New York City homelessness is up

The number of homeless people in New York City rose by nearly 6 percent in 2007, according to a March 27 report by the Coalition for the Homeless. The figures from the Department of Homeless Services indicate that the increase in homelessness for families will continue in 2008.

In the city’s Fiscal Year 2007, which runs from July 2006 to June 2007, 102,187 different New Yorkers slept in homeless shelters—5.8 percent more than in FY 2006 and a 23.4 percent increase since FY 2002.

The last residence of a majority of the people in the shelter system was northern Manhattan, central Brooklyn or the Bronx, areas of New York City which are predominantly African-American or Latin@.

At the same time that the use of homeless shelters was increasing significantly, the homeless living on the streets declined. The city administration under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg has been effective in using social-worker outreach, backed up by coercion and publicity campaigns, to get the homeless out of publicly visible areas.

New York has a different housing market than most of the U.S.; far more people—about two-thirds of all households—rent rather than buy. Since it has a large majority of all the regulated rental units in the country, and a large public housing stock so desirable that it had a waiting list, working people formerly had stable housing costs. It was common for a family to rent the same apartment for decades.

But landlords have been able to significantly weaken rent-regulation protections and right-wing politicians, following the wishes of the real estate interests, have shifted major funding out of public housing in New York City.

The same unbridled capitalist greed that has produced foreclosures, along with subprime mortgages and predatory lending practices in other areas of the U.S., has obviously had an impact on evictions in New York City. People who are paying over 50 percent of their monthly income on rent have a precarious hold on their housing and even a slight reduction in their income brings major difficulties in meeting their obligations.

About 50 percent of the homeless families in shelters have either a formal or informal eviction in their recent history, according to a Vera Institute study.

Homelessness is a nationwide problem; according to some estimates, 750,000 people are homeless in the whole country, with Los Angeles County having 73,000 people living on the street. Service providers in St. Petersburg, Fla.; Seattle; Baltimore; and the District of Columbia told the Inter Press Service March 8 that they had noticed a sharp increase in homelessness. But hard figures and even trends are hard to come by.