Strange to say, homelessness declined in the year before Mayor Eric Adams was sworn into office Jan. 1, 2022.
New York’s main shelter-system census has grown by almost two-thirds since then, thanks to the migrant surge that started last spring.
Of all the services being provided to the migrants — schools, health care, etc. — shelter is by far the most expensive.
The average annual cost to shelter one single adult in New York is $50,000; one family unit, $69,000.
But budget strain is not the only problem.
New York has a large and diverse native homeless population whose needs will not be adequately met so long as the migrant influx keeps city shelters in triage mode.
No city has a homeless shelter system like New York’s. This city guarantees immediate temporary housing to everyone, in every season, even if they just arrived that day.
Thanks to the “right to shelter,” New York homelessness stands at around 90,000, a historic peak. Were the homeless of New York to form their own city, it would rank as the state’s seventh-largest.
The shelter system has two aims, the first being to help people find housing who don’t have it.
Last year, 5,700 families and 7,000 single adults exited Department of Homeless Services shelters for permanent housing. City government considers every one of those cases a success story.
But since lack of housing is never the only problem in someone’s life, New York’s shelter system also aims to provide specialized programming appropriate to clients’ needs.
The city runs shelters for the mentally ill, for those struggling with substance abuse, for runaway youth, for seniors and employment shelters for the able-bodied.
Programmatic shelters are important because it typically takes shelter clients a long time to exit the system. Last year, the average length of stay in Department of Homeless Services shelters was 509 days for single adults and 534 days for families with children.
Onsite programming helps ensure people make the most of permanent housing when they eventually land it and, meantime, avoids warehousing shelter clients during the wait.
The theory is sound. In practice, New York’s approach to shelter programming leaves much to be desired.
That was the conclusion of an audit state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli put out late last year.
The report analyzed “whether DHS is effectively placing clients into shelters or facilities that have the necessary services and supervision.”
It documented hundreds of instances of adults diagnosed with serious mental illnesses and addiction not being placed in shelters designed for those populations.
Notably, the DiNapoli audit analyzed shelter operations before the migrant crisis began. Since that time, reports have emerged of problems within the youth and domestic-violence systems.
The idea of converting unused hotels into housing for the homeless now seems a distant dream, with every last spare inch of New York hotel space being used to shelter migrants.
Able-bodied homeless adults are a chronically overlooked population. Many New Yorkers don’t even know they exist because they are not involved in subway chaos but rather working or pursuing work.
City progressives have been making strenuous appeals to recruit the migrants to address the local labor shortage. They’ve been completely silent as to how the labor shortage could be used to lower the unemployment rate among adult shelter clients.
The migrant crisis has taught New York two key lessons about homelessness policy.
The first is that if you build it, they will come.
It can’t be coincidence that New York has attracted far more migrants from the border than any other American city and is the only city in America with such a uniquely expansive right to shelter.
The second is that there’s a tension between quantity and quality when it comes to running shelters.
It’s hard to both guarantee everyone shelter on demand, on the one hand, and, on the other, provide everyone with the best shelter-based programs and services possible.
That dual strategy is great if good intentions are the only standard of success in homelessness policy. But increasingly, it looks a recipe for failure if we think that good intentions aren’t enough.
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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