Schools are uniquely positioned to identify and support grieving children, but families and school staff say the system isn’t equipped to serve them.
A bill introduced in the City Council this week would create a 15-member commission that includes people who have experienced homelessness to study current shelter locations, identify new sites and figure out how to pay for them. “Homeless New Yorkers come from every neighborhood in New York City and accordingly we need to equitably site shelters,” the bill’s sponsor said.
The new, formalized procedure essentially codifies what has become a de facto sweeps policy under Mayor Eric Adams, and replaces a 2020 directive that removed the NYPD from most street homeless outreach and clean-ups in the wake of an uprising for police accountability and reform spurred by the murder of George Floyd.
“If everything…is just a question of ‘Does the local community support or not support it,’ the answer will almost, inevitably, always be ‘no,’ so it can’t just be that, it has to be a broader consideration,” the former councilmember said during an interview on the WBAI radio program City Watch.
The land use plan, part of a broader initiative known as Resilient Edgemere, encompasses the area bound by Beach 35th Street and Beach 50th Street and will change zoning rules to increase density in some areas, limit development in others and raise the shoreline along Jamaica Bay.
Eric Adams’ “Housing Our Neighbors” blueprint is missing key details about how to track and accomplish its broad goals, according to critics. City officials pledged to include the updated benchmarks in a revised Mayor’s Management Report (MMR), an annual assessment of municipal agency performance over the previous fiscal year.
De Blasio told City Limits that he wants to see New York City-style right-to-shelter laws for people experiencing homelessness in all cities, rent regulation across the country and a path to citizenship for 12 million immigrants living in the United States without authorization.
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.
The 17th council district in The Bronx saw 8,550 new affordable units built since 2014, while district 23 in Queens saw just 17. Those dramatic production disparities are fueling New York City’s affordable housing crunch, experts say.
How many people spend each night in a New York City homeless shelter? It seems like a simple question, but getting the answer is pretty complicated. So this year, City Limits will provide a daily total using the most complete information available.
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