April 11, 2011
By Patrick Markee, Senior Policy Analyst, and Giselle Routhier, Policy Analyst
In the midst of high unemployment, the steady loss of affordable housing, and years of failed policies under the Bloomberg administration, an all-time high number of New Yorkers turned to homeless shelters last year and the New York City homeless shelter population is now larger than at any time since the City began keeping records.
An all-time record 119,553 homeless people - including 44,888 children - slept in municipal shelters in FY 2010, an 8 percent increase from the previous year and a 37 percent increase from FY 2002 when Mayor Bloomberg took office.
This includes a record 28,977 families, a 15 percent increase from the previous year and a remarkable 81 percent more than when Mayor Bloomberg took office.
And by the end of February of this year, the nightly census of homeless adults and children in the municipal shelter system - 39,542 people - reached the highest point ever recorded.
In the midst of this historic homelessness crisis, the Bloomberg administration's only response has been to defend its failed policies. Unlike previous New York City mayors from Ed Koch through Rudy Giuliani, Mayor Bloomberg refuses to use proven and cost-effective Federal housing programs to move homeless families from shelters to stable homes. Instead, for more than six years the Bloomberg administration has replaced proven Federal programs with a series of untested, time-limited subsidies like the recently-terminated Advantage program.
However, City data show that these flawed time-limited subsidies have forced thousands of formerly-homeless children and families back into the shelter system and homelessness, at tremendous expense to taxpayers.
Since the Bloomberg administration cut off homeless families from proven Federal housing programs and replaced them with time-limited subsidies like the Advantage program, more than twice as many formerly-homeless families enter the shelter system each year.
In the seven years before Mayor Bloomberg's misguided policy change, an average of 2,003 formerly-homeless "repeat families" entered the shelter system each year, but in the five years after the change, an average of 5,020 "repeat families" entered the shelter system each year, a remarkable 151 percent increase. And in FY 2010, an all-time record 6,294 "repeat families" entered the shelter system.
Before the Mayor's time-limited subsidies were implemented, only one in four families (25 percent) entering the shelter system was formerly-homeless, while now nearly half (47 percent) of all families entering the shelter system was once homeless
