Categories: New York City
01.09.2014
Commissioner Hess served under Mayor Bloomberg from 2006-2010
The Network is deeply saddened to report the passing of Robert Hess, former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS). Mr. Hess passed away on Christmas Eve after being diagnosed with liver cancer in 2013. He was 57 years old.
As DHS Commissioner from 2006 to 2010, Mr. Hess oversaw a period of great change and experimentation, despite a major recession and multiple fiscal challenges. During his time at DHS, the agency reduced the number of long-term shelter stayers and people living on the streets by nearly half. Mr. Hess also worked hard to improve and expand homeless families’ and individuals’ access to rent subsidies and permanent housing.
“Rob Hess was among the best of DHS commissioners,” says Tony Hannigan, Network Board Member and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS). “In addition to completely reorienting street outreach services to prioritize chronically homeless people, he also implemented a design for accountability, including performance-based contracting, that ensured the job got done. Commissioner Hess truly cared about homeless people.”
“Rob Hess transformed DHS and homeless services in New York City by demonstrating that even the most intractable problems are in fact solvable,” says George Nashak, Executive Vice President at HELP USA. “The best example of this was his leadership on street homeless services. Rob invented safe havens and reengineered the street outreach contracts so that we were moving street homeless clients indoors at a pace that had never been seen before. I will miss him enormously.”
A U.S. Army veteran and Baltimore native, Mr. Hess came to fight homelessness in New York after witnessing the scourge of veteran homelessness. For 16 years, Mr. Hess ran a chain of thrift stores for the Baltimore chapter of Disabled American Veterans. Encountering firsthand the appalling number of homeless veterans in America, Mr. Hess committed the rest of his career to ending homelessness.
He continued this journey in the 1990s as the Board President of the Maryland Center for Veterans Education and Training (MCVET), a nonprofit that provides housing assistance and other services to at-risk and homeless veterans. In the early 2000s, then-Philadelphia Mayor John Street tapped Mr. Hess to serve as his homeless czar, where he first drew national attention for his innovative strategies to reduce street homelessness. In 2006, Mr. Hess made the move to New York to help America’s largest city reduce its number of chronically homeless people.
"Rob Hess was a true leader of our collective effort to address the issue of homelessness," says Stephan Russo, Executive Director of Goddard Riverside Community Center. "He was passionate in his belief that every individual, regardless of their life circumstance, deserved a safe place to live. He is a major reason why we have new and varied housing resources that have improved thousands of lives."
In his final years in life, Mr. Hess worked briefly for The Doe Fund and founded Housing Solutions USA, a nonprofit emergency housing provider based in New York. He served as Chairman and CEO of Housing Solutions USA until his passing.
Mr. Hess is survived by his wife Patricia, his daughters Brittany and Christi, his mother Barbara and his brother. Our thoughts are with them in this difficult time, and we thank them for sharing Robert with us for all those years as he fought to end homelessness, in New York City and across the United States.