City Limits’ coverage of homelessness in New York City is supported by Trinity Church Wall Street.
More housing-related series:
The nine-member Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) voted Tuesday to raise rents by 3.25 percent on one-year leases and by 5 percent on two-year leases, the highest increase for rent-stabilized apartments since 2013.
Since Jan. 1, City Limits has been publishing more accurate homeless shelter census figures after a Council bill to force the city to publish a true number failed last year. The total commonly cited by city officials excludes thousands of people staying in shelters run by agencies other than the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), failing to count more than 15 percent of the actual population.
The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is re-evaluating its guidelines for sheltering older homeless adults and people with significant health problems that make them especially vulnerable to COVID-19, who can under the current rules access private or semi-private rooms. More than 170 such residents being housed at a Radisson Hotel in lower Manhattan will need to move out by early next month.
One big problem with Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), experts say, is that they’re not laws, but rather private contracts between a developer and community groups. And if those groups aren’t around to hold a developer accountable—or the developer isn’t around and there’s no successor clause—there’s little anyone else can do to enforce an agreement.
Some 1,121 babies were born into the Department of Homeless Services’ (DHS) shelter system last fiscal year, and a disproportionate number of low-income New Yorkers depend at least in part on formula to feed their infants.
“Having housing and a place to call home gives one hope and stability, which is essential, especially when you grew up in a system that gave you neither.”
The new budget directs $2.4 billion to homeless services in the coming fiscal year, invests billions more in housing over the next decade and funds an increase to rental assistance programs, but is nevertheless facing criticism from advocates who say the spending plan fails to adequately address New York City’s affordability and homelessness crises.
When COVID-19 hit, policymakers saw an opportunity: The city had interconnected affordable housing and homelessness crises; the city also had hundreds of empty hotels hemorrhaging cash. But a year after the state passed a law funding the conversion of hotels to affordable housing, not a single one has happened. The experience of the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street illustrates why.
“The very forces contributing to a worsening housing emergency are also impacting the workers tasked with solving that crisis. Those who work to find permanent and safe apartments for the housing-insecure and homeless should not find themselves at risk of eviction and displacement.”
The City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection met Tuesday to discuss a newly introduced bill banning heating oil No. 4 by 2025, five years earlier than was agreed upon when Local Law 43 passed in 2010.
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