August 1, 2024 NEW YORK, NY — Today, the Coalition for the Homeless released its annual State of the Homeless report, titled Rights Under Attack, Leadership in Retreat. The report focuses on the Mayor’s and Governor’s performance with regard to shelter capacity, access, conditions, and exits, and addressing the City’s severe shortage of affordable and supportive housing for those who need it most. The report reveals that there are now more people homeless, there is less affordable housing available, and there are more people in desperate need of social services and mental health care than at any time in recent memory. “It is a constitutional, practical, and moral obligation of our City and State government to proactively address homelessness and poverty,” said David Giffen, Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless. “Yet, Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul have done very little to invest in the proven solutions to mass homelessness. If we continue to allow unchecked the catastrophic shortage in affordable housing, the lack of access to quality voluntary mental health care, the difficulty in accessing the type and amount of emergency shelter and services that people need, New York will increasingly be defined not by its ingenuity, pragmatism, and compassion, but by the scale of deprivation and suffering it allows.” The main findings of State of Homeless 2024 include: The number of people in NYC without homes on any given night is now approximately 350,000, including 132,000 in shelters, thousands sleeping unsheltered in public spaces, and well over 200,000 sleeping doubled-up or tripled-up in the homes of others. Even aside from the influx of asylum seekers and other new arrivals since March 2022, the number of homeless longer-term New Yorkers in shelters increased by 10,000, or about 19 percent, in the same time period. Mayor Adams did make some welcome progress in increasing supported exits from shelters when compared to the previous year, but the numbers are still vastly short of what is needed to reverse an increasing shelter census. Governor Hochul failed decisively in meeting the State’s obligation to help resettle new arrivals: by May 2024, Governor Hochul had placed only 376 new arrival families in housing through her failed Migrant Resettlement Assistance Program (“MRAP”) – far lower than the formal target of 1,250 and informal target of 2,500. While the modest increase in the production of supportive housing and set-asides in FY23 was welcome, it represented a fraction of what is needed to address the crisis. The number of homeless households placed into NYCHA public housing in FY23, only 650, hit its lowest level in recent memory, and was roughly one-third the number of households placed in FY19. Ensuring that New Yorkers have access to the most fundamental requirements of survival, such as a safe place to sleep at night, sufficient food, and access to healthcare, is a constitutional, practical and moral obligation to protect and foster the core humanity of our community; yet, through their actions, statements and policies, Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul have illustrated an alarming retreat from these obligations. The report explains that Mayor Adams’ and Governor Hochul’s responses to these crises were primarily defined by their: Efforts to dismantle core legal protections for the most vulnerable among us, by attacking the Right to Shelter; Placing limitations on access to vital benefits, such as shelters and rent vouchers; Refusal to take critical actions that would have alleviated the crises, such as heeding recommendations for reducing the NYC shelter census, standing up to bigoted executive orders in upstate counties, creating enough housing for those who most need it, and failing to create a functioning resettlement plan for new arrivals. The full report can be read here.
