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 But outdated contracts that trail actual market rents mean the organizations—and the state and city agencies that fund them—are propping up some of the city’s worst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.
‘Thousands of units of supportive housing—affordable housing with onsite support services for people experiencing homelessness who face additional barriers to stability—are standing vacant for months while more than 70,000 New Yorkers remain in shelter and on the streets. This is the ultimate inefficiency.’
During the first 10 months of 2020, nonprofit providers scheduled nearly 3,000 interviews with supportive housing applicants, 560 of whom were outright rejected. The housing shortage allows providers to “cherry-pick” applicants who require the fewest services, a process known as creaming or screening, tenants and advocates say.
The city’s sprawling, patchwork supportive housing network is designed to provide homes and services for people who have experienced homelessness. But too often the model leads to unnecessary restrictions, inconsistencies and even glaring housing violations against vulnerable residents, according to the people who live there.
‘For every supportive housing slot there are six applications. Nearly 45,000 New Yorkers, including 14,000 children, fill the shelter system. What we need now is the political will to invest in this long-term goal while offering shorter-term pathways to housing.’
The city’s previous policy, which City Limits reported on last month, blocked adults approved for supportive housing—permanent apartments with on-site staff, typically reserved for people with mental illness—from even applying for the roughly 8,000 new rental subsidies.
Adults approved for supportive housing will be precluded from applying for the federal rent vouchers—which attorneys and advocates say cuts off a path to housing for thousands of shelter residents and functions as a proxy for mental health disability discrimination.
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