A bill introduced in the City Council would establish “minimum standards” for HERRCs and respite centers that the city would have to meet, including that beds be at least three feet apart and that facilities have a certain number of bathrooms and showers per person.
Of the 2,308 homeless New Yorkers present during the city’s encampment sweeps over more than eight months in 2022, only three people—about 0.1 percent—had landed in permanent housing placements as of January, according to an audit from Comptroller Brad Lander.
That funding will go towards the New York City Continuum of Care (CoC) to address street homelessness, including the creation of a centralized “unit” to connect people with outreach teams and resources for finding shelter, healthcare and stable housing.
La Liga de Ciudadanos Latinoamericanos Unidos o LULAC (por sus siglas en inglés) propuso a la administración Biden que se aplique una moratoria de tres a seis meses en la aceptación de nuevas solicitudes de asilo y que se lleve a cabo una cumbre en la frontera.
Durante semanas, City Limits ha hablado con personas en dos de los centros humanitarios de emergencias humanitarias y socorro (HERRC por sus siglas en inglés) de la ciudad: uno en el Hotel ROW y otro en el Hotel Watson de Manhattan, donde recientemente se trasladó a hombres adultos a un centro de acogida en la Terminal de Cruceros de Brooklyn, en Red Hook.
For weeks, City Limits has been speaking to people sheltered at two of the city’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, or HERRCs: one at The ROW Hotel and another at The Watson Hotel in Manhattan, where adult men were recently transferred out and relocated to a congregate facility at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook.
“The city’s annual census–known as the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE)–has served as a tool for measuring our progress toward ending street homelessness. However, HOPE misses a critical component of NYC’s ecosystem: hospitals. By ignoring this population segment, the city underestimates the true number of unhoused individuals.”
Thursday night, the same day Mayor Eric Adams unveiled a preliminary budget focused on “fiscal discipline” and two days after Gov. Kathy Hochul laid out her priorities for the year ahead in her State of the State speech, 70,525 people slept in a New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter.
Adams’ early commitments to open new “low-barrier” shelters comes into sharper focus as he closes out his first year in office, with yet another plan to remove homeless New Yorkers from trains and public spaces. New York City has about 600 new specialized shelters for street homeless New Yorkers, but data shows relatively few people are moving from the subways to the largely congregate sites.
“Study after study has shown that stable housing is the linchpin for successful reentry and for creating strong social bonds. These outcomes, in turn, lead to a substantially reduced likelihood of facing a new criminal charge, which—contrary to the scare tactics of this bill’s opponents—will make our city at large safer, too. “
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