According to the latest Department of Homeless Services (DHS) figures, more than 23,000 of the 57,448 people sleeping in New York City shelters are children. There are nearly 12,000 families in the shelter system. Organizations that help aid homeless people are getting worried that as the cold weather sets in, the numbers will return to the record high of seen in December 2014, when the homeless population numbered 59,068.
Another point of concern is that homeless people are staying in shelters longer and returning to them within a given year. The DHS said adults are staying an average of 11 months, up 24 days on last years’ data. Families with children are staying 14 months (up three days) and couples are staying an average of nearly 18 months (up 19 days).
Compounding the problem is that city rents have continued to escalate. Between 2002 and 2011, 39 percent (385,300) affordable apartments were lost. A number of myths persist about homelessness – that people are substance abusers or suffer from mental illness – but the major reason is more fundamental.
“More than two-thirds of the people in our shelters are families with vulnerable children, and the most common cause of their homelessness isn’t drug dependency or mental illness. It’s eviction,” wrote Mary Brosnahan, president and chief executive of the Coalition for the Homeless, in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“If we can slow the pace of evictions, we will make a major dent in the homelessness crisis.”
In cases where a tenant does have an attorney, they are less likely to get evicted, and landlords simply drop their cases when a tenant is represented.
There is also a bill pending in the City Council that would create the right to counsel for all low-income tenants in housing court. If passed, it would make New York City the first in the nation to guarantee representation for tenants. Sponsors feel this would lead to decrease in the number of families forced into homelessness.
« We live in a city with 1.5m people living below the poverty line – that means we have 1.5m people at risk of being homeless, »said Jeff Foreman, policy director of Care for the Homeless, an advocacy group in the city.