BY
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
March 12, 2017
Black and Hispanic neighborhoods struggling with poverty bear the brunt of the battle to shelter the homeless, not affluent white communities, a Daily News data analysis shows.
Critics say this racial imbalance is likely to be reinforced by Mayor de Blasio’s new plan to keep homeless individuals in the communities where they become homeless.
“This basically comes down to segregation,” said Councilmember Donovan Richards, whose majority-black Queens district has more shelter beds than any other district in the city.
“This is where the mayor’s plan falls short,” Richards said. “If you're saying that communities like East New York are still shouldering the majority of responsibility, how do you say it’s an equal responsibility?”
In the struggle to combat homelessness, a racial and class divide can be seen across the city where some neighborhoods host hundreds of shelter beds — while others host none. The Daily News compared the racial balance and poverty rates with the number of shelter beds, cluster site apartments and hotel rooms located in each community district.
The data show the five community districts with the highest number of shelter beds in the city (Jamaica/Hollis in Queens, Concourse/Highbridge in the Bronx, Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn and East Harlem) are all majority black or Hispanic. The racial tilt is even more pronounced in the outer boroughs, where 17 of the 20 community districts with the heaviest shelter burden are at least 75% minority.
Meanwhile, six of seven community districts that currently host zero shelter beds (Tottenville and South Beach in Staten Island, Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and Forest Hills, Queens) are majority white.
Only three of the top 20 community districts for shelter beds are majority white: Murray Hill/Stuyvesant Town and the Upper West Side in Manhattan and Greenpoint/Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
For Richards, who represents Far Rockaway, Hollis and Springfield Gardens, this is simply unfair. His district hosts nearly 3,000 shelter beds — the most in the city, data show. Most of these homeless families and individuals stay in hotels that cost on average $350 a night. In a one block area near JFK Airport off South Conduit, there are four hotels housing hundreds of homeless individuals — Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Best Western and Metro Inn.
His district has a relatively low poverty rate (between 8% and 20%), but communities with high levels of poverty also bear this burden far more than affluent zip codes.
Of the top 20 community districts with the highest number of homeless beds/units, 15 have poverty rates over 20%. Six have poverty rates over 50%.
The mayor, who has watched the number of homeless in city shelters rise from 53,000 to over 60,000 during his tenure, is struggling to reverse the course in a balanced way.
In unveiling his latest blueprint for reform Feb. 28, he vowed to shut down the cluster sites and hotels and build 90 new shelters citywide through 2027 but promised to try and distribute the burden across all neighborhoods, whether rich or poor.
He also said he’d push to keep people in the neighborhoods where they became homeless, allowing families to attend the same schools and houses of worship they attended before they became homeless. It also quells fears that strangers are descending into neighborhoods.
Critics say that approach reinforces the current disparity because few residents in shelters come from communities that are predominantly white and affluent. And what about communities that are housing more than their fair share of homeless from outside their district? Will the city move those families to other shelters to even the score?
De Blasio spokeswoman Jaclyn Rothenberg said the imbalance will change as the city shuts down cluster sites and hotels and adds shelters.
“Our shelter system is a critical safety net meant to help homeless neighbors from every community get back on their feet," she said. "Our borough-based plan aims to keep people closer to their support networks, schools and jobs. Smart homeless policy cannot right a centuries-long history of wrongs that have led to a division of segregation in our city or anywhere else."
City Hall officials said homeless individuals come from every part of the city, so they predict that ultimately communities that have never had a shelter will eventually have them and those that host many shelters will have fewer.
But I. Daneek Miller, a Queens councilman with a large number of shelters in his predominantly black district, called that approach "problematic."
“The majority of these folks that are in the (Community Board 12 and 13 shelters) now do not reside in 12 and 13,” he said. “Are we then going to remove those from the geographic areas and send them to where they come from? I doubt that's going to happen. We have to figure this out in another way because obviously we're starting from behind the eight ball.”
Miller and others say it's more important for the homeless to be placed in communities with strong support, including good schools, transportation, job opportunities and low crime rates.
“I like the ideas of keeping people in their communities," said Richards. "But at the end of the day, you can find places where there are adequate schools, where there are opportunities and housing that's affordable."
When de Blasio tried to turn a hotel into a 110-unit men's shelter in predominantly white, middle income Maspeth, Queens last fall, the neighborhood erupted. Protestors ultimately forced the provider who was going to run the shelter to pull out.
Last week, furious residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, cited the Maspeth reversal as they contested a new men's shelter set to open soon in their neighborhood during a public hearing. Residents of Brooklyn’s Community Board 8, which is 67% black with a poverty rate of 26%, railed against what they called an oversaturation of shelters in their neighborhood. They have 679 beds.
Some have demanded that new shelters be placed in more affluent neighborhoods with few shelters, such as the mayor's neighborhood, Park Slope. The mayor's Community District 6 is 75% white and host to a relatively modest 267 beds.
“Go into communities that have zero that have not had their fair share. Have them address this," said Richards.
One councilmember representing Maspeth, the majority-white Maspeth neighborhood where protestors blocked a men's shelter, said there's a compromise that could balance the scales.
Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley's district includes CB 5, which is 82.7% white with a poverty rate of 14.7 %. It has just 30 beds. Crowley said it was unfair to single out Maspeth because two adjacent community boards in her district have more than there fair share of homeless shelters. She suggested de Blasio should just expand the target areas when placing shelters.
"It's too narrow," she said. "If you're going homeless in the community, we will take care of you. But it's not as narrow as the mayor is saying it is.”
No comments:
Post a Comment