Care For the Homeless

On Monday, January 5 th , Care for the Homeless got together to discuss Mayor de Blasio’s first year in housing policy. The lively conversation covered the Mayor’s housing plan and recently begun LINC programs that issue rental subsidies to help people move from shelter into housing. Get up to speed on NYC housing policy and join the discussion during Care for the Homeless 1 st Monday Policy Briefings! Next discussion will be held Mon., February 2 nd , 2015 at 5 pm. Want to attend? Send us an email at policy@cfhnyc.org . 

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy Few things in life are rarer than real political courage. How often do you find political leaders, particularly elected officials longing to stay elected, standing up for locally unpopular issues at the height of their controversy? This is the province of unique experience, strange curiosity and genuine oddity. Yet at a time of dramatically increasing stigmatization of poor and especially homeless people, particularly in New York City’s Queens Borough where several new homeless shelters have or are scheduled to open, New Yorkers have been treated to an extraordinary show of bravery from political leaders speaking out for what is unpopular among their electorate seemingly just because it’s the right thing to do. That’s about as quirky as the Big Apple itself. In July, the City’s Department of Homeless Services opened a family homeless shelter in the defunct former Pan American Hotel in Queen’s Elmhurst neighborhood. It opened on an eme...

Today, members of the NYU Naughty Knitters club, started by Jennie Tichenor in 2010, presented Care for the Homeless with a record-setting donation: 185 hand-knit and crocheted baby blankets Photo courtesy of Dean G. Mudgett, NYU Volunteering thousands of hours of time and creativity, the club has adopted Care for the Homeless, providing over 600 blankets since the annual program began. These blankets will be distributed at Care for the Homeless sites throughout NYC - in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens - to hundreds families in need. We thank the generous and talented members of the  NYU Naughty Knitters for this amazing donation!

Housing Instability is catastrophic problem that directly impacts hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers each year; but there are great success stories of people who have overcome tremendous obstacles to find and maintain stable housing and a far better life.  Please join us for a Summer Solstice Celebration to celebrate the success of New Yorkers who have overcome homelessness. Download the poster for more details. Date: Saturday, June 21st  Time: 1:30 - 3:00 p.m. Where: Broadway Presbyterian Church, 601 W. 114 th  Street (at Broadway) in Manhattan FREE! Our celebration will include music and entertainment, food and celebration, and of course stories of success. The winner of our first “Stories of Success” Short Essay contest will be there to read their winning entry. Every participant will have the opportunity to define their own success!  Our Summer Solstice Success Celebration recognizes not only success for individuals ...

Four Care for the Homeless client leaders have been invited to attend the National Health Care for the Homeless Conference this week in New Orleans to present a workshop on our client advocacy work. The workshop will be called “Advocating for Ourselves.” David Broxton, one of the clients teaching the workshop said “Care for the Homeless does incredible work in providing life-saving health services to people who are homeless and in advocating for policies to fight, prevent and end homelessness. But I’ve learned in my involvement here that no one can advocate for homeless people as effectively as those of us who have lived this experience.” “We’ve had the opportunity to testify to City Council and the state legislature, to talk with policymakers and most important, through our Care for the Homeless Speakers’ Bureau, to meet and speak with interested New Yorkers about policy choices that helped cause the homelessness crisis and how better policies could end homelessness as we kno...

“ A municipal ID is a great common-sense and cost efficient way to help many vulnerable New Yorkers access and utilize our city’s human service and safety net programs. As an official government ID it holds the promise of access to banking, cultural, educational and business services too often denied or made difficult to get because of insufficient ID. This will be a tremendous resource for our clients and many other New Yorkers. Council Speaker Mark-Viverito and Council Members Menchaca and Dromm deserve a lot of credit for their legislation.”                - Bobby Watts, Executive Director, Care for the Homeless That’s the quote City Council used last week in announcing introduction of legislation to establish a new official city ID. The proposed program, modeled on working programs in New Haven, Connecticut, in San Francisco, California and other places specifically makes it easier, quicker and more conv...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy New Yorkers can celebrate the opportunity for a tool to move people experiencing homelessness from shelters to stable housing because of the last-second success of advocates and policy makers in removing language from the New York State budget that prohibited it. Yesterday, as state legislators and Governor Cuomo enacted the new state budget, they removed language prohibiting any city in New York of over 5 million (that’s only New York City; the second largest city, Buffalo, has a 260,000 population) from using state money to fund a rental subsidy program for homeless people. That language prohibiting state and federal funding from the old city Advantage program in 2011 has remained in each budget since then. Just 5 days before this year’s March 31 st deadline the prohibitive language was still firmly in place. There were media stories reporting policy makers were saying it was too late in the process to change it. But client leaders, ad...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy Care for the Homeless was pleased to take part in a Baruch College public education event last week.  Bobby Watts speaks at Baruch College. Seated left to right are:  Dr. Lance Freeman of Columbia University, Dr. John Goering of  Baruch College  and Department of Homeless Services  Commissioner  Gilbert Taylor.   The program, attended by over 100, featured Care for the Homeless Executive Director Bobby Watts, new Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor and Columbia University’s Dr. Lance Freeman, a leading researcher and expert on homeless policy involving youth. Dr. John Goering of Baruch College, an expert on housing and affordable housing policy, was moderator and organizer of the event. Watts used the opportunity to advance specific recommendations for the new administration. He cited the Care for the Homeless policy position that public policy helped to create modern day homel...

Mayor Bill de Blasio was elected on a “Tale of Two Cities” – one incredibly rich and privileged and one poor or struggling and losing ground. Care for the Homeless works every day to deliver life changing services to the most vulnerable families and individuals struggling daily in New York City. As part of our advocacy for our clients we’re participating in a national conversation about economic inequality in America and what can be done about it. Join us for a special screening of the film Inequality for All This week, on Thursday, February 27 th , Care for the Homeless and our client leaders are sponsoring a showing of the movie “Inequality for All” and an open discussion following the screening. The program begins at 5 p.m. in the CFH conference room on the 5 th floor of 30 E. 33 rd Street.  If you want to join us please e-mail policy@cfhnyc.org because seating is limited. The award-winning movie Inequality for All is based on a course Dr. Robert Reich, form...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy “57,000 is 57,000 too many.” That’s what the sign said that a Care for the Homeless client leader held up   last year at a rally (featured   here ) on the steps of New York’s City Hall, after the media brought us the bad news that we’d set yet another record for the number of people experiencing homelessness in New York City shelters. Last year over 111,000 people spent time in our city’s homeless shelters. More than 40,000 of them were children. Those figures, too, represent new high census figures for shelter populations. Another way to think about it is that in HUD’s recently released Point-in-Time survey for a given day in January of 2013, there were 64,060 people in New York City’s homeless shelters or living on the streets. That’s a 13% increase in City homelessness, year-over-year, at the same time the country as a whole decreased homelessness by 4%.   That study found about 1-in-10 homeless people in America was in New Yor...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy We can end modern day homelessness in New York City. And here’s the interesting thing, we know how to do it, doing it promises better outcomes and a second chance for the 55-64,000 people who will sleep in city homeless shelters or on the New York City streets tonight and the cost of doing it isn’t higher than what we’re doing right now. What’s more, with a very supportive city administration and City Council, the timing is right to do it! Most advocates and the de Blasio administration agree New York City needs to reinstate two vitally needed programs that city government ended while they were working! First is the use of a small portion of our city’s federal housing resources – NYCHA public housing apartments and Section 8 housing rent vouchers – to help fight homelessness. Second is a housing subsidy targeted to move people experiencing homelessness from shelters to affordable housing. Care for the Homeless also believes more affordable h...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy Tomorrow, January 8 th , is the 50 th anniversary of America’s “unconditional war on poverty.”  Yesterday Care for the Homeless sent copies of petitions they collected to members of the New York Congressional delegation asking that they not “allow more funding cuts to programs providing health care and human services to poor and homeless people.” The War on Poverty began with poverty in America of 17.4% and a commitment to “not rest until that war is won.” It lasted in an aggressive way about as long as the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and in 2014 dollars cost a small fraction of those wars. And the War on Poverty was working when we stopped fighting it. In the 1960s and 1970s America’s poverty rate was falling. It went from 17.4% in ’65 to 12% in 1974.  The War on Poverty spawned programs assisting the poorest Americans in nutrition, health care, housing and job training. It created the Department of Housing and Urban D...

Are you following the New York Times series on homelessness this December? Read Care for the Homeless Executive Director Bobby Watts' response in his Letter to the Editor . Learn more in this opinion published in the Gotham Gazette by Jeff Foreman, Care for the Homeless Policy Director. Child homelessness in New York City has risen 22% in the last year. Care for the Homeless is on the front lines, changing the lives of homeless men, women and children with your support. Thank you.

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy New York is flush with conversation about the new city administration and the typical who is coming/who is going chatter, not to mention the interest in who the new City Council Speaker will be. It is exciting. And for homeless advocates there’s special excitement with a new Mayor committed to a progressive agenda that includes housing the homeless and 200,000 units of affordable housing. We’re also excited with the prospect of Councilwoman Letitia James, who stood with our Care for the Homeless contingent on the steps of City Hall at a recent United to End Homelessness rally, and Scott Stringer as new citywide officials. Mayor-elect de Blasio has taken on the most hopeful agenda to fight homelessness in New York City ever. His promise of 200,000 units of affordable housing, commitment to reinstate a priority for people experiencing homelessness to get NYCHA and Section 8 housing, and his pledge to never cut shelter beds for runaway and h...

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy There's reason for optimism about ending homelessness as we know it in New York City. Sure, the problem has never been worse. There are 57,000 homeless people daily in city homeless shelters or living on the streets, probably more. At least 22,000 of them are kids and, for them, brushes with homelessness may lead to a lifetime of consequences. But now a loosely knit network of community-based groups, calling themselves United to End Homelessness, have joined to author and promote a detailed plan. They fittingly called it "A Roadmap to Ending Homelessness." The timing isn't random. It comes just weeks before an election sure to shake up city policies for decades with a new mayor, all new citywide officials and several new City Council members, too. Nicole Branca, deputy executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, is a steering committee member. She says the group’s hope "is that this briefi...

The Care for the Homeless Speakers’ Bureau presented its first public program to an audience of 20 on Tuesday, October 28th. Fittingly, the topic was health care issues for homeless people in New York City. A number of clients told their stories of living without a home and trying to access health care. One client leader, Gayle Dorsky, talked about living on the streets and squatting. “I was lucky,” she said, “I found Care for the Homeless.” She spoke about friends who weren’t so lucky.  “I watched their health decline. Some developed chronic diseases. Some died,” she said. In addition to several client speakers, the program featured Care for the Homeless Assistant Executive Director Debbian Fletcher-Blake who spoke about health care issues specific to people experiencing homeless in New York City. “A lot remains to be done," she said. Fletcher-Blake said the age adjusted life expectancy for chronically homeless people in New York City is about 50 years....

Letter to the Editor by Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy New York: Two Cities? An argument rages about whether New York is "two cities," with half just getting by as income inequality explodes with the arrival of multimillionaires. Who seriously questions our growing poverty or that many struggle just to get by?  We can combat inequality through investment in affordable housing, including for very low income families, supportive housing for those who need it, and other progressive policies.    Read the entire Letter to the Editor published October 2, 2013 in the New York Times and the news article that prompted Care for the Homeless' response.   [Read more] For more information on the Care for the Homeless Agenda to End Homeless , visit our web site and subscribe to our monthly Policy Matters newsletter .

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy It might seem like déjà vu but we’re in another fiscal crisis of our own making in Washington. The House and Senate have been unable to agree on at least three major funding items that are critical to the country. First, there’s the budget. In recent years it’s become usual to miss budget deadlines (the new fiscal year started October 1st) but keep the government going by passing temporary “Continuing Resolutions” to continue funding government at current levels until something is agreed to. In today’s hyper-partisan and frequently nonfunctional environment, short term resolutions add little optimism of reaching a real agreement. They just kick the can down the road, and not very far either. Second, the federal government will reach its debt limit, possibly in days but certainly no more than weeks, compounding the problem. The government can’t legally spend more than its debt limit. So reaching the debt limit doesn’t stop debt accumulation...