April 19, 2005

KEEPING HASA HONEST

There could perhaps have been no greater bow to Keith Cylar, Housing Works cofounder and longtime advocate for sound shelter for people with HIVAIDS, to mark the first anniversary of his death: On Tuesday, April 12, the New York City Council unanimously passed an act in his name that holds the city's HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) accountable for the protection of tens of thousands of poor New Yorkers living with the disease. The Keith Cylar Act requires HASA to furnish the City Council with detailed quarterly reports on its success in providing case management, timely delivery of service and benefits, and medically appropriate housing to more than 41,000 HASA clients and their families. Mayor Bloomberg is expected to sign the bill into law shortly.

"I can think of no more fitting tribute to the legacy of Keith Cylar on the first anniversary of his death—and during the week in which we celebrate the first annual Keith Cylar Activist Awards—than this law making sure HASA protects our most vulnerable citizens living with AIDS," said Housing Works senior staff attorney Armen H. Merjian, among those who advocated robustly for the act's passing. "We commend the City Council for defending a population that's all too often underserved. And we're hopeful that the Council will likewise pass the AIDS housing referral and tracking bills," he said. He was referring to bills before the Council that, respectively, would require HASA to provide clients with a referral to medically proper housing—and an application for permanent housing—within 90 days of completing an application, and that would require a centralized housing referral and placement system, which would help HASA keep better track of its clients in emergency housing.

"If you left any wiggle room" for HASA, "the agency would find it," councilmember Quinn told the press. With the Cylar Act, "we will eliminate that."

The Cylar Act not only ensures that HASA deliver benefits and services more promptly. It will also provide the City Council with crucial data on the emergency housing in which homeless clients are placed—usually rooms in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels that have come under fire in recent years for lacking basic amenities like mattresses and toilet paper while still costing the city roughly $2,100 a month. And the act helps the Council to accurately determine if HASA is complying with the caseworker/client ratios the law demands. Best of all, the law imposes no weighty new requirements on HASA, which has been reporting much of what is asked for in the Cylar Act since the passing of Local Law 49 in 1997—and in the four years since the court case Henrietta D. v. Giuliani began requiring the city to provide such reports on a stringent monthly basis, a mandate that expired last December.

Yet the Cylar Act improves on Local Law 49 in at least one significant way: the original law demands that HASA report merely the average time of its provision of benefits. In other words, if the law requires that HASA get clients a subsistence check within 30 days, and the agency gets two clients their check in 10 days but another two in 40 days, the agency reports an average of 25 days. This suggests that HASA is doing a great job, but in fact, half its clients failed to get their subsistence benefits within the legal time frame—a lag that can be devastating for a homeless client who needs money to put down a deposit on an apartment. The new law amends this misleading shortcut in reporting.

The Cylar Act delighted housing advocates. "It honors a great AIDS warrior, and one of the fathers of AIDS housing, by making it possible for us to continue ensuring that low-income New Yorkers access their most basic, life-saving services," said Jennifer Flynn, executive director of the New York City AIDS Housing Network. The act also seemed to satisfy councilmembers like Eric Gioia, a prime sponsor of the bill, who has blasted the city for "warehousing people in rooms infested with rats and roaches, with holes in the wall, leaks in the ceilings, and doors with no locks," according to gothamgazette.com. On the same website, councilmember Christine Quinn was quoted as saying, "Over the years, one thing that became clear is that if you left any wiggle room" for HASA, "the agency would find it." With the Cylar Act, she said, "we will eliminate that."

For more information on this historic act, please contact Armen H. Merjian at 212.967.1500 x154.

The Housing Works AIDS Issues Update is reported, written and edited by Diana Scholl, David Thorpe, Christine Campbell, terri smith-caronia and Housing Works staff. Send your feedback, leads and story ideas to d.scholl@housingworks.org.

You can reach us by phone at 212-967-1500 x168, by fax at 212-868-4222, and by email at d.scholl@housingworks.org. Housing Works provides housing, advocacy and services to homeless people living with AIDS and HIV. Housing Works is the nation's largest community-based AIDS organization and the nation's largest minority-controlled AIDS organization.

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