Join CFH and City Council in Creating a Tool to Help End Homelessness in NYC!

Jeff Foreman, Director of Policy
Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26th, at 9:30 a.m. in City Council Chambers in at City Hall, Council’s General Welfare Committee is holding  a hearing on Resolution 123-A, calling for a rental subsidy program to assist people experiencing homelessness in moving from shelter to permanent housing. Care for the Homeless is testifying in support of the Council Resolution and it’s open to the public. 

You can attend and even testify if you want.

The Care for the Homeless Agenda to End Homelessness includes a working rental subsidy to fight homelessness. The need is greater than ever before. New York City’s homeless shelter census is over 53,000 daily and growing. Over 22,000 children are in those shelters daily.  The fastest growing shelter population is families with children.

Here’s our view:
  • Public policy choices helped to create modern day homelessness; better policy will help end it.
  • We can end modern day homelessness as we know it in New York City – but it won’t happen without a working subsidy, a tool, to help move people from shelter to real housing.
  • The subsidy is the right thing to do, it promises better outcomes AND it saves taxpayer dollars over time.
So what’s the problem?

In 2011 when the Advantage subsidy program was eliminated, leaving no subsidy tool to aid homeless families in moving from shelter to housing, the state added budget language prohibiting the use of state funds or state administered federal funds in a subsidy targeted to aid people experiencing homelessness. That language must be removed from the budget before putting a tool in place to help move homeless families to housing.

We thank Council Member Ruben Wills for authoring this resolution, General Welfare Chair Steve Levin for moving it and along with Council Members Gibson, Palma, Deutsch, Cohen, Menchaca and Johnson for sponsoring it. Thank you to all members of Council and the de Blasio administration for fighting for a program to help end homelessness.

We’ll be there supporting the resolution for “a State budget which does not bar the City of New York from using State reimbursements for rental subsidy programs for the homeless, and calling on the City of New York and State of New York to work together to create a rental subsidy program for the homeless.” 

Please join if you can, or call your Council Member to thank them.

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