In a “solution” woefully mismatched to the problem, Mayor de Blasio on Monday announced a new plan to deal with homelessness: Send in the lawyers!
The city will spend more on extra legal help for poor residents in danger of eviction, hiking outlays from $34 million to $60 million.
The lead is Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steven Banks — who, in decades at the Legal Aid Society, repeatedly sued the city to thwart any “tough love” approach to homelessness.
Shocker: A career lawyer sees lawyers as the solution; a career “homeless advocate” thinks giving more rights to “victims” will make the difference. When you’ve got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
And never mind that the city’s housing courts already lean over backward to favor tenants over landlords.
Or that evictions just don’t drive homelessness. On that point, the mayor might call his friend, Gov. Cuomo.
In 1991, then-Mayor David Dinkins tasked Cuomo to lead a commission on that era’s homeless crisis. Its finding: To get a hold on homelessness, look at “behavioral problems.”
As the commission noted: “Homelessness is frequently a symptom of some underlying problem, such as lack of job skills or education, a substance-abuse problem, or mental illness. It results when one or more of these problems interact with a number of social and economic factors, including a shortage of affordable housing.”
Forty-two percent of the homeless families surveyed had a mental-health or drug problem. Nearly a third of adults in shelter families tested positive for illegal drugs.
Decades later, the homeless haven’t changed much: For most, the real problem is in their heads. And lawyers can’t help with that.