New York, which leads so much social policy around homeless issues, is moving with more vigor in clearing the streets of homeless encampments.
An excerpt.
Homeless in City Face New Effort To Clear Streets
Publisher: The New York Times
By: Diane Cardwell (Leslie Kaufman and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting for this article) First published: July 18, 2006
Beginning an aggressive push to reduce the number of people living on New York City's streets, the city will start pressuring homeless men and women to leave makeshift dwellings under highways and near train trestles and will raise barriers to make those encampments inaccessible, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday.
The city has found 73 of those sites inhabited by groups of chronically homeless people, the mayor said. "Humanely, respectfully and firmly, we'll work to get these men and women to enter supportive housing, enroll in treatment programs or go into shelters," Mr. Bloomberg said to a gathering of government officials and social service providers from around the country.
The changes amplify the mayor's longstanding effort to steer the city away from its emphasis on emergency shelter for the homeless, and toward providing permanent housing and using social services to prevent homelessness.
The measures discussed by the mayor on Monday represented a significant shift in the culture of the Department of Homeless Services.
"While everyone has a right to emergency shelter, that doesn't always make emergency shelter right for everyone," Mr. Bloomberg said, adding that his administration was working to replace "the dead-end model of managing homelessness with the new goal of ending it."
He cited his administration's program to create 12,000 units of supportive housing, which offers social services like mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment. And he announced plans to expand another program, which helps people on the verge of homelessness hold onto their homes.
But the new element is potentially controversial. The Department of Homeless Services, under its new commissioner, Robert Hess, has identified 73 makeshift encampments, including 30 in Manhattan, to which roughly 350 homeless men and women -- of a total homeless population of about 3,800, according to the city's last count -- return nightly.
