New York, NY – New York City sent letters to more than 15,000 individuals and families on Thursday warning them they could no longer expect the government rent subsidy that helped them move out of homeless shelters. Officials said they believed the cuts would force 4,400 families back into the shelter system.
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The city blamed the move on proposed state budget cuts that are set to slice tens of millions of dollars from the program, but opponents accused the city of playing fast with the lives of its most vulnerable residents, canceling a program that has drawn mixed reviews, in a bid to spark pressure on state officials to restore the funds ahead of an April 1 budget deadline.
Told that she might lose the $1,000 monthly payment that’s keeping her and her 2-year-old son in their Bronx apartment, Lizmarie Rodriguez said she didn’t think she’d be able to pay her rent. She doesn’t want to go back to the shelters, where she spent nine months even though she had a job.
The 22-year-old felt unsafe there, she said, fending off vermin and bedbugs as she took care of her baby. Her Advantage-funded Bronx apartment, by comparison, is a haven, where she lets little Christopher ride a small tricycle in the unfurnished living room.
“What’s going to happen with us?” she asked Thursday. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Where we’re going to go.”
The Coalition for the Homeless said it would sue in court to prevent the city from stopping payments for Rodriguez and the thousands of others who are already in the program, which provides rent subsidies for up to two years to homeless people who have secured jobs. Most of the participants work about 30 hours a week for about $9 an hour — not enough to cover their rents alone, said coalition spokesman Patrick Markee.
“It will be difficult, certainly for families, particularly those who recently left shelter, to maintain their apartments,” said city Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond. “The premise of the program is it gives people time to grow into their apartments and have their income grow and maintain stability. So that is very troubling and of great concern.”
While the clock for final budget negotiations between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature is ticking down, proposals from both sides in Albany call for cuts to the program. The city says it stands to lose $92 million in state and federal money because of the cuts, and it expects the increased needs of the community served by the $140 million Advantage program to cost the city $34 million more than what it was already spending. The state disagrees with those numbers, and says the city would lose a combined $68 million in state and federal funds.
The city says it anticipates that without the program, the city’s homeless family population will increase by 51 percent and the city will have to build an additional 70 shelters. State and federal costs will rise as well, the city claims.
Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto argued that the city could afford to keep the program if it wished to.
“New York City seems intent on manufacturing a crisis and endangering thousands of New Yorkers to benefit its own economic and political interest. … Regardless of this year’s anticipated cuts, New York City has the funds to support the continuation of this program if it so chooses,” he said in a statement.
Diamond shot back: “The state is the one that has developed the crisis. … We had no choice but to take this action at this time.”
Advocates for the homeless have long found the Advantage program problematic, saying that it places people in apartments they won’t be able to afford in the long term and in some cases delivers participants right back into the shelters. While the Coalition for the Homeless is fighting to keep the city from cutting off payments to those already in apartments, Markee says getting rid of the program is the right thing to do.
“The Advantage program is a revolving door back into homelessness for thousands of children and families,” said Markee. “There have been (City) Council hearings, there have been studies: The program is not working.”
One out of three families that were in Advantage and then lost their rental assistance have applied for shelter, Markee said, noting that many participants don’t make it through the entire program. Meanwhile, the city calls the program a success and says 90 percent of families that complete two years in Advantage remain out of the shelter system one to two years after the program has ended.
Some advocates express concerns about the state of the buildings used in the Advantage program as well. Rodriguez’s apartment, for example, has been named one of the worst buildings in the city by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, with inspectors finding lead paint, crumbling plaster and, at times, no heat.
Without Advantage in place, the city will have no program to move families out of the shelters, and Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs said there is no replacement program on the horizon.
“Without the state’s and federal support, we’ll have nothing for them,” she said. “So the only consequence is that there’s going to be a lot more homeless families and we’re going to need a lot more shelters.”
This is a good start. We need to gradually phase out ALL of these subsidies and grants for housing and go back to a market-based system. We don’t have enough money to keep paying people to live in New York and other high cost areas they cannot afford. Over time, they will have to relocate to lower cost areas. It may be disruptive to some families but the reality is that as a nation, we’ve created a network of subsidies they will bankrupt us. Let the private charities care for the trul needy but we currently subsidize hundreds of thousands of people and that has to end now.
Actually this is one program that makes sense as it is for two years. What they need to cut is the people getting Section 8 for 20+ years.
This program is a bride, and meant to get people through hard times, which is something that actually makes sense.
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While I agree with you in principle, I would rather see the government cut first the billions of dollars used for foreign aid. “Charity begins at home”, and we can’t afford it, we shouldn’t be giving it to foreign countries.
30 hours a week???
If I had the government pay my rent I would also work only 30. Hours a week. Tell these leeches of society to get off their rear ends and start working normal jobs, and put in the 40-45 hours weekly to pay for their own expenses, no ones obligated to pay you so you can take it easy.
And a single woman and child need a $1000 apartment? Go get a 750 studio apartment, without a living room and stop living on the tax payers tab!
Something is really messed up with our system!
You want to cut welfare? Cut it to the able-bodied people who refuse to work not to people who can’t nebach make it, usually due to mental illness or addiction, and are in homeless shelters.
Is should really be cut to a group of people who refuse to educate their kids, refuse to be accepted by society, don’t work, and have a ton of kids all on the backs of the rest of the people. And they don’t even appreciate it. They hate and malign other religions and even their own people who arn’t like them.
It’s time to end all free clinics, food stamps, publicly funded education, WIC, section 8, welfare, medicaid, rent subsidies and rent control. Let the free market prevail. In NYS we’d save 90 billion or more a year . That’s more then half of the budget.
Forty years ago, when I was first married, my mother-in-law was desperate that my new (American) wife and I should leave Israel, where my wife and I lived at the time, to live in the NYC area.
I was not earning a great deal at the time as I was a junior officer in the IDF. Additionally, I did not have work skills that would have been marketable in the US.
My mother-in-law airily told me, “Oh you can register for food stamps and get assistance for housing in NYC”. She was both shocked and insulted that I would never consider taking either. I continued serving in the IDF for a further twenty years and enjoyed every second of it.
I am now a (junior!) senior citizen and I still refuse all state benefits.
we need to cut all spending by 20% accross the board.
Unless someone is crippled or in a coma there’s no excuse not to work. All those programs should be terminated immediately. Then, hopefully, we can end social security, medicare, student grants, and wasteful narishkeit research spending too. We should also privatize all so-called public services. If someone wants an ambulance, police, street lights, water, garbage pickup, food inspection, health inspection, firefighters- let them pay a private service. If not, it’s their choice.