Adi Talwar
City Limits’ series on family homelessness in New York City is supported by Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York and The Family Homelessness Coalition. City Limits is responsible for all editorial decisions.
The first four months of Fiscal Year 2024 saw timely processing of just 14.3 percent of cash assistance applications—a new low—and 41.6 percent of SNAP applications. Delays can have serious consequences for applicants, from hunger to missed rent payments that can put families at risk of eviction.
“Black New Yorkers are disproportionately affected by homelessness, making up 58 percent of shelter residents; 80 percent of the workers caring for these individuals are women of color, yet the top ranks of the organizations that employ them and set organizational policies are overwhelmingly white.”
In his annual address Wednesday, his third since taking office in 2022, Mayor Eric Adams touched on plans for a “Tenant Protection Cabinet,” developing affordable housing on two dozen city-owned sites, and issuing new NYCHA Section 8 vouchers. But several advocates said the speech fell short in addressing the city’s homelessness crisis.
While supporters say New York City’s right to counsel program needs additional funding to cover all the qualified tenants who need the legal help, they’ve also hailed it a success, and are now pushing to replicate it statewide.
“Instead of 100,000 migrants by mid-2024, we expect to care for 80,000 by June and 90,000 by the end of the year,” Mayor Eric Adams said while unveiling his budget Tuesday, saying a combination of strict limits on immigrant shelter stays and “reticketing” efforts to move immigrants to locations outside the city helped drive that estimate down.
While the Adams administration has been issuing shelter deadlines to adult immigrants for months, and to some families with kids in hotels as part of a separate initiative, Tuesday’s evictions were the first to apply to families with children under City Hall’s broader policy, which officials say is an effort to manage more than 168,500 new arrivals since 2022—69,000 of whom remain in the city’s care.
The governor’s State of the State address will include proposals to discourage landlords—and insurance companies—from business practices rooted in anti-voucher bias.
“We have already witnessed the harm that 30-day limits have inflicted on adult migrants without children, who have either had to sleep on the streets indefinitely while reapplying for housing or who have been abandoned by the system altogether,” reads a letter signed by nearly 50 city and state elected officials.
While New York City must propose a balanced budget in January for the coming fiscal year, some say Adams’ approach to closing the gap—multiple rounds of budget cuts across most agencies—is a blunt instrument, and not the only option.
City Limits recently spoke with several families about what it was like to live at the shelter, the first congregate facility in which the city has placed large numbers of immigrant families with children. All complained about the cold inside the tents, the remoteness, and inaccessibility.
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