Posted on October 8, 2014 by Gabriela Sandoval Requena Every night well over 13,000 families with more than 24,000 children are affected by homelessness in New York City. Many of them reside in apartments with deplorable conditions used as temporary shelter, known as “cluster-site” units, for which the City pays exorbitant rates, in some cases as high as $3,400 per month. The de Blasio Administration wisely decided to reduce the rents paid to private landlords, a change that met obvious resistance from unscrupulous property owners. Mirela Iverac reports for WNYC News: Jessica Heinze’s problems with her one-bedroom apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx begin as soon as she enters, when she can’t turn on the light. “From the bathroom all the way to the bedroom there’s no electricity, no outlets that work,” she said. In the bathroom, the toilet and the sink are clogged up, and a part of Heinze’s tub is missing. Heinze, 37, has been homeless since she lost her rent subsidy two years ago. She stays in this apartment, for which the city pays $2,900 a month. The money goes to a non-profit provider who leases the apartment from a private landlord and is supposed to provide social services. It’s a model called cluster-site shelter. Advocates have criticized it ever since the city first started renting private apartments for the homeless in 2000. Mary Brosnahan, president of the Coalition for the Homeless, describes it as “endless amounts of money just poured into some of the worst buildings in the city.” The de Blasio administration announced in the spring that things were about to change in a big way: rents paid to the landlords would be cut in half, to $1,500. The city expected to save $60 million. But after a summer of negotiations with nine providers, the average cost of an apartment will only go down to $2,522, for a savings of $15 million in fiscal year 2015. Lorraine Stephens, first deputy commissioner at the Department of Homeless Services, said that’s still a success. [Source] As recommended in our State of Homeless 2014 Report, reverting cluster-site shelter units to permanent affordable housing while implementing more housing-based permanent solutions, such as long-term housing subsidies and priority referrals of at least 2,500 eligible homeless households to NYCHA apartments annually, will help significantly reduce the record-high number of homeless families and save taxpayer dollars. This will allow the City to do away with cluster-site program, and eliminate the need of private landlords to provide emergency shelter.
