“Too many nonprofits are waiting on money owed by the same city that tells nonprofits to prepare to do more with less, again and again.”
Recent clarifications and updates to city funding terms have alleviated some fears among legal service nonprofits while sparking others, as the organizations demand Mayor Eric Adams’ administration stop the contracting process and start over.
Amid a record-breaking homelessness crisis, there are some bright spots. Mayor Adams has dedicated roughly $4 billion in capital funding to construct affordable housing—a campaign promise that he fell short on last year. Yet staffing cuts and shortages still plague the city agencies tasked with assisting homeless New Yorkers.
The city’s landmark Right to Counsel law was the country’s first to guarantee legal representation in housing court to low-income tenants most at risk for eviction. But advocates and providers say it’s been undermined in recent months as the courts schedule eviction cases faster than there are available housing attorneys to take them. “When the law was first passed, it worked,” Ruth Riddick, a Flatbush tenant, testified Friday at a city hearing on the initiative.
According to the latest Comptroller’s report, Black and Latino‐owned businesses each received under 2 percent of city contract dollars in fiscal year 2022, and only 5 percent of all new city contracts and purchase orders registered during that same period went to city‐certified minority or women‐owned business enterprises.
Citywide, workers at nonprofits under contract to provide support and essential services to New Yorkers at a time of unprecedented crisis say they feel overworked, overwhelmed and burnt out. As costs continue to increase around them, many have said their low wages make it difficult to justify staying in the sector, even with a recent pay bump from the city and state.
There are some 16,000 scattered-site supportive housing units across the city, rented and overseen by nonprofits contracted to provide services to tenants. But outdated contracts that trail actual market rents mean the organizations—and the state and city agencies that fund them—are propping up some of the city’s worst housing.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) said it will stop contracting with Aguila to run the men’s shelter inside the Park View Hotel on West 110th St., across the street from Central Park, by the end of the year as it seeks to weed out inadequate providers.
The city will start the process of terminating the company’s contracts to operate the Central Park Carousel, Wollman and Lasker ice skating rinks and the Ferry Point Golf Course in the Bronx.
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