In October 2023, an average of 90,578 people slept in New York City's homeless shelters each night.[1] This included 23,103 single adults, 32,689 children, and 34,786 adults in families.[2] The total number is at its highest ever, with 63,636 people sleeping in homeless shelters. The city reported that in 2019, 3,600 individuals experienced unsheltered homelessness, sleeping in public spaces such as streets and public transit rather than shelters.[3] The homeless population has surged in New York City 18% in 2023 from 2022, despite efforts from Mayor Adams.
The Coalition for the Homeless, a New York-based non-profit organization, reports that 30% of single adults entering the shelter system each year enter directly from institutional settings.[4] In 2018 6,100 adults entered from institutional settings, including: 3,466 from prison, 1,294 from non-hospital facilities (i.e. nursing homes), 760 from psychiatric hospitals, and 580 discharged from Rikers Island.[4]
In 2019, 59% of Single Adults in shelters were Black, 27% were Hispanic, 10% were White (non-Hispanic), 4% Unknown/other, and 0.4% Asian/Pacific Islander.[5] Black people are disproportionately homeless, making up 29% of NYC residents (35% difference). Whites are underrepresented, making up 32% of NYC residents (22% difference).[5] The NYC Asian homeless population is marginally higher than the statistic shown above, and found in Chinatown based shelters or are on the streets.
History
In 1979, a New York City lawyer, Robert Hayes, brought a class action suit before the courts, Callahan v. Carey, against the City and State, arguing for a person's state constitutional "right to shelter". It was settled as a consent decree in August 1981. The City and State agreed to provide board and shelter to all homeless men who met the need standard for welfare or who were homeless by certain other standards. By 1983 this right was extended to homeless women. Despite this, 70% of homeless refuse shelter and help when assist programs approach them. [citation needed]
In March 2013, the New York City Department of Homeless Services reported that the sheltered homeless population consisted of:[6]
27,844 adults
20,627 children
48,471 total individuals
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, the homeless population of New York rose to an all-time high in 2011. A reported 113,552 people slept in the city's emergency shelters in 2010, including over 40,000 children; marking an 8 percent increase from the previous year, and a 37 percent increase from 2002. There was also a rise in the number of families relying on shelters, approximately 29,000.[when?] That is an increase of 80% from 2002. About half of the people who slept in shelter in 2010 returned for housing in 2011.[7][8]
In 2004, New York's Department of Homeless Services (DHS) created HomeBase,[9] a network of neighborhood-based services, to help tenants in housing crisis to remain in their communities and avoid entering shelter. Tenants can visit HomeBase locations[10] within their neighborhoods to receive services to prevent eviction, assistance obtaining public benefits, emergency rental assistance and more. Brooklyn nonprofit CAMBA, Inc operates several HomeBase locations as well as an outfitted "You Can Van," which uses data on pending evictions to travel throughout the borough and offer help.[citation needed]
According to DHS, 64 percent of those applying for emergency shelter in 2010 were denied. Several were denied because they were said to have family who could house them when in actuality this might not have been the case. Applicants may have faced overcrowding, unsafe conditions, or may have had relatives unwilling to house them. According to Mary Brosnaham, spokeswoman for Coalition for the Homeless, the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg employs a deliberate policy of "active deterrence".[citation needed]
According to the Bowery Mission, "In most cases, multiple factors are involved [in homelessness]. Common ones include: mental illness, substance abuse, untreated medical issues, traumatic events, violence and abuse, lack of affordable housing and difficulty sustaining employment."[11]
The New York City Housing Authority is experiencing record demand for subsidized housing assistance. However, just 13,000 of the 29,000 families who applied were admitted into the public housing system or received federal housing vouchers known as Section 8 in 2010. Due to budget cuts there have been no new applicants accepted to receive Section 8.[12]
In March 2010, there were protests about the Governor's proposed cut of $65 million in annual funding to the homeless adult services system.[13] The Bloomberg administration announced an immediate halt to the Advantage program, threatening to cast 15,000 families back into the shelters or onto the streets. A court has delayed the cut until May 2011 because there was doubt over the legality of cancelling the city's commitment. However, the Advantage program[14] itself was consciously advanced by the Bloomberg administration as an alternative to providing long-term affordable housing opportunities for the poor and working class.
The result, as the Coalition for the Homeless report points out, is that "Thousands of formerly-homeless children and families have been forced back into homelessness. In addition, Mayor Bloomberg proposed $37 million in cuts to the city's budget for homeless services this year."[8]
In 2018, DHS's budget was $2.15 billion. It fluctuated over the next few years, with 2021's proposed budget being slightly lower at $2.13 billion.[15]
Homeless encampments have long featured prominently in the landscape of American cities. A vicious anti-homeless campaign called 'Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too' led by a union of NYPD officers sparked an uproar about the presence of homeless people more generally. Urban financialization in particular has focused on the city's stock of low-income rent stabilized housing. The warehousing of vacant buildings by speculators led to an increase in homeless encampments.[16]
In 2022 the population of New York's homeless shelters increased as more asylum seekers arrived.[17]
HOME-STAT
In 2015, Bill de Blasio introduced HOME-STAT (Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement Street Action Teams). HOME-STAT is a city-wide case management system which compiles information on unsheltered homelessness from 311 calls and street canvassing teams.[18] Outreach teams include staff from different agencies including the Department of Homeless Services, the NYPD, and other social service agencies.[18]
The core tenets of HOME-STAT are: proactive canvassing from Canal Street to 145th Street to identify "hotspots of persistent homelessness presence," immediate response to 311 calls by expanding the number of city street outreach staff and NYPD officers assigned to the Homeless Outreach Unit, and the creation of a city-wide case management system that facilitates "continuous monitoring and outreach" and "rapid response to individual problems."[18] Under HOME-STAT, the city has created a by-name list of individuals known to outreach teams, confirmed to be experiencing homelessness, and currently engaged by outreach teams.[19]
The city encourages New Yorkers to call 311 when they see individuals, they believe to be homeless, and call 911 if the individual seems to be a risk to themselves or others.[19] This relies on individual New Yorkers to assume someone to be homeless and creates a division between New Yorkers with reliable shelter and without, encouraging people to use the city as an intermediary. The city labels homeless individuals who avoid the city's shelters as "service resistant".[20]
In 2019, Coalition for the Homeless reported that the city's shelters struggle with 3 main issues including: "large-scale capital needs, routine cleaning and maintenance, and dehumanizing treatment by shelter staff."[20] Coalition for the Homeless explains that these conditions create an unsafe, degrading and dehumanizing environment for those who stay in shelters.[20]
The administration of laws and regulations relating to begging in the state of New York is largely performed by each of the 62 cities of the state. Many of the state of New York's largest cities have introduced laws in the last decade prohibiting 'aggressive begging' in some form. The 1993 Loper case was a challenge to the state-wide law in the New York Penal Code §240.35(1) which made it an offence to loiter in a public place for the purpose of begging. New York City Police Department rarely issued fines under this law, but used it to 'move on' beggars.[21]
In Loper, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals found begging in this case to be a First Amendment right, but still legal to ban in subways. A similar judgement was made in International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Inc. v. Lee in regard to New York City's airports, which found it reasonable to ban such activities in airports.[22] However, the law still technically remained in force in the rest of New York state until it was repealed in 2010.[23]
Some people in New York state were charged under that section of the law after Loper, but before it was repealed.[24] Civil liberties groups have campaigned against the more targeted aggressive begging laws,[25] however, they have been found to comply with the First Amendment. In 2010, New York City's current aggressive begging laws also withstood challenge in People v. Stroman.[26]
In the United States, the number of homeless people on a given night in January 2022 was 582,462 according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Annual federal HUD reports contradict private state and local reports where homelessness is shown to have increased each year since 2014 across several major American cities, with 40 percent increases noted in 2017 and in 2019.
Homeless shelters are a type of homeless service agency which provide temporary residence for homeless individuals and families. Shelters exist to provide residents with safety and protection from exposure to the weather while simultaneously reducing the environmental impact on the community. They are similar to, but distinguishable from, various types of emergency shelters, which are typically operated for specific circumstances and populations—fleeing natural disasters or abusive social circumstances. Extreme weather conditions create problems similar to disaster management scenarios, and are handled with warming centers, which typically operate for short durations during adverse weather.
Housing First is a policy that offers unconditional, permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. It was first discussed in the 1990s, and in the following decades became government policy in certain locations within the Western world. There is a substantial base of evidence showing that Housing First is both an effective solution to homelessness and a form of cost savings, as it also reduces the use of public services like hospitals, jails, and emergency shelters. Cities like Helsinki and Vienna in Europe have seen dramatic reductions in homelessness due to the adaptation of Housing First policies, as have the North American cities Columbus, Ohio, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Medicine Hat, Alberta.
Coalition for the Homeless is a not-for-profit advocacy group focused on homelessness in New York. The coalition has engaged in landmark litigation to protect the rights of homeless people, including the right to shelter and the right to vote, and also advocates for long-term solutions to the problem of homelessness. Formed in 1981, the Coalition has offices in New York City and Albany, New York.
Breaking Ground, formerly Common Ground, is a nonprofit social services organization in New York City whose goal is to create high-quality permanent and transitional housing for the homeless. Its philosophy holds that supportive housing costs substantially less than homeless shelters — and many times less than jail cells or hospital rooms, and that people with psychiatric and other problems can better manage them once they are permanently housed and provided with services. Since its founding in 1990 by Rosanne Haggerty, the organization has created more than 5,000 units of housing for the homeless. "This is about creating a small town, rather than just a building," according to Haggerty. "It's about a real mixed society, working with many different people." Haggerty left the organization in 2011 to found Community Solutions, Inc. Brenda Rosen was promoted from Director, Housing Operations and Programs to Executive Director, and has led the organization since.
Homelessness or houselessness – also known as a state of being unhoused or unsheltered – is the condition of lacking stable, safe, and functional housing. The general category includes disparate situations, including:
Bradford S. Lander is an American politician, urban planner, and community organizer who currently serves as the New York City Comptroller. A member of the Democratic Party, Lander is a progressive politician, and has been described as "one of the most left-leaning politicians in the city."
In the Seattle King County area, there were estimated to be 11,751 homeless people living on the streets or in shelters. On January 24, 2020, the count of unsheltered homeless individuals was 5,578. The number of individuals without homes in emergency shelters was 4,085 and the number of homeless individuals in transitional housing was 2,088, for a total count of 11,751 unsheltered people.
The New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is an agency within the government of New York City that provides services to the homeless, though its ultimate aim is to overcome homelessness. The guiding principles of the department were outlined at a 1992 New York City Commission on the Homeless: to operate an emergency shelter system for people without housing alternatives, provide services and resources to assist shelter residents in gaining independent housing, and partner with local agencies and non-profits to provide these services. Its two rules are compiled in title 31 of the New York City Rules; state regulations are primarily compiled in title 18 of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations.
Project HOME is a nationally recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides housing, opportunities for employment, medical care and education to homeless and low-income persons in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Launch Housing is a secular Melbourne-based community organisation that delivers homelessness services and housing supports to disadvantaged Victorians.
The Homeless Bill of Rights refers to legislation protecting the civil and human rights of homeless people. These laws affirm that homeless people have equal rights to medical care, free speech, free movement, voting, opportunities for employment, and privacy. Legislation of this type is currently being debated at the state level in the United States. Over 120 organizations in five different states have shown public support for a Homeless Bill of Rights and are working towards its implementation. A Homeless Bill of Rights has become law in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Illinois and is under consideration by several other U.S. states, including California, Delaware, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont.
The San Francisco Bay Area comprises nine northern California counties and contains four of the ten most expensive counties in the United States. Strong economic growth has created hundreds of thousands of new jobs, but coupled with severe restrictions on building new housing units, it has resulted in an extreme housing shortage which has driven rents to extremely high levels. The Sacramento Bee notes that large cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles both attribute their recent increases in homeless people to the housing shortage, with the result that homelessness in California overall has increased by 15% from 2015 to 2017. In September 2019, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in which they stated that deregulation of the housing markets would reduce homelessness in some of the most constrained markets by estimates of 54% in San Francisco, 40 percent in Los Angeles, and 38 percent in San Diego, because rents would fall by 55 percent, 41 percent, and 39 percent respectively. In San Francisco, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to spend less than 30% of their income on renting a two-bedroom apartment.
According to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, as of January 2017, there are an estimated 32,190 homeless individuals in Florida. Of this high number, 2,846 are family households, 2,019 are unaccompanied young adults, 2,817 are veterans, and an estimated 5,615 are individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. According to a January 2020 count, this figure was 27,487 on any given day, a decrease from previous years. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as of December 2022, the estimate for homeless individuals has dropped to 25,959, about 5% of the total U.S. population. This is in spite of fears that moratorium's on evictions ending could lead to an increase in the homeless population.
Women Creating Change is a nonprofit organization founded in 1915 by suffragettes in New York City. WCC is still active in the New York community.
Homelessness in the United States has occurred to varying degrees across the country. The total number of homeless people in the United States fluctuates and constantly changes hence a comprehensive figure encompassing the entire nation is not issued since counts from independent shelter providers and statistics managed by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development vary greatly. Federal HUD counts hover annually at around 500,000 people. Point-in-time counts are also vague measures of homeless populations and are not a precise and definitive indicator for the total number of cases, which may differ in both directions up or down. The most recent figure for the year 2019 that was given was at 567,715 individuals across the country that have experienced homelessness at a point in time during this period.
Homelessness is a serious issue throughout the state of New Mexico. Through a demographic examination it becomes evident that New Mexico has a high proportion of ethnographies that are currently and historically socioeconomically disadvantaged. Native Americans as a proportion of the US population represent the second highest amongst all States with only Alaska having a higher ratio, while it also has a large Hispanic population. Homelessness is a direct cause from an individual not being able to provide themselves with the most basic of necessities to maintain a healthy life hence having a higher proportion of individuals in poverty places a greater risk of an individual becoming homeless.
For many decades, the New York metropolitan area has suffered from an increasing shortage of housing, as housing supply has not met housing demand. As a result, New York City has the highest rents of any city in the United States.
Columbus, the capital city of Ohio, has a history of social services to provide for low- and no-income residents. The city has many neighborhoods below the poverty line, and has experienced a rise in homelessness in recent decades. Social services include cash- and housing-related assistance, case management, treatment for mental health and substance abuse, and legal and budget/credit assistance.
↑ Tier, Robert (1993). "Maintaining Safety and Civility in Public Spaces: Constitutional Approach to Aggressive Begging". Louisiana Law Review. 54 (2): 285–338.
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