February 9, 2007
HOPE 2007, HOPELESSLY FLAWED
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Hello? Any homeless people here? |
On January 29, the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) sent thousands of volunteers out onto the streets in freezing temperatures to count NYC's street homeless population. They were participating in this year's Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE). The DHS, under the leadership of Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs (formerly DHS Commissioner), began the HOPE project in February 2002 in an effort to extrapolate from one night of homeless "counting" an estimate of the number of homeless New Yorkers living on our streets, in parks and in other "public spaces."
Since 2002, Housing Works and others who work closely with our homeless have objected to the city's use of the count as a primary tool for making its homeless estimate and have refused to participate. But this year, a score of folks from Housing Works renewed their acquaintance with the process. We bundled up and hit the streets in several boroughs with other volunteers, wondering if the count were still as flawed an idea as we thought.
About a dozen of Housing Works' people chose Brooklyn as their borough and all were sent to PS 100 in Brighton Beach. At 10:30 PM, counters began to sign in and were assigned to teams, a mixture of newbies and old-timers, people with cars and people without. We then went into the school cafeteria for coffee and snacks, reviewed the area maps given and got canvassing 101 instructions from a DHS staff person. Councilmember Domenic Recchia (D-47) was there to greet the troops as he had for the previous four counts.
What came next? Chaos—and a chorus of criticism. One counter grumbled about the winter chill saying, "Who the hell do they expect to find out there in this weather?!" Others noted that just one day before the city had issued a cold weather emergency allowing the NYC Police Department's Homeless Outreach Unit to forcibly remove homeless people from the streets and bring them to a hospital or shelter. In fact, one might hazard a guess that DHS will open a Farmer's Almanac to pick the coldest day in 2008 for their HOPE 2008 survey.
Many of us knew that most of the homeless would come in from the cold to hang out in warmer spots like McDonald's or on the subway. But what do you know? The canvassing 101 instructions disallowed any counting of homeless folks that would be inside an establishment or riding a subway car. So, after canvassing from midnight to 2:30 AM, checking the parks near Coney Island Creek, under the Belt Parkway and the areas around Keyspan Park and the Aquarium, our team found...no one. Other teams sent to gated communities found no one on their high-security streets either.
DHS Press Secretary Tanya Valle-Batista later defended the cold-night count to the Update with some tortured logic. The count is done specifically in winter "because the assumption is, if you're living on the streets during extreme, unaccommodating weather, you are part of the population we most need to reach," she told us. DHS wouldn't comment on the police sweep because it involved another city agency!
DHS also told us that to ensure that the final estimate is as accurate as possible, they employ 200 "decoys" to pose as homeless, and the number of decoys that go undetected in the count will be used to estimate the percentage of homeless people not accounted for. We sure hope we missed some of those decoys....
At the end of the night, folks came back to PS 100 to turn in their surveys and sign out. Volunteers were given a T-shirt for their efforts and a photocopied letter from Mayor Bloomberg thanking them for their participation. It read, "Last year's count estimated 3,843 unsheltered individuals living in streets, parks, subways, and other public spaces—a 13 percent year-to-year decrease from HOPE 2005. This count is critical to helping us evaluate the effectiveness of our current strategies to overcome street homelessness as well as developing appropriate housing resources for the most vulnerable New Yorkers." (The final estimate will be available in April; it takes 60 to 90 days to tally the numbers).
Thanks for the T-shirt, but the bottom line is that HOPE is not designed to find the folks living on our streets desperately in need of the permanent and affordable housing that this city has yet to build—the folks that roam stores and eateries all day, the throngs we see living on the streets in shantytowns from early spring through late fall. Mr. Mayor, your reported numbers will appear to have gone down, not only because of this city's beefed up outreach efforts but because you are gathering data from a flawed process. A businessman should know better.
ON A BRIGHTER NOTE... AFTER 12 LONG YEARS, THE FLOOD GATES OF SECTION 8 HAVE BEEN REOPENED
On the morning of the homeless street count, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Housing Authority Chairman Tito Hernandez announced that after a 12-year drought, the city will be reopening the Section 8 voucher list for very low-income families in need of affordable housing.
During a press conference in Queens, the Administration told the public that 22,000 new Section 8 applications will be available at all New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) Borough Application Offices and Management Offices. These locations can be found by calling 311. All completed applications can be sent in immediately but NYCHA will not begin to process them until February 12, 2007. They will not accept any application postmarked after May 14 so the time to act is now!
For more information about how and where to apply for these new Section 8 vouchers, call 311 or go online to www.nyc.gov/nycha.