in 2013.)[1]. Advocates for the homeless would argue that those dollars spent have “improved the experience of homelessness” (as I have heard Commissioner Steven Banks of the New York City Department of Social Services state).  They would also say that since homelessness is caused by a continuing housing crisis, homelessness can’t be properly dealt with without an order of magnitude increase in the availability of affordable housing – particularly for the lowest income families. This has been the policy position of many homelessness advocates since the mid-1980’s. Will it really be possible to build “enough” affordable housing to eliminate homelessness? If not, does that mean that homelessness is a fact of urban life in New York? We suggest that some re-thinking about homelessness, its causes and how to assist those without shelter needs to be reconceptualized in order to seriously meet their needs. 

To most New Yorkers, “homelessness” means folks living in public spaces. That is, the 4,000 highly visible, generally high need people (mostly men) they see on the street. The 50,000 members of families in shelters each night probably doesn’t register with most New Yorkers. But, given how people perceive public space, most New Yorkers, if asked, would probably estimate that there are 50,000 homeless people living on the street. If you told them that them it is a mid-four figure number and that billions of dollars were being spent to provide services to the homeless, they would be suprised, since addressing the situation of the street homelessness is what impacts their lives, and their perception of public safety and quality of life in New York City. 

There is also a regularly cited claim that 100,000 New York City public school children experience homelessness each year[2]. That is 10% of New York’s school population. I recently heard the leader of a city-wide food bank say that one-quarter of New York City families are “food insecure.” This is all quite confusing. How could it be that housing prices are rising to an unaffordable level when a quarter of the population of the City could be defined by one measure as impoverished? That defies the basic rules of economics. If people don’t have money, they aren’t in a position to drive housing prices up. There is no question that inequality of income and wealth is at an unprecedented and morally intolerable level in New York City (and the US). But that does not logically lead to a conclusion that everyone who isn’t wildly wealthy lives in poverty. Plutocrats drive up the prices of ultra-luxury towers on 57th Street, not of two bedroom apartments in Briarwood. 

In addition, New York City’s affordable housing program is one of the great public policy successes of the last fifty years. Beginning with the New York City Housing Partnership during the Koch administration, and continuing through today, the City has built or preserved hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units.[3] New York City’s affordable housing programs are more robust than anywhere else in the United States and the City invests tens of billions of capital dollars in subsidizing the construction of affordable housing – in addition to the hundreds of thousands of low-income units managed by the City’s Housing Authority. Neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn, The Bronx and Manhattan were transformed by the programs subsidizing affordable housing over the past three decades. 

None of this makes any sense if you view these statistics comprehensively. Let’s try to unpack some of it.  We are by no means an expert on homelessness – although in our career in public life we have been at least tangentially involved for over twenty-five years in the issue of working to improve the situation of individuals who find themselves without shelter in public spaces. We were involved in the operation of a homeless facility and outreach program for about ten years, and then later, managed a remarkably successful outreach program in an outer borough neighborhood. That community also housed a dozen family shelters, which had external effects on their neighbors, which we worked to improve. While not a professional in the field, we have certainly been a close, careful observer of homeless policy over an extended period of time.

We’ve also had the good fortune of coming to know two of the thought leaders in the field, Bob Hayes, the founder of the Coalition for the Homeless[4], and Rosanne Haggerty, the founder of Common Ground (now Breaking Ground), and later Community Solutions, the recent recipient of a $100 million grant from the McArthur Foundation to eliminate street homelessness. We’ve learned from listening to and observing the work of them both (although neither can be blamed for any of this that we get wrong). 

Bob Hayes and the Coalition, represented by Steven Banks[5] as counsel at the Legal Aid Society, were the moving forces that created the right to housing in New York State in the landmark case of Callaghan v. Carey in 1979. (Callaghan v. Carey, 188 N.Y.L.J., Dec. 11, 1979, at 10, col. 4 (consent decree filed with N.Y. Sup. Ct. Dec. 5, 1979)). As a result of that decision, under threat of Court sanction, New York City created what is now a huge bureaucracy that evaluates claims of homelessness and provides shelter to those who are deemed to be eligible within a Court prescribed period of time. In the first years after Callahan, there were 4,000 shelter residents.[6] Today, as noted, there are more than 50,000. It may be that part of the vectors pushing this number is supply creating its own demand. 

We think most homelessness experts would say each person who finds themselfs homeless has become so for multiple reasons. Some are unable to make their monthly rent because of their poverty, and as a result are evicted. Most face a range of other challenging issues including domestic violence, substance abuse and mental health problems (which, of course, are related to poverty and lack of employment). But as statisticians often say, a relationship doesn’t prove causation. Are people mentally ill because they are poor or are they poor because they are faced with mental illness? We can certainly all agree that our society fails to provide sufficient resources to assist people coping with mental illness. These are complex sets of social problems that require complex solutions. Housing isn’t enough.

For folks facing psychological issues, particularly single adults, Haggerty’s solution, devised in the 1990s, is supportive housing. Supportive housing provides not just shelter, but also the range of social services, particularly mental health and addiction services, that enable residents to succeed in being off the streets and living in a relatively safe and stable environment. In New York City, the single obstacle preventing the creation of more supportive housing is finding sites on which to build it. No neighborhood in New York City of which I am aware welcomes supportive housing in practice (some pay lip service to it, but when sites are selected, they seem to always be in the wrong place). We know that supportive housing works, and that well-run supportive housing facilities are invisible to their neighbors. That has certainly been our first-hand experience with facilities in our neighborhood. 

Haggerty is now involved in a program called Built for Zero that works to eliminate street homelessness and has been successful across the country.[7] While her organization, Community Solutions, has a project in a Brooklyn area, to our best knowledge, Community Solutions and Haggerty have no influence over the provision of New York City’s homelessness programs. Instead, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on outreach services to single adults living in public spaces, while thousands remain outdoors and at risk. Contracts are awarded to not-for-profit social service agencies on a geographic basis to do outreach to the homeless. Outreach workers for these extensive programs appear to be generally unsuccessful in persuading clients to accept service. Our sense is that the structure of the outreach contracting, appears to create a situation of box checking – outreach workers recording how many potential clients they have spoken to over a given period of time. It is as if it is assumed by the system that they will be unsuccessful in their efforts to engage with people without shelter. The system’s is designed is to place people in programs with available beds – attempting to fit the client to the programs (rather than finding programs that address the needs of particular clients), and treating potential clients as members of a group, rather than as individuals. 

Our experience is that outreach work requires gaining the trust of people who find themselves on the streets, learning about them from extended conversation, determining what their needs are, also, very importantly, determining what benefits they might be entitled to that they are not receiving, and finding programs that address their needs, rather than the reverse. 

New York City has also created a massive social service economy for providing temporary shelter to the homeless. The City does little of this directly. Because of Callahan, the City is literally desperate for shelter beds in order to meet its obligation to provide housing to those who in need, and contracts with some poor-quality facilities, some poor-quality providers, and as has been recently reported on a number of corrupt providers. Some of this is certainly due to the process by which contracts are services are awarded on the basis of price, which incentivizes providers to spend and do less. 

Because the City needs beds to comply with the Callaghan requirements, and it never has enough beds to meet its ever-growing need, it is loath to terminate any provider. Even the high-quality providers have become empires, paying their senior executives generous compensation packages, for some in the mid-six figures (certainly many times the salaries paid to their government colleagues) even though almost all of the income of these not-for-profits comes from government funds. Recent news reports have documented even higher pay and financial self-dealing for CEOs at entities under audit and investigation.[8] The City continues to contract with those suspect organizations because of the beds they provide. These practices cannot be justified, particularly when the homeless clients themselves often tell the media that they refuse to use shelters because of a perceived lack of safety. 

And even with the expenditure of these billions of dollars for services to those in need, the number of clients served each year does not decrease. Because the providers need to have clients to fill beds in their facilities in order to be reimbursed by government funders, this too creates the appearance of a perverse incentive – to sustain a pipeline of families claiming to be homeless, all of whom, undoubtedly are attempting to improve a housing situation they find unacceptable. 

This would all be a rather academic discussion if Community Solutions were not working in dozens of communities across the country successfully eliminating street homelessness, with particular success with veterans, in its Built for Zero program. Our understanding is that the success of Built for Zero is based on its data-driven approach, which treats potential clients as individuals. We cannot claim to understand all of the details of Built for Zero’s success, but it seems clear that working with people who find themselves without shelter to determine their needs, is quite a bit different from dealing with street homelessness as a group phenomenon as New York City does. This kind of specificity takes into account the fact that what people without shelter say they need — sometimes because of problems arising out of mental illness and substance abuse, or because living on the streets can be disorienting or embarrassing — may not be what they actually need.  Identifying potential clients as veterans opens up a wide range of available services, but accessing those services requires documentation and navigating the process of qualification. Thus, outreach workers must be trained to work with potential clients to establish this information, and then to have the persistence and expertise to obtain the required paperwork (birth certificates, discharge papers) and submit them to the Veterans Administration in the required form. Otherwise, this is a nearly impossible task. 

In our view, homelessness is not an unsolvable problem. Thinking within the current parameters that define the issue is what makes the issue seem unsolvable. The solution requires unconventional thinking. This is what we would suggest:

  1. We need to reframe the issue. When Bob Hayes founded the Coalition for the Homeless, he cleverly argued that the issue was about “housing, housing, housing.” But that was an oversimplification. The fact is that in New York City we will never build enough affordable housing to meet continuously rising demand. And, actually, housing is most affordable in places where people don’t want to live (think Cleveland, St. Louis).  Homelessness, like all social problems, is a complex one, caused by a crosscutting matrix of forces. By framing the issue as one that would be solved by building enough affordable housing, we pose it as something unsolvable. By including in the discussion mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence and lack of income/employment, we make it the frame more complex, but also makes homeless more subject to solution.
  2. The City should go to court and seek to end the consent decree entered into in Callaghan – and eliminate the “right to housing” in New York City – which defines homelessness in such a way as to make the demand for low cost housing infinite. Empowering people to demand immediate shelter, sounds humane and reasonable, but sets an ever expanding and receding Sisyphean goal. 
  3. Prioritize the development of supportive housing and clear away obstacles to its creation. Perhaps the City Charter needs to be amended to remove the ability of local forces to veto the location of supportive housing in their communities. Those forces are often racist. The funding streams that pay for supportive services are now too many and too complex. They need to be simplified (this is primarily a State and Federal problem). 
  4. Prioritize the development of mid-rise, mixed income housing with a substantial affordable component. In our experience, these are the most successful projects (for example, 50% subsidized middle income, 20% subsidized low income and 30% market rate. While they will never fully meet the demand for low cost housing, they do promote neighborhood economic diversity. Housing that is built entirely for the lowest income band of families tends to be socially unsuccessful (think Far Rockaway), and so mixed income development is preferable. 
  5. Set a date for the elimination of street homelessness and utilize Built for Zero’s tools for reaching that goal. 
  6. After the Callaghan decree has been lifted, work to decrease the number of shelter beds as demand declines culling low quality providers. 
  7. Stop awarding contracts with shelter providers and outreach services on a lowest cost bid basis. Get rid of the corrupt and poor quality providers. Work only with operators who have demonstrated the ability to support families as they move towards permanent shelter. This can only happen if the Callaghan obligations have been terminated. 

[1] https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/Directory-Of-Homeless-Population-By-Year/5t4n-d72c

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-children-pandemic.html

[3] https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/AHistoryofHousingPolicycombined0601_000.pdf

[4] Now the President and CEO of Community Healthcare Network.

[5] Who recently announced that will join Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton and Garrison as its director of pro bono services at the end of the De Blasio administration. 

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/30/nyregion/city-to-make-a-count-of-homeless-people.html

[7] https://www.joinbuiltforzero.org/our-approach/

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/ethel-denise-perry-millennium-care-fraud.html?searchResultPosition=1; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/nyregion/nyc-homeless-levitan-de-blasio.html