New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced November 16 that the intake center, which he called “a symbol of shame,” would be torn down and replaced by a $30 million facility that is scheduled to be finished in 2008.

The one-story windowless brick building was run down and cramped. Working people who ended up there often found themselves herded into the center’s hallways and waiting areas for many hours along with hundreds of other families before being sent to a so-called overnight shelter—often arriving there at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. and then being kicked out at 7:00 a.m. The cramped and unsanitary conditions led to the quick spread of illnesses—especially among children—and vermin infestation.

As the number of homeless in the city increased over the past several years—to the current official number of 9,000 families—the inhuman conditions in the EAU had become an embarrassment for the city administration.

The new facility will be larger, with shelter space included to eliminate the late-night busing. But the measures the city has announced along with this new center are aimed at placing the burden of skyrocketing rents, unemployment, and other conditions more squarely on the backs of working people.

“For 20 years, the Emergency Assistance Unit has come to represent confusion and pain for vulnerable families applying for temporary emergency housing,” Bloomberg said. “We are ushering in a new day—a day where families in need are treated with the utmost respect and where our efforts are guided by rational policies.”

As part of Bloomberg’s “new day,” the city decided October 19 to bar homeless families from access to long-term federal housing grants. In the past, homeless families used to be the first in line for such grants, which have been the primary way for thousands of working people to escape from the city’s 200-plus homeless shelters and into more stable housing.

The city government is also planning to replace long-term housing assistance with a one-time five-year housing subsidy. This would offer up to $925-a-month rental subsidy to a single parent with two children, and then gradually decrease the amount each year, eliminating the housing assistance after five years. The city has stopped offering the long-term vouchers altogether, complaining that they have run out of them.

Much of the reporting in the big-business press presented the surge in homelessness as being caused by those seeking the long-term subsidy, inferring that this was a scam.

“Ever since word leaked out that the homeless get first dibs on Section 8 housing vouchers, families have thronged the city’s Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx,” the New York Daily News complained. “For anyone willing to stomach the indignities of the shelter system, there was a pot of gold—of sorts—at the end of the journey: a government-backed lifetime housing subsidy.”

In fact, the surge in homelessness—a more than 60 percent increase since 2001—has nothing to do with the word leaking out about a “pot of gold.” The jump coincided with the final cut-off of the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children five years after the Clinton administration ended “welfare as we know it.”

Some have pointed to the similarities between the Clinton-engineered assault on federal Social Security and the New York City government’s new housing assistance plan. “This is the first proposal for a major new housing program in New York that includes a time limit, similar to the one that has attached to cash public assistance since welfare reform passed in 1996,” wrote one columnist in the City Journal, a quarterly magazine published in New York. “The section 8 pot of gold is now empty…. The time has come to make good life decisions, including paying the rent rather than depending on Uncle Sam to do it.”

This falsely presents the Section 8 voucher as a free lunch. The vouchers simply capped rent to a percentage of your income—usually 30 percent. In New York and many cities across the United States, working people often spend closer to half of their income on housing, increasing the grind caused by the steady decrease in real wages.

Bloomberg’s plan will also bar from the shelters homeless families who come back after having been turned down once by social workers. “While the new system may be gentler on families applying for the first time, it will be much more skeptical of families who have applied in the past and been told they already have adequate housing, often with relatives,” the New York Times reported November 17.  
 
 
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