(GOTHAMIST) December 13, 2019

After a homeless man allegedly bludgeoned four other homeless men to death on the streets of Chinatown, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Outreach NYC, a new plan to address the ongoing crisis of street homelessness in the city. The center of this plan involves training 18,000 city workers how to use NYC’s 311 hotline to share information about sightings of homeless people—information which gets passed on to homeless outreach workers who go to meet these reported individuals and offer them services and potential housing. As current and former outreach workers, we believe this plan is a massive misdirection of effort and resources, and has the potential to undermine the city’s ability to house and serve the people it is supposed to be helping.

By New York state law, any homeless individual can enter the city shelter system and must be provided a bed each night. More than 60,000 people, including 21,673 children, spent the night in shelters this past weekend. The Outreach NYC plan operates on the erroneous assumption that people aren’t aware of this law and that 311 visits help to make clients aware of shelter. The truth is that most street homeless people know about the shelter system and have weighed their current situation against the prospect of entering a typical shelter where privacy is nonexistent, curfews are enforced, theft and conflict are common, and future prospects for moving into permanent housing are nebulous. Outreach workers know that placing street homeless individuals in city shelter beds is incredibly rare.

Source: https://gothamist.com/news/homeless-outreach-workers-nothing-we-do-matters-without-new-housing