April 23, 2018

Mayor Bill de Blasio City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mayor de Blasio:

As organizations on the frontlines of New York City’s housing and homelessness crisis, we urge you to use every available tool to help the record 63,000 people – including nearly 24,000 children – sleeping in shelters each night. In order to substantially reduce homelessness in New York, the City must fund a greater number of deeply subsidized affordable housing units targeted specifically to families and individuals in shelters.

Your Housing New York 2.0 plan commits to creating or preserving an ambitious 300,000 units of affordable housing. Unfortunately, just 15,000 of those units will be made available for homeless households – a paltry 5 percent. Furthermore, most of the 15,000 set-aside units will be preservation of existing occupied units and thus not available for move-in by homeless families currently languishing in shelters. HPD predicts no more than a few hundred units will be available for occupancy by homeless families each year through the life of the Housing New York 2.0 plan. With well over 15,000 families and more than 16,000 single adults sleeping in shelters each night, this is nowhere near the level of production necessary to meaningfully reduce record homelessness in New York City.

In contrast, at a time when the shelter census was only a fraction of what it is today, Mayor Ed Koch created nearly 15,700 units of homeless housing – constituting more than 10 percent of the units in his 10-year plan. Nearly all of these units were immediately available for occupancy by homeless families in shelters, contributing to the significant decreases in homelessness during this time period.

In order for you to align your housing plan with the reality of record homelessness and your own admirable progressive values, we implore you to immediately direct your housing development agencies to increase the total number of housing units for homeless households to 30,000, with 24,000 of these units financed and created as new construction. These goals are imperative if we are to meet the unprecedented need for permanent housing for homeless New Yorkers.

This plan will require the City to build roughly 2,000 new units of homeless housing each
year between now and 2026. This level of production is ambitious but feasible given the progress that has been made so far: New construction is already ahead of pace, City investment has increased to $1.3 billion per year to meet the revised goals, and term sheets specifying requirements for capital subsidies have been revised to increase incentives for units serving homeless people. Given these building blocks, homeless housing production on the scale we recommend is not only financially achievable, but morally imperative. As the Mayor of our great city, you must take the lead in providing relief to the thousands of men, women, and children who are living the trauma of homelessness every day. By following our recommendations, you can cement your legacy as a leader in progressive values and evidence-based responses to challenging social problems.

Sincerely,

David R. Jones, Esq., President/CEO Community Service Society of New York

Rosa Cifre, LCSW, Chief Program Officer Comunilife, Inc.

Catherine Trapani, Executive Director Homeless Services United

Housing Conservation Coordinators

Charles King, President/CEO Housing Works

Susan Zimet, Executive Director Hunger Action Network of NYS

Lab/Shul

Mutual Housing Association of NY (MHANY)

Presbyterian Church (USA)
Society for the Advancement of Judaism

St. Ann’s Church of Morrisania
Strong Families Deliverance Ministries Inc.