The number of people sleeping in city homeless shelters has hit an all-time high, topping more than 39,000, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Coalition for the Homeless, which put out the report, blamed the Bloomberg administration and its policy of not giving out Section 8 vouchers to those at homeless shelters, something that would help them to afford low-income housing.

“With unemployment continuing to rise and affordable housing as hard as ever to come by, this crisis will continue to get worse unless the Bloomberg administration changes direction, and does so quickly,” said Mary Brosnahan, head of the coalition.

As of Sept. 30, there were 39,243 homeless adults and children in shelters, an 11 percent increase over last year, according to the report, which is based on city records.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, the coalition found, there has been a 45 percent increase in the homeless shelter population.

Robert Hess, head of the Department of Homeless Services, pointed to a city rental assistance program he said had placed 13,000 people.

“In the years before the Bloomberg Administration reformed the shelter system, the kind of demand . . . we’re seeing today would have overwhelmed the system,” Hess said.

Source: AMNY

New York City is buying one-way plane tickets for homeless families to leave the city.

It’s part of a Bloomberg administration program to keep the homeless out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family. More than 550 families have left the city since 2007. All it takes is for a relative to agree to take them in.

The city employs a travel agency for domestic travel and the Department of Homeless Services handles international travel.

City officials say there are no limits on where a family can be sent and families can reject the offer.

Families have been sent to 24 states and five continents, mostly to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

City officials say none of the relocated families have returned to city shelters.

Source: AP

Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city’s homeless services system Wednesday after more than two decades of court oversight.

The Department of Homeless Services had been under court supervision since 1983, when a judge ruled that the city wasn’t doing enough to guarantee every homeless person’s right to shelter.

“It inevitably created delays, impeded change and stifled innovation,” said Bloomberg of the court supervision.

Staffers were subject to 40 rules ranging from what baby formula they could serve in shelters to how investigations of clients were conducted.

The settlement, which preserves a right to shelter, is a stamp of approval on the mayor’s homeless policy reform.

Still, the Legal Aid Society, which defended families in the suits, warned that more work needs to be done.

“No system is perfect. And there are certainly problems that everyone is committed to address,” said Legal Aid Society chief attorney Steven Banks.

“What this agreement does is give a legal framework to protect families in the future if the efforts that are underway don’t work.”

The city had argued that it had successfully overhauled emergency shelter intake centers where families once slept on floors.

“The power of the suffering there never failed to stun me,” said Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs, the former commissioner of Homeless Services.

But the city has fallen short of its goal to reduce the homeless population – which stands at 30,000 people a night in shelters – by two-thirds.

DHS Commissioner Robert Hess said it’s too soon to say if the crippling economy will lead shelter numbers to skyrocket, noting: “This is not an area where we really like to see new business.”

Source: NY Daily News

In April, when word reached Crown Heights that New York City’s homeless services agency planned to move its central intake center from Manhattan to the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Brooklyn, local residents started a fierce campaign to prevent the move.

They handed out fliers, met with elected officials and Department of Homeless Services representatives, and rallied their supporters via e-mail.

On Tuesday, organized and emboldened, the opponents — who contend that the area already has more than its share of shelters and social-service providers and that the intake center would attract thousands more people — had a tense evening meeting with George Nashak, a deputy commissioner at the homeless services agency. They accused him of not hearing their concerns, and at several points, all but shouted him out of the room, despite his announcement that the city would close a 150-bed shelter in their neighborhood and take other steps to ease the burden.

On Thursday, Heather J. Janik, a spokeswoman for the city’s homeless services agency, said an additional intake center would be opened in Manhattan to lessen demand at the proposed Brooklyn site. She said it would open “in tandem” with the new Brooklyn intake center, at the same time that the current central intake center, the Bellevue Men’s Shelter on the East Side, closed down. The site of the new center in Manhattan, which will be open 24 hours, has not been determined.

Bill de Blasio, the city councilman who leads the committee overseeing the homeless services agency, said more was needed, including guarantees from the city about improving the armory. “I think it’s going to take a lot more before folks in the neighborhood are satisfied,” he said.

One of the local organizers, Sandy Taggart, set a higher bar, saying, “We will absolutely not accept an intake center here.”

The dispute comes at a time of rebirth and rising property values in Crown Heights, a diverse neighborhood in central Brooklyn that is home to an annual West Indian carnival. Opponents of the city plan said it would also affect Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is also experiencing a revival.

Some restored brownstones are on streets adjacent to the armory at Bedford and Atlantic Avenues, an enormous red brick building resembling a castle, with crenelated turrets and a footprint the size of a city block. The armory, completed in 1902 for the 23rd Regiment in Brooklyn, became a shelter for homeless men in 1982, and quickly developed a bad reputation. In the Atlantic, as it was called, the men slept on cots in a cavernous 50,000-square-foot drill hall. Nearby, there were crack houses, and the struggling neighborhood offered the men little else.

Today, there are 350 beds at the shelter. But advocates for the homeless, local activists and former residents of the shelter said it was still a woeful, dangerous place, where drug use seems to be tolerated. Nathan Ashford, 39, a homeless man who lived at the armory for three months in the past year, said he saw men smuggle weapons into the shelter, smoke crack and inject heroin. And while local activists said they were disturbed by the tales of what went on in the armory, there seemed to be greater consternation at the thought that the number of homeless men standing on the streets outside it could grow.

The city’s plan would make the armory a processing point for homeless men entering the shelter system. According to estimates by the homeless services agency, about 40 men a day currently use the central intake center at Bellevue, with the number rising sharply during the coldest days of winter; however, Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, said that data compiled by the city showed that about 90 men used the center each day.

The city says its new approach to fighting homelessness lessens the importance of intake centers. Officials said that homeless people avoided the large centers, and that the focus was on outreach teams, who find homeless individuals and place them in “safe havens,” shelters with few barriers to entry.

Since 2004, when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg committed the city to an aggressive schedule to reduce the number of homeless people, the city has had mixed results. A recent report by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that roughly the same number of families were living in shelters this March as in 2004. But the city says the number of homeless people living on the streets has fallen by 25 percent and the number of single adults in shelters has been reduced 22 percent.

As it stands, the intake center at Bellevue is set to close in June 2009; the site is to be converted into a hotel and conference center. When the intake center opens in Brooklyn, the city has said, the number of beds there will be reduced to 230, a move that officials say would improve services and security.

Mr. Markee said there were still too many questions about the city’s proposal to open another intake center, including its location. There was a reason to keep the intake center in Manhattan, he said: It is where most of the city’s homeless men stay, near the central business district, as in most cities.

But at the community meeting on Tuesday, residents seemed concerned about more than just the logistics of a move. People said Crown Heights was a dumping ground for the city’s social problems, and they talked about the danger that the neighborhood would regress after reaching something resembling prosperity.

The Rev. Caleb Buchanan, parish administrator at St. Gregory the Great Roman Catholic Church in Crown Heights, asked Mr. Nashak whether the city’s decision was fair. “All we’re asking for,” he said, “is respect.”

Source: NY Times