What de Blasio's 'Paying the Homeless to Leave Town' Program Is Really About
“Get the fuck out of here!” exclaims Anthony Cepeda. “That is so awesome!”
Cepeda is one of the dozens of mostly homeless people streaming out of a Chelsea church’s soup kitchen one morning in mid-October, bearing paper-wrapped buttered bagels and Styrofoam cups of tea. He’s just been told that the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) has a new pilot program that will help pay homeless people’s rent for up to twelve months if they find housing outside the city.
The unnamed program, which began quietly on September 1, drew public attention in late September, after DHS sent a group of shelter residents to look at seventeen apartments in Newark, New Jersey. Republican mayoral candidate Nicole Malliotakis called it an example of the failure of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s policies on homelessness, accusing him of spending “the taxpayers’ money” to subsidize out-of-town rents. For others, paying for poor people to leave raised the specter of the Louisiana segregationists in the 1960s who bought public-assistance recipients one-way bus tickets up North, or the Trump-mouthed provincial executive in Alberta in the 1990s who sent them to British Columbia.
New York’s relocation-aid program is much more benign, according to both city officials and homeless advocates. For ten years, the city’s Project Reconnect has paid transportation expenses for people living in city homeless shelters who are looking to move outside the city; under the new pilot, the city will subsidize rents as well.
“It’s brand-new, so we don’t have a lot of on-the-ground feedback,” says Giselle Routhier, policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless. “We haven’t seen people in our office who’ve been through it.”
Read more: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/10/18/what-de-blasios-paying-the-homeless-to-leave-town-program-is-really-about/
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