Thursday night, the same day Mayor Eric Adams unveiled a preliminary budget focused on “fiscal discipline” and two days after Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her priorities for the year ahead in her State of the State speech, 70,525 people slept in a New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter.
For the past few months, City Limits has sought out New Yorkers in unique living arrangements to find out why they live where they live. We homed in on three people, all Bronx residents, with three very different accommodations: an old RV, a two-story houseboat and a room in a spartan warehouse.
The city’s trailblazing program guaranteeing legal representation to the city’s poorest tenants facing eviction has been falling short since the state eviction moratorium was lifted last year; many still face housing court alone. State officials told City Limits the program has declined more than 10,000 cases since March 2022.
Adams’ early commitments to open new “low-barrier” shelters comes into sharper focus as he closes out his first year in office, with yet another plan to remove homeless New Yorkers from trains and public spaces. New York City has about 600 new specialized shelters for street homeless New Yorkers, but data shows relatively few people are moving from the subways to the largely congregate sites.
In 2019, when the police were the sole enforcer, the NYPD issued 1,812 tickets versus 2,499 in the first nine months of this year, with almost half (48.6 percent) doled out in the last quarter. In just nine months, the NYPD and the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) have issued 3,884 tickets to vendors, more than double the number of tickets made in 2019.
“Just Home”—a NYC Health + Hospitals (HHC) plan to convert an empty staff residence on the Jacobi Hospital campus into supportive housing for a few dozen people with serious medical problems discharged from Rikers Island—is a pressure cooker for many of the most fraught issues in the city: homelessness, mental health, development, and the risk of crime, whether real or perceived.
The latest vacancy data now mirrors pre-COVID figures following a “pandemic-height outlier,” according to New York State’s affordable housing agency. The number of empty apartments also matches the vacancy rate prior to landmark 2019 tenant protections that landlords blamed for the spike in empty units last year.
Gov. Kathy Hochul and Congressman Lee Zeldin have starkly different stances when it comes to energy policy and other environmental issues, at a time when New York is at a critical juncture in planning and implementing its ambitious plan to lower its carbon emissions.
The candidates in the race for New York governor have vastly different platforms on housing. To start, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, has a housing plan. Republican challenger and U.S. Congressman Lee Zeldin does not.
Superstorm Sandy spared the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center, New York City’s most important food source. But a decade later, little has changed when it comes to storm resiliency at the low-lying markets, and a disaster could have a major impact for the city’s restaurants, shops and food pantries.
City Limits uses investigative journalism through the prism of New York City to identify urban problems, examine their causes, explore solutions, and equip communities to take action.
Founded in 1976 in the midst of New York’s fiscal crisis, City Limits exists to inform democracy and equip citizens to create a more just city. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by foundation support, ad sponsorship and donations from readers.
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