Dena Pinto just wants a home again.

Pinto lost her apartment, on 116th Street in Far Rockaway, during Hurricane Sandy.

In the six months since, she’s shuttled from hotel to hotel, finally landing in a city-funded Brooklyn room.

But Pinto, like about 800 others that the Coalition for the Homeless estimates are in city-funded hotels, will soon lose her room key.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will close the hotel program April 30.

Advocates say that means people like Pinto, 47, will have no place to go.

The night of the hurricane, she said, “We were literally standing in the ocean. It was wild.”

She tried to stay, but mold intervened. She ended up in a hotel in Queens, then one in Brooklyn.

After she and her fiancée lost their assistance for the Park Slope hotel, the city placed them at Kings Hotel on Atlantic Avenue.

“We’re just dealing with it,” she said, describing the tiny room where she and her fiancée can barely inch past each other. “It’s hell.”

They want their own place, but Giselle Routhier, a Coalition policy analyst who is helping Pinto, said she faces a stream of problems too common among Sandy victims.

First, they faced a slew of paperwork and frustrating waits for assistance approval. In Far Rockaway, Pinto had an affordable apartment. Now she can’t find something similar.

“Their incomes are not enough to support relocation to a market-rate apartment,” Routhier said.

The mayor recently announced a rental-assistance system, which will help, Routhier said.

Under the program, the city promises rental subsidies for households displaced by Sandy, something advocates have said families need to transition.

Renters will pay up to 30 percent of their income in rent, with the city helping to cover cost after that. Funds are also allotted to help with first and last month’s rent to facilitate leases quickly, according to city plans.

But for people in hotels, a few weeks might not be enough to secure affordable rents. Routhier fears they will end up in the shelter system.

“The majority of them are not going to have housing going forward,” she said. “That’s a huge problem.”

Follow Alison Bowen on Twitter @reporteralison.

The post Clock ticking as Sandy victims look for new homes appeared first on Metro.us.

City records show that the number of people sleeping in shelters nightly this year averaged over 50,000, a number that a new report from the Coalition for the Homeless states is a record high “since modern homelessness emerged three decades ago.” 

The report notes that these numbers do not include “the thousands of New Yorkers displaced by Hurricane Sandy, many of whom comprise extremely low-income households.” The city testified last week that around 1,500 families are still in hotels, YMCAs, and shelters, but Patrick Markee at the Coalition said there are “obviously many more still doubled up with friends or family.”

The report directly calls out Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and holds him responsible for the rise, alleging that had he not discontinued practices that existed under the previous three mayors, the “homeless shelter population” would not have “risen by a staggering 61 percent and the number of homeless families [by] 73 percent.”

“Mayor Bloomberg’s elimination of all affordable housing assistance for homeless families is a major factor behind the historic homelessness crisis,” the report says. “Previous New York City mayors, from Ed Koch to David Dinkins to Rudy Giuliani, targeted Federal and City housing resources to help homeless families relocate from shelters to stable, permanent housing.”

Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond called that accusation “misleading,” noting that permanent housing funding, known as Section 8, was not cut by the mayor, but has been crippled by an absence of financial support from the federal government.

“You can’t have a homeless housing program that is based on something that doesn’t exist,” Diamond said. “It’s unfair to people in the shelter system to tell them this is the answer when it’s not the reality.”

A DHS spokesperson explained that “because it comes from the federal government we never know how many vouchers we will receive; it’s a spigot that turns on and off at the will of Congress.”

The spokesperson also added, “We are not facing the same economy that the previous three mayors faced, we are not facing the same federal resources that the previous three mayors faced. The Coalition needs to realize that it is no longer 1970, we are in a different time that requires different solutions.”

Dispute over the Advantage program

According to Diamond, there are 25 percent less people entering the shelter system in February 2013 than there were in February 2011. The cause of the increase in overall numbers, Diamond said, is the loss of the state-funded Advantage program, which used to provide rent subsidy funds.

Diamond noted that the Coalition lobbied to shutdown the Advantage program, which he said would have granted DHS $150 million to help subsidize the rent of working homeless people moving out of the shelter system.

Bloomberg echoed that point at a press conference today, saying that when the state Advantage program was cut, the city lost federal monies as well.

The Coalition released a statement in response from the organization’s president, Mary Brosnahan, in which she said that “Advantage families were returning to shelter in record numbers.”

A DHS spokesperson emphasized the city’s focus on securing employment for the homeless as “a self-sustaining, investing solution,” and said the city has “seen nearly 20,000 homeless families go to work since 2010 with assistance from this administration,” through various programs, work supports, trainings and education.

The spokesperson also said that New York City is unique in the nation because the city is “mandated by law and court order that every eligible homeless individual and family has a right to shelter.”

In fact, families must undergo an application process to prove eligibility before they are given shelter, but homeless adults currently do not have to prove eligibility to stay in a shelter, though the city has been working in court to change that.

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

The post Report: Record 50,000 homeless now in NYC appeared first on Metro.us.

In answer to a recent question from a reporter, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there are no homeless people sleeping on the street.

The backlash was immediate: people were quick to point out that even by the city’s own estimates, there are more than 3,000 New Yorkers sleeping on the streets and in the subway.

But the comment was made in the context of victims of Hurricane Sandy, and in the context of a longer answer, wherein the mayor said the city’s goal is to make sure that people who most need housing and shelter services get those services.

However, according to Patrick Markee at the Coalition for the Homeless, the city regularly does not practice this philosophy, as public housing priority actually is not given to the neediest New Yorkers.

“What the city used to do is give priorities to homeless families — the groups [getting priority] now are the least poor of the poor,” Markee said.

There are approximately 180,000 NYCHA public housing units in New York City, and Markee said that prior to Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor, homeless families were given priority for some of those units.

A priority list provided by NYCHA showed that first priority goes to referrals from other city agencies, which would mean the individuals have already gone through the intake system of those various agencies. Second priority goes to domestic violence victims and intimidated witnesses; and third to those who have been ordered by the government to vacate spaces declared uninhabitable or needed for public housing or “public improvement.”

Fourth and last priority is people living in substandard conditions: the homeless or involuntarily displaced — evicted, for example — or people living in over-crowded public or private housing.

Heather Janik at the Department of Homeless Services said there are 164,000 households on the waiting list for public housing, which is the equivalent of a more than seven-year waiting list.

A major problem, Markee said, is that there is simply not enough affordable housing to go around.

According to Markee, investing in permanent housing resources could minimize street homelessness and lessen the burden on city shelters in a matter of months.

Outreach this Saturday with Bowery Mission
Trinity Baptist Church at 250 East 61st Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues
- volunteer training starts at 3pm
- covering 23rd Street to 110th Street from 5th Avenue to the FDR
RSVP at www.dontwalkby.org

Follow Danielle Tcholakian on Twitter @danielleiat

The post City in Need: New York’s homeless struggle appeared first on Metro.us.