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'Shameful': No Sign of City's Long Overdue Plan for 250,000-Plus Disconnected Youth


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Organizers and activists (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


While unemployment booms and New York City faces its worst economy in decades, the fate of the city's disconnected youth -- people aged 16 to 24 who are both out of work and out of school -- is getting a shrug from city government.

The city's Disconnected Youth Task Force, created by the City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio to examine the factors that inhibit employment and school enrollment among this group numbering in the hundreds of thousands, is more than two years late to submit its first report, a requirement of the 2017 legislation that created it.

Now it appears as though the de Blasio administration is waylaying the report again after a draft circulated among members this summer. Practitioners in the field say the endless delays point to a lack of commitment from both sides of City Hall to address young people falling through the cracks, with one task force member calling the hold-up "shameful."

"It is shameful that it's not out yet, given the crisis, given that it's been almost two years," said Marjorie Parker, head of JobsFirstNYC and a member of the task force, in a phone interview with Gotham Gazette. "They shouldn't sit on this thing for two years. I know covid happened but other people have done reports in shorter periods of time than that."

The urgency has only increased during the pandemic, during which time youth unemployment increased sevenfold -- reaching 35% in June -- and gun violence has soared. (While the mayor regularly cites a confluence of factors, including rising unemployment, to explaining the uptick in shootings, there is no definitive causation.)

The task force, set up through legislation passed and signed in April 2017, has been plagued by delays from the start. The bill, sponsored by City Council Member Mathieu Eugene, then chair of the Council’s youth services committee, under former Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, required the Mayor and the Speaker to appoint its members within 30 days. Its mandate was to explore barriers and policy solutions to youth employment and education gaps and produce a report with recommendations by March 1, 2018.

Close to two years later, in February 2019, de Blasio only announced the launch of the task force under the leadership of Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson, with 20 appointees, five fewer than the law established and mostly representing city agencies with a handful of nonprofit partners. The report is still lost in the offing.

“It is critical that we provide young people the tools they need to thrive in our city,” de Blasio said in a statement the day of the launch. “This taskforce will build our work already underway in this area and will help better identify and meet these needs. I look forward to seeing what recommendations they develop.”

Thompson said the administration was already taking steps to address the vulnerable population at hand but that he would work with the task force members "to develop a better coordinated strategy among programs servicing youth citywide."

At the time the task force bill was first heard in City Council committee, in November 2016, an estimated 172,000 New York City residents aged 18 to 24 were out of school and out of work, close to a fifth of that age group citywide, according to a report prepared by Council staff. Two-thirds of that population did not have a high school diploma. In 2019, pre-pandemic, there were 129,000 disconnected 16- to 24-year-olds, according to the Aspen Institute, a global nonprofit focused on equality. It is not clear what factors contributed to the drop in disconnected youth by 2019.

The latest estimates from Aspen Institute in July indicate the number of out-of-school-and-work young people more than doubled in the first months of the covid crisis in New York, falling anywhere between 259,000 and 324,000 16- to 24-year-olds, or 27% to 34% of that population in the city.

Figures available from November on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website place the nationwide number of unemployed and not-enrolled 16- to 24-year-olds at roughly 5 million. That number is significantly lower than what was reported in a Pew Research Center study from June, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, which revealed that nationwide 28% of youth ages 16 to 24, 10.3 million people, were out of work and school. The rate more than doubled between February and June, from 12%, as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and forced economic shutdowns across the country.

According to Richard Fry, a co-author the Pew study, "there is some seasonality to enrollment, both at high school and college." The fall months, when many students are back in school, account for the precipitous drop between June and November, he told Gotham Gazette.

In addition to representatives from agencies like the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development and the Department of Education, the mayor was given six appointees on the Disconnected Youth Task Force and the Council speaker was given five. The 2019 press release of the launch lists the members but not who appointed them and the speaker's office, now under Speaker Corey Johnson, did not clarify how many were selected by the Council.

In response to Gotham Gazette inquiries about the Council's role in the task force, a spokesperson said that when the body creates a task force through legislation, the Council makes appointments as required by the law, but the administration is "in charge."

"As you know covid changed many dynamics in the city," wrote Jose Bayona, a mayoral spokesperson, in October, who at the time said an update would be available at the end of November. On November 23, Bayona told Gotham Gazette, "it seems like we are releasing the report in the first week of December.”

The report has not materialized as of December 17 and representatives for the mayor, Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and Council Member Eugene have not been able to provide updates since.

"Our office will provide an update as soon as possible," said Adam Ullian, a spokesperson for  Eugene, a Brooklyn Democrat who is currently running for borough president.

Unlike past recessions, the coronavirus pandemic has had a unique impact on young people, spurring unemployment while also driving down community college enrollment, which has historically risen during economic downturns.

According to new figures released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center and reported by The 74, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 29% in fall 2020 among low-income high school graduates nationwide, close to double the rate among students from high-income schools. While enrollment fell among all students, the most acute decline was among Native American students, followed by Black students, both of which continued downward trends from last fall. The Clearinghouse figures show that undergraduate enrollment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities declined more sharply than the national average.

At the same time, in New York City, youth unemployment has skyrocketed during the pandemic. In June, City Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report showing the unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year olds had risen to a staggering 35%, from under 7% pre-pandemic.

Contributing to youth disconnection is the ongoing digital divide, the gap between populations that have the technological infrastructure to stay on the grid from home, and those who do not. The latter group is disproportionately composed of people living in poor communities, public housing, and homeless shelters, predominantly impacting Black and Latino New Yorkers. The divide makes remote education and finding a job increasingly difficult during the ongoing shutdown.

While de Blasio's office cited the pandemic as a reason for the report's further delay, the mayor regularly discusses the city's major increase in unemployment, and has connected it and other upheaval to the significant rise in gun violence this year. But he has not offered any city solutions to better engage disconnected youth and even cut long-established programs.

Youth aging out of foster care are particularly vulnerable to missing out on job and education opportunities, especially during the pandemic when many transition services were upended. "[Education and employment] is certainly an issue in that our membership, the foster care agencies, are considering it very heavily and adding it to decision-making about discharging youth at this point," said Lisa Gitelson, head of the downstate programs of the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies.

Statewide, 205 young people were discharged to "another planned living arrangement," or self-responsibility, between January and October, according to data published by the state Office of Children and Family Services. More than half of them, 121, were in New York City.

Yet while there are risks involved in discharging youth from foster care, there are also risks in postponing it -- ones that play into other, more clinical, public health issues that have gotten greater attention from elected officials. "Many of our foster families, whether they are kinship or non-kinship, are older families and they're families with co-morbidities that put them at risk," Gitelson said.

"There's a slew of problems around young people right now that we're trying to figure out," Parker told Gotham Gazette, referring to the work of her organization, JobsFirstNYC, which focuses on workforce development.

"We've never had a crisis like this but whenever we've had crises, young people are at the back of the line," she said. "You always focus on the professionals, getting them back to work, and eventually work your way down to young people. But this time is very different and I think we need different strategies."

Even some of the city's existing programs to improve the experience of disconnected youth have suffered under the economic contraction, which has led to billions in lost revenue for the city and state. High on that list is the city's Summer Youth Employment Program, which pre-pandemic connected young people with roughly 75,000 paid job opportunities during the summer months. During budget negotiations this year, the program was scrapped and only reinstated after an outcry from advocates and elected leaders, and then only partially reinstated.

The Disconnected Youth Task Force report is supposed to include an assessment of the barriers to work and school employment and map the skills and education employers are seeking. The law also requires the task force to analyze the policies and programs that impact disconnected youth and provide recommendations to the city for improvements.

"There's not a reason for it to have taken this long," said Parker. "For something to take this long shows that it's not a priority."

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

De Blasio's Shelter Plan Moves Ahead


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Mayor de Blasio at a homeless shelter (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


“We’ve opened shelters in communities that have never had shelters before,” New York City Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks said in October, at an online event hosted by New York Law School that took place amid controversy over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s decision to move homeless men from the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side after uproar from some local residents.

Banks alluded to the de Blasio administration’s “Turning the Tide” initiative, a plan to reduce homelessness in New York City released by the mayor and Banks in February 2017. As part of the plan, the city pledged to eliminate the use of commercial hotels and “cluster site” shelter units in favor of shelters run by the Department of Homeless Services and efforts to reduce the homeless population through preventative and re-housing measures.

But the plan got off to a slow start and some advocates, like Coalition for the Homeless, say it is outdated in light of the pandemic and that the mayor is using it to deflect criticism from his handling of the Lucerne controversy, in part by repeatedly citing the goal of eliminating the use of commercial shelters. When the residents of the Lucerne were initially moved there from congregate settings to avoid the spread of COVID-19, they were not provided necessary support services and security was lacking.

When the administration announced Turning the Tide, de Blasio was on the receiving end of relentless criticism over his handling of homelessness in the city, and he acknowledged coming up short against the enormity and complexity of the problem. According to the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), the city shelter census currently stands at 53,778. That’s under the goal Mayor de Blasio set in 2017 of getting the DHS shelter census to about 57,500 by 2022, though it’s unclear how the covid eviction moratorium is impacting the numbers and what may happen when those protections are removed -- some are predicting a potential tsunami of homelessness. The city’s actual homeless population is far greater than the DHS census, which does not factor in all types of shelters in the city and does not account for the number of people living ‘doubled up’ or other crowded conditions after loss of housing.

The mayor and Banks are pledging to site 90 new community-based shelters by the end of this year that, in Banks’ words at the time, would be “as close as possible to the anchors in people’s lives.” The idea being that if people do wind up in shelter, they can keep continuity with regard to jobs, school, family, and other key pieces of their lives, helping them maintain some stability as they deal with housing insecurity and the challenge of returning to stable housing.

As of early this month (December 2020), 43 of the 90 shelters are operational and 37 are sited but not yet operational. Of those 43 operational shelters, about half (21) are located in the Bronx, with eight in Queens, nine in Brooklyn, and five in Manhattan, with none operational yet on Staten Island.

Of the 80 total sited shelters, whether operational or not, under Turning the Tide, 31 are in the Bronx, 14 in Manhattan, 19 in Brooklyn, 14 in Queens, and 2 on Staten Island. These numbers don’t exist in a vacuum, however, as the shelters are being opened to replace the use of hotels and other elements of the hodgepodge shelter system, and the overall plan said that the city’s shelter footprint would actually shrink significantly if the plan were to be implemented as planned, and in conjunction with other measures to prevent homelessness and re-house people who do enter the system. Yet there are also questions about whether the city should be dedicating so many resources to opening new shelters instead of investing time and effort into permanent housing, such as increasing the value of certain housing vouchers.

Overall, as of October 31, there are 132 Department of Homeless Services shelters in the Bronx, 127 in Brooklyn, 118 in Manhattan, 75 in Queens, and one on Staten Island, for a total of 453. These numbers include so-called “stop-gap” locations or commercial hotels being used due to the pandemic -- combined, there were 164 such locations throughout the five boroughs as of October. According to the Department of Social Services (DSS), which Banks runs and coordinates with DHS, these numbers represent a 28% decrease from the 647 various buildings in use before Turning the Tide was launched.

The 90 opened, sited, or planned but not sited new shelters are a mix of traditional shelters and specialized ones, such as those supporting families with children, adult families, employment-focused, or for LGBTQ New Yorkers.

Four of the city’s 59 community board districts will be getting their first traditional shelters through this program, including Brooklyn 13 (Coney Island and Bensonhurst), Bronx 8 (Riverdale, Kingsbridge), Queens 9 (Woodhaven, Richmond Hill), Staten Island 3 (South Shore), and Manhattan 1 (Lower Manhattan), according to DSS.

As of now, this will leave six community board districts throughout the city without any DHS shelters, according to DSS, including Bronx 11 (Allerton), Brooklyn 10 (Bay Ridge) and 11 (Gravesend), Staten Island 2 (Mid-Island), and Queens 6 (Forest Hills) and 11 (Bayside), even after Turning the Tide is fully implemented. However, shelters could be coming to those community districts in the remaining batch of ten shelters that still need to be sited under the plan.

Additionally, there will be 21 specialized shelters in community board districts where such shelters have never been before, including three in the Bronx, seven in Manhattan, seven in Brooklyn, and four in Queens.

Neha Sharma, associate press secretary at the Department of Social Services, told Gotham Gazette that the city expects all 90 planned shelters to be sited "by the end of this year" and most to be operational by the end of next year, which is when Mayor de Blasio leaves office due to term limits. She noted that DSS has “a responsibility to make sure neighborhoods that never had shelters have the resources to support those who need them.”

According to Sharma, Turning the Tide “represents this administration’s holistic effort to really change the way we provide shelter” and “transform the physical footprint of shelters in this city.” Sharma stressed that the pre-de Blasio shelter system was “built up over several decades” and reflects “about forty years of inherited policy.”

DSS’ focus when opening new shelters is making sure communities have the resources to assist those experiencing homelessness within those communities, Sharma said, adding, “as we right-size the geographic footprint of the shelter system, the idea is making sure all communities share in this responsibility and have the resources they’d need to offer anyone from the community or neighboring communities to stabilize their lives there.”

Jacquelyn Simone, a policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, told Gotham Gazette that “it is possible the administration may be on track with the goals they’ve set. However, it remains to be seen if that capacity will be able to meet the needs in light of the economic devastation brought about by this pandemic.” She criticized the mayor’s homelesness policies as lacking a focus on permanent housing and said “the commitment for permanent housing for homeless people has been inadequate to date.”

“We were disappointed at the time [Turning the Tide] came out that the administration was projecting they were only going to be able to decrease the number of people in shelters by about 2,500...and based their capacity planning on that very unambitious goal,” said Simone.

Simone sees a “bifurcation of responsibilities in City Hall where there’s one side of the government that works on homelessness issues and there’s one side that works on housing issues” and that “those issues are treated separately instead of recognizing that housing is the answer to homelessness.”

Coalition for the Homeless and other housing advocates have been critical of the mayor’s handling of the controversy surrounding the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side being used as a temporary shelter. Simone said that “Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly alluded to this Turning the Tide goal to get out of commercial hotels as an excuse” for moving unhoused persons out of the Lucerne. He did so during September 10 and September 14 press conferences, during the height of the controversy, as well as at other times.

Simone believes that the Lucerne saga will have ripple effects throughout the city, where she is already seeing shelter sitings being contested in “almost every neighborhood, unfortunately,” where sitings are being attempted. She also believes that “the mayor’s capitulation will only make these shelter siting issues more challenging than they already were.”

She explained that by agreeing to move the unhoused persons from the hotel, de Blasio has “emboldened other NIMBY groups throughout the city and we’re already seeing other neighborhoods object to the presence of homeless New Yorkers nearby because they’ve received a very clear message from City Hall that the Mayor won’t defend homeless New Yorkers and his priority is to instead defend this vocal group of NIMBYs.”

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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
   

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been updated to reflect that the de Blasio administration is planning to have all 90 new shelters sited by the end of 2020 and to correct the pronoun used for Neha Sharma - we regret the original error.

City Council Speaker Unveils Comprehensive Planning Legislation


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New York City development (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


City Council Speaker Corey Johnson on Wednesday unveiled legislation that would overhaul New York City’s long-term planning processes, eliminating duplicative procedures, streamlining agency coordination, and establishing a more proactive, holistic approach to land use and budgeting that prioritizes racial and economic justice. 

For decades, the city’s zoning, land use, and development have been subject to disparate sets of mandates and guidelines, some overlapping and redundant, in the City Charter, the city’s foundational governing document. There are more than a dozen planning documents that determine how infrastructure is built and how communities and boroughs grow. 

Over the last two years, Johnson and his colleagues, particularly Council Members Brad Lander and Antonio Reynoso, have been attempting to reform those processes into one centralized comprehensive approach that would act as an overarching strategy for everything from housing creation to school construction, public spaces, transit access, and economic development. The approach would bring about more equitable and sustainable growth across the city, addressing long-standing disparities and needs, particularly in Black and brown communities, while also meeting citywide goals.

Council members along with the Thriving Communities coalition of advocates and experts unsuccessfully proposed such a comprehensive planning framework before a Charter Revision Commission last year. They sought to have the commission present the policy to voters in the form of a ballot question, but the commission decided against including it in its final list of ballot proposals. 

“We have a piecemeal and top-down approach to land use and planning and we can't afford to carry that ineffective approach into our future. The stakes are just too high,” Johnson said Wednesday, as he announced the new legislation and released an accompanying report, “Planning Together.” The report outlines the city’s broken planning procedures that have created inequities and critiques city government’s inability to realistically evaluate, budget, and build major infrastructure projects through the capital budget.

The report and the legislation, Johnson said, would “give us tangible and useful tools to plan for our future...We're going to have clearly-defined, measurable, citywide goals, and every neighborhood is going to develop their own land use plan. These are real concrete things that New Yorkers can actually wrap their heads around.” 

Johnson was joined at a virtual rally to announce the report and legislation by Reynoso and Lander, as well as Council Members Vanessa Gibson, who chairs the Council capital budget subcommittee, Carlina Rivera, and Ben Kallos, as well as planning experts and advocates from Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, the Pratt Center for Community Development, the Municipal Art Society, and the Regional Plan Association. 

The new legislation, which includes City Charter amendments, would incorporate and re-jigger all the current elements of city planning into a comprehensive planning strategy over ten-year cycles, mandating a regular effort at thoughtful, coordinated growth and that decisions on land use and the city budget actively seek to rectify historic inequities across the city for low-income communities of color and to prevent the displacement that may be caused by forces of gentrification.

The plan will be a living document, changing every five years to keep up with the evolving needs of the city and based on regular engagement with communities. If the legislation is passed in 2021, the ten-year process would begin in 2022, with a Long Term Planning Steering Committee and an assessment of needs from community boards. The plan itself would first be published in 2025, and then amended in 2030 as citywide goals, needs and land use actions are reassessed.

It would require regular appraisals of infrastructure needs, short- and long-term risks and the impact of land use decisions. The proposed bill would require that the city prioritize community input and create new, local decision-making bodies to weigh in on land use and development processes. And it would set quantifiable targets for “housing, jobs, open space, resiliency infrastructure, schools, transportation, and other infrastructure.”  

The legislation was built off the Planning Together report, which includes, as Johnson called it, an indictment of “bureaucracy at its worst” under past mayoral administrations that created siloed processes, inefficient coordination across city agencies, and lacked proactive planning for community needs. Those problems, the report argues, have only worsened under Mayor Bill de Blasio and have served to effectively water down his attempt at holistic planning through OneNYC, his vision for equitable growth that retooled former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC framework. “The lack of proactive public engagement or buy-in from elected officials and communities has allowed the significance and utility of PlaNYC/OneNYC to fade over time,” the report says. 

It highlighted what has become a central issue for de Blasio’s affordable housing program: vociferous community opposition to individual neighborhood rezoning and land use proposals. The mayor’s administration has sought to upzone swathes of neighborhoods to allow for more density and to encourage developers to build a combination of market-rate and rent-restricted housing. But time and again, those rezonings have been met with widespread resistance and even legal challenges, some of which have successfully derailed the administration’s plans. The ones that have been passed, in coordination with the City Council, have all been in communities of color. In his final year in office, de Blasio is looking to advance rezoning plans in Soho and Gowanus.

“That contention is, in part, due to a growing distrust of the process and a sense among some community stakeholders that the City and private developers are often unfairly targeting neighborhoods—particularly low-income communities of color—to bear the burdens of growth in exchange for long-overdue investments like affordable housing, schools, child care centers, street safety improvements, parks, and playgrounds,” the Council’s report notes.

Johnson said he is hoping to soon hold a hearing on the legislation.

“It has long past time, long overdue that we implement these best practices that nearly every other city in the world uses to prioritize its spending,” said Council Member Gibson. 

“[A]dvocates are marching today as they have often in the past for an approach to land use that starts from listening to communities about their needs, rather than starts by responding to a proposal from a developer,” said Council Member Lander. “A comprehensive plan, developed in conversation with communities grounded in principles of fair housing, equity, livable neighborhoods, and sustainability will help give us the tools to do that.” 

An equity-focused comprehensive plan “will help move us away from this ad hoc approach to planning that only perpetuates the existing inequalities,” said Barika Williams, executive director of ANHD, which is a leader of the Thriving Communities Coalition.

Council Member Reynoso said comprehensive planning would ensure that “the burden of building ourselves out of any crisis doesn't fall on strictly poor Black and brown neighborhoods. We get to have a conversation about how all neighborhoods can contribute.” Reynoso recently killed a de Blasio administration attempt to rezone a portion of his district in Bushwick after the sides could not come to agreement on key pieces of the puzzle.

The comprehensive planning legislation is of a piece with Johnson’s policy agenda as speaker. He successfully created a “streets master plan” for traffic and pedestrian infrastructure, which was signed into law by the mayor at the end of last year (though it’s implementation has been delayed due to the pandemic). Johnson has pushed through legislation to codify the mayor’s Office of Food Policy into law and to mandate a ten-year plan to tackle hunger and food inequity. He called for municipal control of the city’s subways and buses in his first State of the City speech last year. In January this year, he proposed a homelessness reduction plan, though he has yet to produce a strategy for building affordable housing which he promised at the time as a companion plan. In March, Johnson also released an in-depth report and a series of proposals to mitigate climate change and build resiliency infrastructure. The plan was originally meant to be released in his State of the City speech, which was cancelled because of the pandemic.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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