Categories: New York City
10.31.2013
United to End Homelessness Twitter rallies lead to homelessness question
United to End Homelessness held two Twitter rallies this month to urge New York City's mayoral candidates and debate moderators to discuss homelessness during the final debates leading up to NYC's citywide election on November 5. The most recent of these rallies was held on Monday, when more than 55 organizations (including the Network) took to Twitter to call on Bill de Blasio, Joe Lhota and moderator Melissa Russo to "Home in on Homelessness."
Yesterday, the coalition's efforts paid off. After several debates in which the word "homeless" was never uttered, moderators at last asked both candidates to detail their plans to reduce NYC's record level of homelessness. You'll find a transcript of the exchange below. To watch the entire debate, head here. You can read the tweets from October's Twitter rallies by following this link.
Moderator:
The number of homeless people spending the night in city shelters recently surpassed 51,000, which is now more than the number of seats at Yankee Stadium. That’s a 64% increase since 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg took office. Have the Bloomberg administration’s policies on homelessness failed, and, if so, what specifically would you do differently? Mr. Lhota, you’re up first.
Joe Lhota:
I think the Bloomberg policies have missed one critical area in dealing with homelessness. First and foremost, we’re just housing people. We need to find out what the problem is. For some, especially the families, they really do need housing, and let’s help them get the housing and the other public assistance they need. But for those who have other needs, whether it’s a drug addiction or alcoholism, we need to be benevolent as the city of New York and get them fixed. Get them back to be mainstreamed into society, go through job-training programs and actually get them back. The city of New York is spending over $1 billion today on the homeless problem in New York, and they’re not doing anything about reducing the number of people going into it. It just keeps growing and growing and growing, and nobody’s coming out of it. We need to treat all the folks who are homeless as humans and get them the services that they need.
Moderator:
Do you want to get rid of the right to shelter? Is that your plan?
Joe Lhota:
You know, the right to shelter has been contested in courts over and over again. Quite honestly, the only thing that I would suggest on shelter is that we should really focus priority on those who are New Yorkers. Under the constitution of the state of New York, anybody can come across a bridge or a tunnel and come into New York, and they have a right to shelter. You know what, New York first, and then we’ll worry about the others.
Moderator:
Mr. de Blasio, the original question to you. Do you think that the Bloomberg administration’s policies on homelessness have been a failure, and what would be your plan?
Bill de Blasio:
Absolutely and sadly been a failure. We had 51,000 in shelters. You said, that’s an all-time high. You know, homelessness is a phenomenon that’s about 30 years old now in our city, and this is the worst it’s ever been in terms of the number of people in shelter. For eight years in the City Council, I was the chair person of the committee that worked on this issue. For the first four years of the Bloomberg administration, I pleaded with the administration to focus on homelessness prevention. There are ways to keep people in their own apartments, to keep families whole, to not let them slip into shelter when they went through an economic dislocation, for example. By the way, here’s the amazing thing: These homelessness prevention programs, for example, you spend $1,000 a month to keep a family in an apartment for a certain period of time, but you spend over $3,000 a month for that same family to be in shelter. Unfortunately, Bloomberg administration policies have allowed more and more families to end up in shelter. The families are the losers and the taxpayers are the losers. I believe in going back to the programs that for a brief time the administration utilized: the anti-eviction legal services, the rental subsidy programs. They abandoned those in 2011. That’s one of the reasons why the shelter population has gone up so high.
Photo credit: Peter Foley