How to Win on Homelessness

The 2017 election cycle is barely underway, but Mayor de Blasio’s challengers have already made clear that they will make his record on homelessness Exhibit A for why New York needs a change. Real estate developer Paul Massey, a Republican, has pledged to “eradicate” homelessness if he is elected. Democrat Tony Avella staged his campaign rollout at a Holiday Inn Express in Queens, which the de Blasio administration tried to convert to a homeless shelter over community objections.

New Yorkers should be debating an alternative to the status quo on homelessness. But critics of de Blasio, on both the left and right, should be mindful that coming up with a realistic alternative is easier said than done.

For one thing, the problem is not simply bad management. One reason why de Blasio’s detractors have focused so much on homelessness is because the current crisis seems to validate longstanding doubts that this former political operative has the administrative chops to govern.

De Blasio has certainly made some missteps of a purely managerial nature on homelessness, most notably the appointment of the ineffectual Gilbert Taylor as his first head of the Department of Homeless Services. But the solution can’t simply be the same policies with different management.

Let’s not forget that Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, who were both better managers than de Blasio, did not have anywhere near as much success on homelessness as they did on crime, K-12 public education and economic development.

Nor can more money be the solution. Across all city agencies, annual spending on homeless services has grown by more than $700 million since de Blasio took office. The mayor has invested heavily in homeless prevention and rental subsidy programs in an effort to bring down homelessness from Bloomberg-era levels.

The results have not been impressive. There are now 25% more families in Homeless Services Department facilities since de Blasio’s inauguration, and 32% more single adults. It is thus strange to hear from critics like Avella, and from the progressive left, that the roots of the current crisis lie in de Blasio’s inadequate commitment to prevention and rental subsidies.

From infrastructure to libraries, New York has been underfunding many public services amid the spike in homelessness-related spending. Homeless policy reform cannot be premised on the notion that de Blasio has not been spending enough.

A complete repudiation of the de Blasio approach would be neither feasible nor wise. Any successor mayor should continue de Blasio’s efforts at trying to make shared housing work for very low-income families.

The Independent Budget Office reckons that about 50,000 city schoolchildren are doubled up with relatives. There is no room in the city budget for a permanent housing subsidy to every one of these families.

Note that the while the rate of “severe crowding” among New York City’s Asian households is more than double that of Puerto Rican, black and white renters, Asians constitute less than 1% of the homeless shelter census.

The more that government can facilitate doubling up as a safe and tolerable alternative to entering shelters, the more resources and attention it can devote toward the truly neediest children.

Yes, there is a right to shelter in New York, but, in the case of families, city government has the legal authority to evaluate whether families truly have no other options — and now needs to use that power more forcefully than in the recent past to restrict shelter eligibility for families with children.

Through this October, 52% of families with children applying for shelter were found eligible by the Homeless Services Department, compared with 43% during the same span last year.

Apparently, even city Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks, who in his former job at the Legal Aid Society pushed to expand the right to shelter, agrees that we may be allowing too many families in: He recently sought and received the state government’s approval to apply more scrutiny to applications for shelter.

Housing instability is a painful experience for young children to endure. But the fact is that city government can do more for the hardest cases if it doesn’t have to spread resources so thin.

Elections are not always conducive to substantive policy debate. But de Blasio’s most serious challengers will distinguish themselves by taking care to propose alternatives. In general, the line de Blasio’s 2017 opponents should pursue on homelessness is that the current approach is crowding out other priorities in the city budget — and that, instead of doing too little for too many homeless people, we should focus on doing more for fewer.

This piece originally appeared at the New York Daily News

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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News