Date: 2024-07-17 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017260
Homelessness
Homeless Shelters
The cost of homelessness: Why do two new homeless shelters in Brooklyn cost so much?
Peter Burgess
The cost of homelessness: Why do two new homeless shelters in Brooklyn cost so much? The city needs new shelters, but can we control the costs? “An ever-growing homeless population is unacceptable to the future of New York City — it’s just literally unacceptable. It will not happen on our watch.” That was Bill de Blasio in December 2013, when there were 52,000 people in city shelters. Cut to July 2019; there are more than 58,000 people in city shelters. But while that literally unacceptable reality has become literally acceptable on de Blasio’s watch, we shouldn’t resign ourselves to another rising line on the graph, one that compounds the failure. In fiscal year 2017, it cost an average $171 per day to house and help a homeless family with children. In fiscal year 2018, it rose to $192. The city now says two brand new shelters for 253 families in south Park Slope, Brooklyn, may cost $10,000 per unit per month to operate, as original reporting in Gothamist revealed last week. That works out to $322 a day. What? Neighborhood NIMBYs opposing the shelters as a threat to their property values are callous, fake progressives. Those asking how it could possibly cost taxpayers so much are sounding a necessary alarm. An internet search of the surrounding blocks shows most market-rate one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments renting for hundreds of dollars lower than the average $3,500 rent the city is tentatively budgeting every month for each new shelter unit. Meanwhile, the draft contracts include plans to pay $6,000 per unit per month for security and social services. That’s more than double what the planned operator of the shelters, Women in Need, spends at a family shelter it operates in Brownsville. The city says the rents and operating expenses are not finalized and could be negotiated much lower. Show us the money.