Treading Water in a Tide of Homelessness

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/opinion/treading-water-in-a-tide-of-homelessness.html

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Mayor Bill de Blasio gave a major speech on homelessness on Tuesday, promoting a plan he calls “Turning the Tide.” This was interesting because, as we know, not even kings can turn tides. If he had called it “Lowering Expectations” or “Treading Water,” he might have more accurately conveyed reality, though the speech would have lost some of its aspirational quality.

Mr. de Blasio deserves credit for candor, anyway. He acknowledged that homelessness has reached historic highs on his watch, with more than 60,000 people in shelters and many thousands living visibly and distressingly on the streets and in the subways. And he said he saw no quick end to the problem, which has worsened, on and off, for 35 years. But he promised that with diligent effort, the city could slowly gain control over the crisis and, over time, subdue it.

The core of the effort involves opening 90 new shelters across the city, and enlarging 30 existing ones, over five years. Meanwhile, the city would end the stopgap use of hotel rooms and the private apartments known as “cluster sites,” which are notoriously shoddy and unsafe. The new shelters would be run by the city or by reputable nonprofits, and would be placed in neighborhoods in proportion to how many of a given community board’s residents use the shelter system.

The mayor said it was only fair that neighborhoods would welcome their own, and noted that shelter residents would benefit from staying closer to home, jobs, relatives and school. That is sound logic, though communities that reflexively oppose social-service sites, or feel burdened by too many of them, may not see it that way.

Mr. de Blasio promises to give neighborhoods at least 30 days’ notice before opening a shelter, and be open to their suggestions about alternative sites. That is the least he should do, given the expected ferocity of local resistance.

The mayor will need to summon all of his salesmanship skills to sell what looks like a sensible plan. He will need help from neighbors persuading other neighbors to say yes-in-my-backyard, and also from the City Council, whose “fair share” law on distributing city facilities may complicate his shelter-siting priorities. He could use Albany’s help as well. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has thrown numbers at the housing problem — $20 billion, 100,000 affordable-housing units, five years — but his lavish promises are far from realized. A promising bill from Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi would create statewide rental supplements for needy families, saving money — and preventing a lot of homelessness.

Mr. de Blasio is committing $300 million in capital spending to expand the 30 shelters, with plans to reallocate the money now spent on hotels and cluster sites for the 90 new shelters. That, plus expanded legal aid to prevent evictions, more mental health services and his long-term affordable housing plan, could go a long way toward containing the problem. Even better would be for the city to devote a greater share of public housing to homeless families and to set aside a higher percentage of new affordable housing for very-low-income New Yorkers.

Some may see the mayor’s downbeat speech this week as a moment of surrender. They should remember the perils of overpromising: Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in 2003 that he was going to end homelessness outright in 10 years. Read the news accounts from back then, and today, and you will see how little the core problem has changed. Nor have the main answers: safe shelters, affordable housing and rental support — bricks and mortar and money.