In the 21 months since Bill de Blasio took office, New York City has seen its homelessness issue go from problem to full-blown crisis. Yet Mayor de Blasio, the self-appointed champion of the downtrodden, hasn’t shown himself to be up to the task.
And nowhere is this clearer than in his handling of the epidemic of homeless veterans. In his State of the City Address this past February, de Blasio promised to end homelessness among veterans in New York City by the end of this year. It was an ambitious promise. However, seven months later, little has been done to meet this goal.
De Blasio hasn’t held a single meeting with his own veterans advisory board, and he’s refused to meet with local veterans groups.
These veterans groups, such as the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, are uniquely qualified to assist our homeless veterans with housing, job training, mental-health assistance and many other vital services. They’re waiting for the call from the de Blasio administration, but have heard only silence.
This pattern, in which de Blasio feigns interest long enough to make a grand pronouncement and then loses interest completely, is reflected in the mayor’s approach toward homelessness in general.
De Blasio quietly opened 23 new homeless shelters in 2014, several via emergency declaration normally reserved for natural disasters, and left it at that until late August, when he authorized another emergency-aid program.
He didn’t announce new programs designed to help transition shelter residents to permanent housing or jobs that would enable them to become self-sufficient. He didn’t increase outreach to the people who spend their days and nights on the street, asking for a little compassion and a helping hand. He didn’t work to improve the conditions in shelters that cause many homeless to want to avoid the shelter system altogether.
De Blasio could no longer ignore it when, in March 2015, the Department of Investigation released a damning report on the conditions in the New York City shelter system.
His own handpicked commissioner of the DOI said that the investigation found “Dangerous living conditions, rat and roach infested residences, and fire violations are the stark reality facing too many homeless families and children in the City’s shelters.”
De Blasio’s response came a full two months later, when he announced the formation of “SWAT teams” to fast-track repairs at homeless shelters across the city. What he didn’t say is that the “SWAT teams” already existed and had been mostly ineffective.
In reality, the announcement was little more than trumpeting a change in title for some city workers. It was the equivalent of janitors being rebranded as custodial engineers.
After that, city Comptroller Scott Stringer publicly rebuked de Blasio for his mismanagement of the shelter system, and rejected several city contracts with shelter providers. (Some of these contracts were later rejected a second time by Stringer’s office for failure to produce any proof that the city had tried to address the problems that caused the original rejection.)
In conversations with many of the New Yorkers without homes in my own neighborhood, I was startled to find that the city’s approach to dealing with them hasn’t been outreach. Instead, the city has been ordering these down-on-their-luck citizens to cease panhandling and to simply leave areas that the NYPD has identified as problem zones.
The most striking example was of two homeless women in Riverside Park who had set up a temporary shelter. They recited, in great detail, the poor living conditions and the constant danger of the city’s shelter system. They were avoiding it for a reason.
Their only interactions with the city are when they’re told to move along or to not set up their shelter during the day, because the city doesn’t want to get complaints from residents about an encampment.
Mayor de Blasio’s approach to tackling the problems of homelessness has fallen short of his repeated pledges to reduce inequality throughout the city. Each “new initiative” is sadly a form of window dressing that fails to truly address the problem, while seeking to provide a campaign line that he “has been fighting for” New Yorkers without homes.
It’s time for Mayor de Blasio to get serious about homelessness and improve the quality of life for those New Yorkers impacted by it.
Evan Siegfried, a Republican strategist, is president of Somm Consulting.