New Report: NYC Should Rate Shelter Performance in Moving Homeless to Independent Housing

NEW YORK, NY – Homelessness in New York City has reached crisis proportions, with roughly 14,500 homeless single adults and 15,200 families in shelter and thousands more living on the streets and in the subway system. As a result, the city has also faced a crisis in shelter conditions, which Mayor Bill de Blasio has responded to with investments in shelters’ physical plant and security.

While making shelters safer and cleaner is a noble goal, the city should increase its focus on shelter outcomes, according to Stephen Eide, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In a new report, Eide argues the homeless would benefit more if the city reinstituted a system of benchmarking and performance incentives for shelter providers.

Key points in Eide’s report include:

• Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has embarked on an expansion of the shelter system and projects high levels of homelessness for years to come.
• The de Blasio administration has shut down providers for egregious abuse. But scrutiny should also be applied to shelters that are not doing enough to move people along to self-sufficiency.
• The city should reinstate a system of performance benchmarking and financial incentives similar to the “Performance Incentive Program” that existed under the Bloomberg administration.
• Success in mental health, substance-abuse treatment and employment programs’ outcomes could be tracked, but none of those metrics should outweigh the average length of stay, rate of placements and rates of return.
• Under Bloomberg, the city was able to reduce homelessness on an annual basis in several instances, and the Performance Incentive Program was seen a factor in these successes. At present, however, the de Blasio administration has no equivalent system in place to monitor shelter performance and incentivize better outcomes.

Click here to read the full report.