Vol. 79/No. 2      January 26, 2015

The figure has been steadily rising as the bosses have carried out a relentless, grinding assault on working people here and across the country. Millions lack jobs, or face part-time or temporary work, and wages are stagnant. Over the last five years, during a so-called economic recovery, homelessness here has soared by 52 percent, reported the New York Daily News.

“For the one in five homeless parents who work full-time, a steady paycheck doesn’t guarantee steady housing,” wrote Ralph da Costa Nunez, president of the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness, in the Huffington Post. “In 2013 they earned roughly $24,000,” he said, way below what’s needed in New York to make ends meet. Some 40 percent of those residing in shelters are children.

De Blasio’s plan, initiated four months ago, is to offer landlords city-financed rental subsidies to move 4,000 families out of shelters by next September. Individuals will pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, and the city will cover the rest for a period of three to five years.

“The program got off to a slow start,” a Dec. 29 article on WNYC.org reported. Because property owners’ goal is to gouge as high a rent as possible, not to assure people housing, “homeless residents had a hard time convincing landlords to accept the subsidies. But the administration agreed to pay the landlords more.”

De Blasio — a Democrat who ran as a progressive, promising big changes for the common man — is pursuing a program similar to one instituted by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “The problem is it didn’t work,” noted Nunez. “The number of families who returned to shelter, homeless again, more than doubled, from one in four in 2005 to nearly two in three in 2013, when 63 percent of families placed in apartments returned to city shelters.”  
 
 
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