The Forgotten 50,000
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD, NY TIMES
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More than 50,000 New Yorkers slept in city homeless shelters and on the streets last night. About 21,000 were children. These numbers are huge and appalling, higher than they were in 2002, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, higher than in the dismal days of the fiscal crisis, the Reagan ’80s and the surly administration of Rudolph Giuliani.

New Yorkers who have no permanent place to live form a small city unto themselves — an abandoned one. The shelter population has risen 61 percent while Mr. Bloomberg has been mayor, propelled by a 73 percent increase in homeless families, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, whose relentless advocacy has been provoking mayoral fury since the 1980s. These surging numbers — of families with children, especially — undercut claims that New York is steadily becoming a better place to live, and that its government has gotten better at helping its most vulnerable citizens meet their most basic needs.

The next mayor will have to do better by them than Mr. Bloomberg. He once proposed energetic and aggressive initiatives on behalf of the homeless. Now he speaks of them with resentment: “You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport,” the mayor said recently, “take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”

He is right that city law grants a right to shelter, the result of a hard-fought legal battle that Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly tried to undermine. But he is wrong to imply that the greatest strains on the shelter system come from out-of-towners who have no city roots, or that this crisis is somehow the fault of lawyers and judges.

That isn’t true, and it is a diversion from the real problem. His administration is meeting its legal obligation by filling the city’s shelters to bursting. But it has failed to keep its promises to significantly shrink the shelter population by giving people the means to live independently and enough paths to permanent housing.

Previous mayors tackled the problem with the assistance of federal programs, helping families in shelters obtain Section 8 rent vouchers and federal public-housing apartments managed by the New York City Housing Authority. So did the Bloomberg administration, for a while. But it broke with those policies in 2005, substituting short-term rent subsidies, which it then abruptly terminated in 2011. That was when homeless families started returning to shelters at an accelerating rate and at great expense. It costs taxpayers an average of $36,799 a year to shelter a family, according to city data, far more than it would to simply subsidize its rent.

With six months left in Mr. Bloomberg’s 12-year tenure, the crisis will be the next mayor’s to solve. The problems of housing and homelessness are intertwined, fed by many unrelated things: joblessness and the lagging economy, deficiencies in mental-health and addiction care that force vulnerable men and women onto the streets, the simple lack of affordable units and a widening gap between incomes and market rents. The mayoral candidates need to offer solutions that are multifaceted, too, in an era of ever-dwindling federal and state aid.

A coalition of more than a hundred community organizations and advocacy groups, created in April to call attention to the growing crisis, has called for restoring rent subsidies and legal services to protect families from eviction and foreclosure, giving the homeless priority access to low-income housing, and expanding supportive housing for the disabled and mentally ill — all good ideas. Mr. Bloomberg’s Homebase program, begun in 2004 to help residents of some high-poverty neighborhoods avoid eviction, now serves about 11,000 families a year — a worthwhile effort but only a piece of the broader solution.

The Democratic candidates generally agree on some approaches, like getting developers to include affordable housing in their projects. Comptroller John Liu has proposed a rental-voucher program that he says could save the city $237 million annually in shelter costs. The city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, has laid out perhaps the most comprehensive housing plan; he wants to create 100,000 and preserve 90,000 affordable housing units in eight years, in various ways, including converting thousands of illegal units into rent-stabilized apartments. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn also wants a new rental subsidy program for homeless families and promises to build 40,000 “middle income” units. William Thompson Jr. has an antipoverty plan that includes more Section 8 vouchers for homeless families. Anthony Weiner talks of cutting red tape to get more affordable units built.

Joseph Lhota and John Catsimatidis, Republican candidates, speak of market solutions. So does the Republican George McDonald, who has spent years aiding homeless New Yorkers through his charity, the Doe Fund, which offers job training as a path to a paycheck and an apartment. He says the Doe Fund’s approach should be vastly scaled up, which is one reason he is running for mayor.

The city looks cleaner, safer and richer in gentrifying neighborhoods, many lined with luxury high-rises and new amenities, like rental bicycles. But it looks vastly different from the intake center for homeless families in the South Bronx, or the shelter for men on East 30th Street, or the other sites where tens of thousands of New Yorkers are languishing, out of sight and out of mind of the larger city.