On December 21st, the longest night of the year, communities across America observe Homeless Memorial Day. Last year, 175 communities held an event. But most people have never heard of Homeless Memorial Day, and that's unfortunate.
Though it's been held for 25 years, it's usually not covered by the media. If ever it deserves coverage and thought, though, it's this year in New York City.
A month ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development published its "Point-in-Time" homelessness count. They reported a 4 percent decline in homelessness across America in 2013 including significant decreases in urban areas. But in New York City, HUD's count, supervised by the city itself, documented a dramatic jump in homelessness.
Homeless advocates have been lamenting the record number of 57,000 people experiencing homelessness in the city. But the HUD count for one night in January 2013, estimated the city's homeless population at 64,060. That's a new record — in a bad way. It's enough people to fill Yankee stadium and jam Times Square, too.
Highlighting further the plight of children like Dasani — whose life was so powerfully described in last week’s bombshell New York Times series — HUD reported a 13 percent New York City increase including 39,601 people in homeless families. Tragically, their report for the city's homeless population, number of homeless families and homeless children may be the highest ever reported.
That makes Homeless Memorial Day 2013 especially poignant.
Homeless Memorial Day remembers those who died in our community this year without a home. Many of them might have no memorial remembrance at all if not for Homeless Memorial Day.
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One person I'll be remembering is Jose Perez. He died without a home on September 12, 2013, in Elmhurst Hospital. I never actually met him, but I'll be thinking of him.
Mr. Perez was brutally beaten in Sabba Park, Sunnyside, Queens, on September 7th not far from where I live. He was assaulted simply because he was homeless and vulnerable. It certainly wasn't a robbery - homeless people are easy targets but not very promising victims for theft.
He died at the age of 42. That's way too young — but not all that young for a chronically homeless person.
Homeless Memorial Day reminds us how dramatically the trauma, stress and exposure of homelessness rob chronically homeless people of years of life.
A child born in New York City today has a life expectancy of over 80 years. Studies document chronically homeless peoples' life expectancy is in their 40s or 50s. That's three or four decades lost, needlessly, to homelessness.
Senseless attacks on homeless people are increasing according to an annual Coalition for the Homeless study reporting over 1,000 documented attacks in the last decade. That's based on very incomplete reporting because most attacks on homeless people aren't reported. Sometimes even if they are reported by the victim they go unrecorded in official statistics. That's why a quarter of the attacks reported are fatal — not because 25 percent of the beatings end in death but because most nonfatal attacks aren't recorded.
Most victims are men in their 40s — just like Mr. Perez. Most perpetrators are male, too, but about half are 20 years old or younger. The youngest documented "hate crime" attack against a homeless person was by a 9 year old. A study at California State University in San Bernardino found homeless people had a greater victimization rate — 66 percent annually — "than any other group in the western industrialized world."
But attacks and traumas are hardly the major health hazard of chronic homelessness recognized on Homeless Memorial Day. Epidemiological studies have found homelessness itself is a cause of morbidity and premature death. Those who practice street medicine and provide health care to homeless people have long known that homelessness is a public health crisis, an aggravating condition for disease and an interference with effective treatment.
It was eye-opening research from the city's Departments of Health and Homeless Services that found age-adjusted death rate for single adults in city shelters to be twice that of the city's general population. They reported homeless adults represented well under 1 percent of the population but over 1.6 percent of the hospitalizations, with their hospital admissions lasting more than 12 percent longer than average. They found some diseases rare in the general population rampant in shelters.
For instance, their report put TB rates in city shelters at 11 times that of the city overall. The HIV diagnosis rate was an incredible 16 times that of the city. Even with heroic efforts to get homeless people off the streets in bitter cold weather, there are dozens of exposure deaths in New York City annually. Mental illness and emotional distress is epidemic among people experiencing homelessness.
Homeless Persons' Memorial Day recognizes the threat to health and life that living without a home carries. Homeless advocate Bobby Watts coined the phrase "death by park bench" in painting the picture of the homelessness health hazard.
If you want to hear more about the scourge of homelessness, its health consequences, how homelessness can be overcome and to memorialize those who passed in New York City this year without a home, there are several events being held in Gotham.
Two outstanding observances are the Picture the Homeless Memorial Service at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South at 6 p.m. on Friday evening, Dec. 20; and 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 21, at the Care for the Homeless client leaders' event at New Song Church, 2230 Frederick Douglass Blvd. between 120th and 121st streets in Harlem.
Homeless Memorial Day also recognizes these deaths are avoidable. Better policies could end modern day homelessness as we know it and end the health hazard and premature death sentences it carries with it.
Jeff Foreman is policy director at Care for the Homeless. Follow him on twitter @JeffForeman2
This week The New York Times is featuring amazing coverage of homelessness in our city, in the form of a captivating series of articles about a 13-year-old girl named Dasani — after the water of the same name. The coverage is nothing short of extraordinary.
First, the sheer depth of it is remarkable. It began on Monday with an article and picture filling almost the entire Times front page above the fold, with four full pages of photos and coverage inside. That's an amazing amount of space for any story.
On Tuesday it was the front page again, and three full inside pages. The series continues.
New York is a city where homeless advocates often criticize the lack of in-depth coverage of homelessness and poverty. We can be a city where people walk by homeless people in the street daily but never acknowledge them and rarely see them at all. We're a city long suffering homeless "fatigue."
The Times coverage might do something about that.
The articles put a face on homelessness. It's an engaging, captivating child's face. Precisely for that reason it's difficult to read; but it makes homelessness personal to anyone who does.
Dasani is an amazingly resilient and optimistic child living through a nightmare. She is described as 4-foot-8-inches, has incredible responsibilities for siblings at her tender age and lives in a city shelter for homeless families.
This isn't just any shelter. It's Auburn Place, a city-run facility Dasani refers to as "the jail." It's a Dickensian horror show of a place where Times reporter Andrea Elliot finds Dasani, who sleeps near a mop bucket that serves as her family's toilet, amid mice and rotting walls, to life.
The Times articles aren't the first media tour of the substandard Auburn shelter. A year ago, when Mayor Bloomberg opined that the increased average length of stay for city shelter residents — it's well over a year now on average — was because the shelters had become "so pleasurable" residents didn't want to leave, the NY Daily News reviewed Auburn. They described it as a place housing homeless families with "rats coming through the walls, worms in the bathroom and living conditions so squalid that one man compared them with his stint in prison."
{pullquote}The plan to end homelessness in New York City would include reinstating the priority for using some portion of the city's federal resources to house homeless families.{/pullquote}
The Times articles paint vividly, too. They tell the story of homeless children suffering "staggering societal costs" at the expensive of their opportunity for a decent education, a real chance to develop earning power or flee poverty, often leading to psychological trauma, disease, addictions and prison.
The Times also laments results for 22,000 homeless children a night in New York City shelters, which they say is the highest number since the Great Depression. But it might be worse than that.
Each year, HUD conducts a national "Point-In-Time" count of people experiencing homelessness in America. Their 2013 PIT count of one night in January reported progress. They found homelessness down 4 percent across America.
Sadly, New York City bucked that trend. HUD estimated on that night there were 64,060 homeless people in New York City. That may be an all-time record high. Worse, it included 39,601 people in homeless families.
The Times series also visits the policy choices "intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant" and meant to reduce the number of homeless. First there was the elimination of the historic targeting of some of the city's public housing and Section 8 housing vouchers specifically to aid homeless families. But the homeless population wasn't reduced — it increased.
Then there was the elimination of a city subsidy to move homeless families from shelter to housing. Again, policymakers felt the meager subsidy was just drawing people into shelters. After its elimination, the number of homeless people, especially families with children, increased. It's more accurate to say it exploded.
Advocates argue the situation is all the more tragic because it doesn't have to be this way. There are real, evidence-based plans that have worked to prevent homelessness and reduce the number of homeless people. If policy choices helped get us into this mess, they say, better policies could get us out.
The plan to end homelessness in New York City would include reinstating the priority for using some portion of the city's federal resources to house homeless families. It would include more affordable housing targeted to very-low income people and supportive housing for those who need it. It would include a housing voucher program to move homeless people to permanent housing and a strategy of better coordinating government efforts of major "feeders" of homelessness such as aging out of foster care without a home, getting time-limited out of domestic violence shelters or leaving prison without housing.
Advocates say these proposals won't cost more than we spend now on programs that haven't worked. In most cases they save money, because subsidies, supportive housing and the like are far less expensive than shelters.
But what has enthralled us this week is not policy choices but the hard to fathom story of an 11-year-old honor student making her way through seemingly impossible obstacles, and the chance — just the chance —that she might succeed.
We're charmed by her optimism against all odds. She tells the Times reporter she won't fall into the pitfalls all around. She believes that Auburn will be just a "pit stop" for her. She says she has "a lot of possibilities."
We are horrified by her challenges, and saddened when she calls herself "ghetto."
The Times called the series "Invisible Child." But of course the articles have made her saga all so visible to us. That's a fantastic accomplishment.
It's also a responsibility. If we now know there are children forced to live like this in our city — 280 of them at Auburn, and at least 22,000 more — we should do something about it. And we could. Which leaves only one question: What will we do?
Jeff Foreman is Policy Director for Care for the Homeless in New York City. Follow him on twitter at @JeffForeman2.
After 12 years in office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg will have left an indelible fiscal stamp on New York City that will present his successor — and any progressive agenda — with formidable challenges.
There is, foremost, a four-year financial plan that looks sound in the short run, but masks future labor cost problems for the new mayor; a more centralized, less transparent budget process that has reduced public participation in making fiscal policy; and a weakened set of City Charter-mandated performance indicators that now obscures actual policy outcomes.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Bloomberg leaves a legacy of a trickle-down theory of philanthropy and privatization that sees fiscal and policy reform as best spun from private, not public sources.
In the immediate case, the mayor leaves a $72.7 billion one-year city budget which, according to a modification released last week, will actually end this fiscal year (in June 2014) with a $1.6 billion surplus. The new modification has even better news. The fiscal year 2015 budget — which in June’s financial plan was projected to have a $2 billion deficit — is, four months later, now balanced. The presumption is that the mayor-elect will inherit 18 months of a balanced budget.
"We’re proud of all we’ve achieved — and now we want the next Administration to do even better," Bloomberg said in his weekly radio address broadcast on WINS-AM on Sunday. "The balanced budget we’re handing off to them now — more than seven months before the next fiscal year begins — will help them get off to the best possible start."
But that June financial plan for fiscal years 2014 to 2017, as well as the new November modification, are disingenuous. Recent reports from all four fiscal monitors — city and state comptrollers, the state Financial Control Board, and the Independent Budget Office – all point to retroactive and future labor costs that could add billions of dollars to the plan. The IBO, for one, has laid out a scenario that could cost the city nearly $12 billion more over the next four years.
In terms of managing city finances, Bloomberg has expanded mayoral fiscal power, weakening the fiscal clout of the City Council and frustrating planning in city agencies and nonprofit agencies. At the same time, mandated accountability mechanisms, such as the mayor’s management report, provide little information about the impact of the outgoing mayor’s major priorities, such as education reform, expanded privatization, and reductions in human and social services.
The mayor’s focus on privatization has changed the funding and governance structures of reform in New York City. New charter schools are almost exclusively privately run. Many charter schools have attracted significant private funding, from foundations and wealthy individuals.
{pullquote}Bloomberg leaves a legacy of a trickle-down theory of philanthropy and privatization that sees fiscal and policy reform as best spun from private, not public sources.{/pullquote}
The mayor’s own foundation has contributed millions of dollars to city organizations that also receive public funds. Similarly, several small anti-poverty reform programs — introduced late in the Bloomberg tenure — are largely funded by private money and managed in large part by non-city agencies.
The ultimate impact of private funding of charter schools, cultural, social, and anti-poverty programs won’t be known for some time, but the private, philanthropic origins of this — unfolding as the Occupy Wall Street movement dramatized increasing inequality in New York City – have only expanded the financial and governance power of private wealth over public policy in the City. This development promises to be a stout barrier to any public, progressive reform agenda.
The mayor’s budget legacy is the product of 12 years of balanced budgets, crafted, often brilliantly, in the face of two major economic, social, and political challenges — the shocks of September 11, 2001, and then the financial crash and subsequent recession of the late 2000s. Those two crisis periods were, however, resolved in quite different ways, and illustrate the range of choices a new mayor and new City Council will consider.
The post-9/11 financial crisis — which slashed city tax revenues and soon threatened the city with a more than $6 billion deficit — presented an enormous challenge to the new mayor. Bloomberg responded effectively and equitably, in November 2002, with a controversial package of service cuts and new taxes, roughly $3 billion of cuts and $3 billion in new revenues.
The $3 billion in property, personal income, and sales tax increases were unpopular, especially the 18.5 percent increase in the average property tax rate (cut back by the City Council from his proposed 25 percent increase), the first rate increase in ten years.
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But the tax package was reasonably progressive, with higher income taxpayers paying higher rates for three years. (The sales tax, the city’s most regressive tax, was increased by only 0.125 percent and only for two years). Along with additional help from state and federal governments, the budget crisis was rather quickly brought under control. The plan, with its focus on shared sacrifice, in retrospect if not at the time, was a triumph for the new mayor.
The second crisis, the financial collapse of 2008 and subsequent budget crisis, was resolved in a quite different way: the regressive city sales tax was increased from 4.0 percent to 4.5 percent — and made permanent; the other major taxes were not tapped; and there followed a nearly-exclusive focus on reductions in city spending. In what has continued as a five year, nearly year-round series of budget modifications, mostly cuts in city spending, the city “saved” a lot of money.
Today the current budget is over $6 billion less than it would otherwise have been, absent the modifications. The cumulative effect on services, while only marginally documented in mayoral performance documents, has had clearly negative impacts, especially in public education.
The progressive income tax rates in place from 2003 through 2005 (and in place through most of the 1990s) would have been a reasonable alternative to the relentless succession of budget cuts. The mayor, however, has simply argued that wealthy New Yorkers already pay the bulk of city personal income taxes (true) and might well move out of the city (unlikely).
By far the biggest fiscal problem for the new mayor will be the nearly $12 billion “gamble,” as the IBO has put it, that the last Bloomberg financial plan includes. All city labor unions have been without a contract for the last three years, the city’s teachers and school administrators for the last five years.
{pullquote}The post-9/11 financial crisis presented an enormous challenge to the new mayor. Bloomberg responded effectively and equitably.{/pullquote}
The IBO’s March 2013 analysis of the mayor’s then-preliminary budget for fiscal year 2014 notes Bloomberg’s “assumptions that the municipal labor unions will accept settlements with no wage increases for contracts that expired after 2010 and that the unions for the teachers and principals will forgo the two years of 4.0 percent raises other unions received [in 2008-2010 negotiations]. With virtually no money set aside to pay for wage increases prior to 2013, the financial plan gambles that the unions and the next mayor will agree to no retroactive raises.”
The IBO estimates that paying the teachers and administrators the 4.0 percent increase for the 2008-2010 period that other unions received, and assuming all union members receive a retroactive annual increase of 2.0 percent for two years after 2010, the cost would be $4.5 billion through last year’s (fiscal 2013) budget, and $1.8 billion annually thereafter through fiscal year 2017. Total potential cost over four years: $11.7 billion ($4.5 billion, plus 4 x $1.8 billion).
The just-released November modification shows that there will be a surplus of $1.6 billion at the end of this fiscal year in June, which is used to pre-pay expenses in the next year’s budget. This is much less than surpluses in recent years — and, again, assumes no costs in new labor negotiations. Another fiscal problem is that the mayor has used up the one big reserve fund, his own Retiree Health Benefit Fund (more on this below), which, although it was designed to pay for costs way down the road, he has used as a convenient budget-balancing tool.
As the state comptroller comments in his July 2013 report: “The city has come to rely on the annual surplus and reserves built up during the last economic expansion to balance its budget, and now the city has exhausted most of these reserves.”
Created in 2007 by the mayor and Council to build a long-term reserve fund to pay for the rising future health of city retirees (the city’s liability is now at $88 billion), the fund reached a peak of $3.1 billion. But little more than $100 million is left, according to the state Financial Control Board’s July 2013 report.
As an example of Bloomberg’s fiscal style, the state comptroller points out that the current fiscal 2014 budget “is balanced with $4.5 billion in nonrecurring [i.e., one-time] resources, including $2.7 billion surplus resources and $1 billion in reserves from the last economic expansion.” In other words, the new mayor will have little fiscal cushion should the collective bargaining results (or any surprise events) add major new costs to the financial plan.
The new mayor’s first chance to formally affect the city budget will be in February, when he will release a preliminary budget for fiscal year 2015 (beginning July 1, 2014) and a modified four-year financial plan.
While questions about the fiscal health of the city in the short and long run will be paramount in the early months of 2014, there are questions about budget process and management mechanisms that deserve similar attention. For instance, the success of the Bloomberg administration’s 2008-2013 budget-balancing stemmed largely from its ability to change the budget clock and control fiscal information.
In its rush to accumulate an ultimate $6 billion in savings, the mayor telescoped the traditional budget process by overriding the usual February-June budget process set out in the City Charter and made it effectively a year-round process. No sooner were budgets adopted in June than they were effectively modified almost immediately: with public warnings to city agencies to cut back spending in the summer and major modifications announced as early as September.
The February-June schedule lays out formal, well-publicized mayoral presentations — a preliminary budget in February, an executive budget in May — which build in time for City Council hearings, opportunities for public access to the process, and council/mayoral negotiations. Big changes made in the fall don’t permit this full democratic exchange.
{pullquote}A more subtle way in which the mayor has controlled the budget process has been through his budget office’s control of information — much of which is not shared with the public.{/pullquote}
The City Council, for instance, could argue that the sudden increase in the budget surplus, announced last week, could have been used to increase city services this year. Autumn modifications don’t get thorough reviews, and the Council is generally ill-equipped to challenge the changes. The early modifications in a budget year also disrupt planning and management in city agencies and the large number of nonprofit agencies that contract with the city to provide public services.
A more subtle way in which the mayor has controlled the budget process has been through his budget office’s control of information — much of which is not shared with the public. There are any number of ways in which the city’s budget office can manage and then explain (or not) its budget planning to the public. The Bloomberg staff has probably not invented any new techniques, but in the scale and sophistication of its close-to-the-vest work, it may be unmatched.
There are several ways, for instance, for a mayor to tamp down expectations and maximize mayoral discretion. Revenue projections may be a bit under-estimated; projected expenditures may be a bit over-estimated. Projects can be delayed. Economic projections may be on the lower range of conventional projections. Money put aside to pay for certain anticipated expenses may not be needed. One-time revenues — like selling city land or taxi medallions — can be moved from one year to another.
These techniques are perfectly illustrated in the new November modification. That surprise $1.6 billion surprise stems from several sources. Tax revenues were (four months ago) underestimated by $1.1 billion for the current year. A reserve fund of $450 million was tapped for $300 million, only four months into the fiscal year; and re-financing of city debt — not anticipated four months ago? — will save $535 million over four years.
One of the most effective of tamp-down strategies is the so-called “budget dance” through which the mayor each year cuts a few hundred million dollars from programs favored by the City Council. The mayor and Council fight over those cuts during the spring negotiations and the mayor eventually restores most of the cuts (generally for only one year, to keep the game going).
By thus focusing on less than 0.5 percent of the City’s $70 billion budget, the mayor diverts attention from the remaining 99.5 percent of his proposed budget. Big ideas — like re-introducing progressive tax rates or reviewing a system of housing and economic tax exemptions that cost the city billions of dollars — don’t get a hearing. Instead, the mayor and Council fight over pennies.
Typical result? This past June the mayor proposed a $1.00 increase in the public school lunch fee (to $2.50). The Council negotiated the proposed increase down to 25 cents — although the City Comptroller noted in his July report that the remaining 75 cent increase remains in next year’s budget.
One of the biggest areas of budget savings in recent years has been the low interest rates for a city that borrows billions of dollars each year for capital improvements. The budget office has repeatedly overestimated the cost of borrowing — as they in effect acknowledged last week — which then makes it easier for the mayor to claim there’s no money for new proposals.
According to the state comptroller’s July 2013 report, for instance, the city has refinanced $18 billion of debt (one-quarter of the city’s debt) for cumulative savings of $1.5 billion through fiscal year 2014.
What these budget maneuvers suggest is a consistent political strategy that anticipates and discourages any pressures from the City Council or others to fund new programs or resist proposed cuts. The use of reserve funds, one-time revenues, and the depletion of the health-benefit fund, in particular, have meant that the Bloomberg budgets for the past five years have reflected short-term, opaque planning and an unwillingness to consider alternative strategies.
Then there is the question of accountability, the flip side of budgeting. What are the effects of 12 years of spending plans? The official answer is ostensibly in the City Charter-mandated Mayor’s Management Report, issued twice a year, in which a mayor is asked, first, to lay out his fiscal and program goals, and, second, to provide indicators that measure the success of those goals.
The Bloomberg administration, however, has stripped the MMR not only of data, but also of language. There is little or no data provided, for instance, on many of the mayor’s biggest policies and programs: education reform, economic development, contracting, and homelessness services. There is no overall analysis of data; there are occasional paragraphs, but mostly a litany of one-line, bulleted comments.
Nobody reads the MMR anymore. An IBO blog, “How the MMR Went MIA,” noted three years ago that there was an almost complete absence of major press notice of that year’s MMR (only 145 words in the Daily News), and concluded that “the report’s stature has clearly declined.” The New York Times, however, did devote 443 words to the last Bloomberg MMR, released in September.
{pullquote}The Bloomberg administration, however, has stripped the MMR not only of data, but also of language.{/pullquote}
But the Times found little of substance. More than a fifth of the Times’ report was devoted to the MMR’s summary of 12 years of work with the “perennial challenge” of graffiti. It turns out that getting rid of graffiti was transferred from the Department of Sanitation to the Economic Development Corporation (the mayor’s economic office) in 2011. Who knew? In any case, in fiscal year 2013, the EDC “scrubbed off more than four million square feet of the city’s landscape … the equivalent of 93 acres.”
It wasn’t always so. In 1991, The New York Times reported that then-mayor David Dinkins’ first MMR “painted a dark picture of New York City’s growing social problems and service burdens.” When Harvey Robins, Dinkins’ director of operations whose office produces the MMR was asked by reporters about the tendency of such summaries to ‘cook’ the hundreds of pages of statistical indicators in the most favorable way, he said, ‘Not only didn’t we cook them. This year, we didn’t even put them on the stove.’”
Eight years later, the Times’ Michael Powell said of the Dinkins’ tenure that “through the years of recession, as the city lost hundreds of jobs, [Dinkins] spoke of his successes and failures, often with brutal candor. His successors [Rudy Giuliani and Bloomberg] have pruned the statistical reports of some negative indicators and tend to place a relentless emphasis on the positive.”