In what would otherwise have been a noble demolition of the cliche of New York City-as-Empathy-Starved-Hellhole, a report in today's Post instead reminds us that homeless "moochers" from Skokie are using your tax dollars to doze on hammocks filled with caviar. Nice caviar, not that trash from Finland.
“I have food. I have health care. It’s great,’’ said 25-year-old Michal Joblonowski, who moved to the city from Poland three years ago and is currently staying at shelter on the Bowery. “The shelters are really nice. You have clean sheets. You get to watch TV and stay in the warm," he added, enraging certain tabloid editors who would rather Jablonowski sleep on a cot made of broken shells and large-print copies of Atlas Shrugged.
William Sullivan, who is identified as a man "who came to the city from LA for a job that fell through," said that staying at the shelter beats working:
Some people in here have it better than people working 9 to 5, because they’re not paying rent. I’ve stayed in hostels worse. I call this four stars. Everyone in this place has a silver spoon in their mouth. You get fed three to four meals a day, and the food here is great.
Mayor Bloomberg has said that the City's shelters are too "pleasurable," which is why you haven't seen anyone sleeping on the street in a long while.
A spokesperson from the City's Department of Homeless Services, Barbara Brancaccio, did not dispute the numbers in the Post's story—almost a quarter of those in the shelter system in December listed their residence as out of town, and that taxpayers pay $3,000 per month to house someone in the shelter system—but noted that the story cherry-picked a relatively small subset of the population.
"The vast majority of people who come in [to the shelter system] really need it, they really do," Brancaccio said, before explaining that the City isn't allowed to give the same level of counseling and screening to single adults as they do families.
"On the family side we can really counsel people, we can help them find other places to go rather than come into shelter. On the single side we don't have an eligibility process," Brancaccio says. "We can't address their real needs because we're not allowed to do that intense level of screening." She adds that the City attempted to increase the screening process for singles last year, "but we were sued by Legal Aid and the City Council."
Homelessness has skyrocketed during Mayor Bloomberg's tenure. According to a report released by Coalition for the Homeless last month, homeless families now make up 78% of people staying in the city's shelter system, a 73% increase since the mayor took office. The number of children sleeping in shelters rose 22% in one year.
In 2004, there were 38,000 people living in the City's shelter system, and Bloomberg promised to cut that number by two-thirds in five years.
"The sad reality is that a record-high 50,000 homeless people, including 21,000 children, are sleeping tonight in the crowded shelter system, and the vast majority of them are New Yorkers," Patrick Markee, a Senior Policy Analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, "not a reputable organization," said in a statement. "Homelessness has skyrocketed under Mayor Bloomberg because of his refusal to provide permanent housing assistance to help homeless people escape municipal shelters."
Of course, we now know from the Post that no sane person would ever want to escape the world of clean sheets and compassion.
