So I was doing some digging to follow up on my last post since it seemed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plans for dealing with homelessness were pretty vague. What I found is a 13 page document that’s dated eight months before the article I used in my last post that outlines everything de Blasio and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo are planning to do. I’ll post the link at the bottom, and I highly encourage you guys to check it out; these guys are trying to end – yes, END – homelessness in New York City by 2020. Of the nine main concepts outlined in the document, at least five focus on housing and rental assistance to prevent homelessness.
A couple comments I have about the document: I’m really interested to see how raising the minimum wage in N.Y.C. to $15/hour would affect the economy. It sounds great, but I know there is an argument to be made against it from a business standpoint; since economics isn’t my strongest subject I don’t know what kinds of effects this would have on both small and large businesses, and overall I think this will be one of the more controversial parts of de Blasio and Cuomo’s plan. Another thing I wanted to touch on is under section 3 of the document it states that de Blasio and Cuomo will renew a City-State agreement to create and fully fund 30,000 units of supportive housing over the next ten years. First off, the beginning of the document says they’re trying to end homelessness in five years, but that’s not the point. What stood out to me was that one of the bullet-points under this agreement states 20,000 of those units will go towards individuals, while 8,700 go to families, and 1,300 to youths. I’m a little confused as to why families aren’t getting the majority of these housing units, I feel families should be more of a primary target in terms of getting people off the streets. I’m not trying to say families are more or less worthy of housing than individuals by any means, I was just a little thrown off by the figures because allocating 20,000 of the units towards families would get more than double the people off the streets.
I think this document is great way for us to get an idea of what it’s like trying to create public policies to counteract homelessness, and it’s definitely something I’d like to go over as a class one day if at all possible.