The three Democratic candidates in the 34th Senate District find common ground in opposing a proposed supportive housing site for critically ill former Rikers detainees on the campus of Jacobi Hospital, and a 314-unit apartment complex planned for vacant lots along the Bruckner Expressway.
“As of 2016, the city had over 1,131 (more or less) parcels of property at its disposal. Instead of using executive orders on projects that benefit a small group of people, the mayor has the power to relinquish parcels of land and abandoned property to address homelessness.”
“Shelters are not a stand-alone solution and just because we remove homeless people from our subways and streets doesn’t mean they have found a home.”
“We need a continuum of care that meets the individual needs of homeless New Yorkers where they are, whether it’s a single mother, an out-of-work man, someone exiting incarceration with nowhere to go, a person living with schizophrenia or battling addiction, and everyone in between.”
Postgraduate Center for Mental Health has $130 million in two cash reserves and steady funding from the state, but conditions inside the apartments it rents for low-income tenants continue to deteriorate. The organization says it is forced to rent substandard units because state contracts are too low to cover better housing.
If the ultimate goal is housing, might there be a way to save lives and money by giving some people a key to their own apartment without the wait, bypassing the shelter system entirely?
While the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is notifying city-contracted supportive housing providers of their requirements under the new law, the same isn’t happening for those contracted primarily through the state, despite the fact that the bill specified it would apply to “every provider” in the city.
“Deeply affordable housing with supportive services for this population has a proven track record of success and hits all the Adams administration’s goals of efficiency, smart government, addressing problems at their root, and getting things done.”
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 But outdated contracts that trail actual market rents mean the organizations—and the state and city agencies that fund them—are propping up some of the city’s worst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.
Service providers have urged the city to hire more workers to help move people more quickly out of shelter or public spaces and into permanent housing.
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