Data Drop: Which NYC Neighborhoods Host the Most Homeless-Shelter Beds?

Mayor de Blasio’s plan to build 90 new homeless shelters around the city has encountered fierce opposition in several neighborhoods. As City Limits reported Monday, opponents in different communities cite various reasons for resisting new shelters. Some cite public safety fears, concerns about strain on local services, worries about the safety or suitability of the proposed site for shelter residents, or fears about the impact a shelter might have on other plans for the neighborhood.

A constant theme in the conversation is “fair share” — i.e., whether neighborhoods are being asked to shoulder more of the burden than is fair. Fair share is a formal part of the city charter, but it’s also an idea. And it’s a more complex idea that it sounds. Does “fair share” refer only to a particular type of infrastructure, or to all types: If one community has three jails and another has one jail and four waste transfer stations, who is bearing the heavier share? Is it fair to communities to insist that they absorb more of the shelter system simply because their residents face harsher economic realities and are more likely to be homeless? And who deserves fairness more: shelter neighbors worried about quality of life or homeless people facing a housing crisis?

And of course, however one defines it, the question of fairness has to be dealt with amid the practicalities of finding space for new shelter beds and doing so with some urgency.

The questions are complex but some of the numbers below, courtesy of the Department of Homeless Services as of July 31, are not: There are nine districts in the city that do not host a single shelter bed.

It’s worth noting that not every homeless person can be traced to a home community board. Prior addresses for 9,600 shelter residents can be linked to a borough but not a community district, so those people are not accounted for in the first column. Neither are 3,600 people who did not have a previous New York City address and 443 for whom no previous address information exists.

Looking at borough totals, the Bronx and Staten Island host less than their share of the homeless population, Queens and Manhattan host slightly more and Brooklyn is roughly proportionate.