New Report: Clarifying NYC’s Debate over “Homelessness”
The full report can be found here.
New York City’s inability to overcome homelessness ranks as one of the most glaring exceptions to the general improvement in city conditions during the past 30 years. Crime has declined, the local economy has expanded, and the budget is balanced, but the sheltered homeless population is now several times what it was in the early 1980s, and levels of street homelessness remain persistently high. A definitive solution to both these problems has eluded every city administration going back to Mayor Koch. Under Mayor de Blasio, concerns over homelessness are once again on the rise.
Both in its sheltered and street varieties, homelessness results from a complex interaction of social and economic factors. The tendency to group all these features and causes under one term, “homelessness,” points in the direction of more government-subsidized housing as the solution. But to what degree is homelessness in NYC a housing problem?
Polls show that most New Yorkers believe that the street homelessness problem has increased under Mayor de Blasio. The statistical evidence about the rise in street homeless citywide is ambiguous. It is possible that it has shifted to areas of higher visibility—mainly, the transit system.
The market for low-rent apartments in NYC has contracted significantly in recent decades, even while the number of poor New Yorkers has grown. But the notion that NYC’s homeless problem is a housing problem should be qualified for two reasons. First, there were times in NYC’s history when the vacancy rate was much lower and yet homelessness was practically nonexistent. Second, “doubling up,” normally thought of as a transition phase into homelessness, has declined in recent years as a reason given for homelessness. The neighborhoods and populations that have the highest rates of crowding are not those that produce the most entries into homeless shelters.
Most of Mayor de Blasio’s efforts on homelessness, as well as the structure of the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) more generally, are devoted to addressing the sheltered homelessness problem. NYC spends more than $1 billion addressing homelessness, with the vast majority of those funds devoted toward maintaining the shelter system. Only a small fraction is devoted to outreach efforts focused on moving homeless off the street.
To address public concerns, the de Blasio administration should focus more efforts on street, not sheltered, homelessness. It should continue policing policies designed to discourage the street homeless from remaining outside the shelter or treatment systems. It should increase housing supply by easing regulations, and drop plans to spend $12 million on anti-eviction legal services unless it can be demonstrated that the policy will reduce homelessness.
Homelessness policy has always been highly legalistic due to NYC’s unique “right to shelter.” The “right to shelter” is rooted in a consent decree that NYC signed in the early 1980s with homeless advocates. Its significance has been to grant special oversight over homelessness policy to judges and advocacy organizations. Given the extraordinary increase in the homeless population since the right to shelter was first recognized, it is not obvious that subjecting city authorities to additional accountability—beyond normal mechanisms such as elections, the media, and checks and balances—has led to better policymaking. The current public outcry over homelessness, the existence of the city council’s Committee on General Welfare, and the extensive efforts and resources the Bloomberg administration put towards trying to end homelessness belie the assumption that, if not for the efforts of an activistic legal community, this problem would be ignored.
A more helpful legal change would empower public authorities to compel inpatient hospitalization for seriously disturbed individuals. Recognizing a “right to treatment” would refocus homelessness law on getting mentally ill people off the streets and onto medication; for most of the public, this is a policy challenge that is likely more pressing than the recent rise in the shelter census. Through the NYC Safe initiative, the de Blasio administration pledges “resources to more effectively use Kendra’s Law and the Assisted Outpatient Treatment program.” Passed in 1999, Kendra’s Law, also known as New York State’s “assisted outpatient treatment” law, allows for court-ordered supervised treatment for individuals deemed to pose a serious threat to themselves or others. In NYC, 8,709 individuals have been placed under a Kendra’s Law court order since 1999; 1,445 are currently active, according to the New York State Office of Mental Health. But more forthright methods should be considered, such as an involuntary-commitment law that relies on a broader notion of “harm to self.”
So long as a return to full-scale reinstitutionalization remains impractical, supportive housing should remain central to city and state policy towards severe mental illness. However, it should only be one part of homelessness policy. The advocacy community ascribes to supportive housing an effectiveness that is much in doubt. A recent study by Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute found that supportive housing programs had no longterm effect on levels of homelessness. This has also been NYC’s experience: if supportive housing has been as successful as its proponents maintain, why are there still so many homeless people on the city’s streets? Has the rate of severe mental illness changed since the 1990s? Again, NYC’s official street homeless count is about 3,000, including many who are not severely mentally ill. 30,000 units of supportive housing would not only more than double NYC’s current stock, it would represent an almost 40 percent increase on the number of affordable units projected to be built under Mayor de Blasio’s ten-year housing plan. Will there ever be a limit to how many supportive-housing units NYC “needs”?
If supportive housing is the only solution to homelessness, the problem will never be solved. There could be more than a thousand mentally-ill New Yorkers sleeping on the streets who are not receiving antipsychotic medication to which they would respond positively. That problem, the original concern of supportive housing, should be revived as its exclusive focus. Scaling back current plans to increase NYC’s supportive-housing stock would free up funds to devote to other solutions that may prove equally effective at addressing street and/or sheltered homelessness, such as giving more funds to transitional housing providers with a strong record of success and providing additional cash assistance for working adults living in shelters.
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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