Vol. 73/No. 31      August 17, 2009

The city government has paid for more than 550 homeless families to leave New York since it began a relocation program in 2007. So far people have been sent to 24 states and five continents, most often to Puerto Rico, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, but also to Paris and Johannesburg, South Africa.

The program only requires that the family have someone elsewhere who agrees to take them in. Homeless families can reject the offer and choose to stay in shelters.

There are more than 35,500 individuals living in city shelters—15,000 of them children—as of the end of July, according to the New York City Department of Homeless Services.

The official unemployment rate in June was 9.5 percent in New York City and nationwide. These figures do not include those who the government claims have not looked for a job in the past month or those who are forced to work only part-time hours. Including these categories, 16.5 percent of the workforce is unemployed or underemployed as of June.

“We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance,” Vida Chavez-Downes, director of the “Resource Room,” a city office that helps move the families out of town, told the New York Times. “We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go. Anyone who comes through our door.”

Arnold Cohen, president of the advocacy group Partnership for the Homeless, is critical of the program. “We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless,” he said.

Julie Bosman of the Times notes in a July 29 article that homelessness is “a seemingly intractable problem” for the Bloomberg administration, and the relocation program is “a way of keeping [the homeless] out of the expensive shelter system, which costs $36,000 a year per family.”
 
 
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