Mayor de Blasio has announced a plan to end long-term street homelessness within the next five years.
The strategy, which was announced at a press conference Tuesday at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, includes adding 1,000 beds in "safe haven" facilities that have fewer restrictions and offer services intended to help the homeless transition off the streets, as well as converting existing buildings to provide 1,000 permanent apartments.
Called The Journey Home, the six-point initiative is aimed at 1,800 homeless New Yorkers—around half of the total street homeless population—who’ve been sleeping outside the longest. These individuals typically face significant mental health and substance-use challenges and don’t want to enter traditional shelters.
“This is a plan to end homelessness in New York City as we know it, once and for all,” the mayor said during the press conference, in which he was joined by Steven Banks, the city’s Social Services Commissioner.
"We've cracked a code that other cities are looking to be able to crack," Banks said.
De Blasio said the cost of this new plan to address street homelessness would be around $100 million in the next fiscal year, but didn’t provide the total five-year cost.
Currently, there are roughly 3,600 homeless people living on the streets, according to the city’s most recent statistics. The Coalition for the Homeless estimates that there were 62,381 individuals who spent a night in a homeless shelter as of September.
The administration rarely sets deadlines for addressing homelessness, which has been one of the most intransigent problems de Blasio has faced during his mayoral tenure. Some targets that have been set, such as creating 90 new shelters by 2022, are behind schedule. De Blasio will leave office at the end of 2021, three years before this new deadline.
Tuesday's policy announcement comes days after the administration reached a deal to support a City Council bill that would require some city-funded developers to set aside 15 percent of rental units for homeless New Yorkers.
Giselle Routhier, policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless, said she was pleased with the plan because it adds safe haven beds and permanent apartments, which people could access immediately coming off the street. Currently, homeless New Yorkers have to apply for permanent housing and wait at least several months to be approved.
“They've laid out a plan that is promising and that focuses on the things that we need,” said Routhier. “Now we need to make sure that the city follows up on that, that they're actually finding those resources and creating them as quickly as possible.”
But in an approach that homeless advocates have called misguided and whose results have been hard to measure, the administration will expand an initiative, launched in August, that uses New York Police Department officers to perform outreach to homeless people in the subway.
