Homelessness in New York City

by Thomas J. Main

Can American cities respond effectively to pressing social problems? Or, as many scholars have claimed, are urban politics so mired in stasis, gridlock and bureaucratic paralysis that dramatic policy change is impossible? Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of how America’s largest city has struggled for more than thirty years to meet the crisis of modern homelessness through the landmark development, since the initiation of the Callahan v Carey litigation in 1979, of a municipal shelter system based on a court-enforced right to shelter.

New York City now shelters more than 50,000 otherwise homeless people at an annual cost of more than $1 billion in the largest and most complex shelter system in the world. Establishing the right to shelter was a dramatic break with long established practice. Developing and managing the shelter system required the city to repeatedly overcome daunting challenges, from dealing with mentally ill street dwellers to confronting community opposition to shelter placement. In the course of these efforts many classic dilemmas in social policy and public administration arose. Does adequate provision for the poor create perverse incentives? Can courts manage recalcitrant bureaucracies? Is poverty rooted in economic structures or personal behavior? The tale of how five mayors―Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and de Blasio―have wrestled with these problems is one of caution and hope: the task is difficult and success is never unqualified, but positive change is possible. Homelessness in New York City tells the remarkable story of what happened―for good and sometimes less good―when New York established the right to shelter.

Genres: Sociology

295 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2017

About the author

Thomas J. Main is a professor at the Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book focus on New York's homeless shelter system, which begin in the 1980s with a few old buildings and now houses over 50,000 people.

Main focuses on the changes in policies over the decades: in the 1980s and early 1990s, the city sought merely to provide emergency shelter to whoever wanted it. As the shelter population grew, local politicians began to argue that providing shelter to the homeless encouraged people to become homeless. So the city moved in the 1990s towards a more "paternalistic" model, which sought to reform the homeless. In the early years of the Bloomberg Administration, the city then moved towards a "Housing First" model, which sought to give homeless people permanent housing before remedying their personal problems. However, this model has proved fiscally unsustainable because the city became dependent on state government funding, and homelessness in New York City is not one of Gov. Cuomo's top priorities. As a result, shelter populations have risen dramatically under Mayors Bloomberg and DiBlasio.

A few things in this book surprised me, most notably:
*unsheltered homelessness in New York was discussed in the media as early as 1971; before then, such homelessness was confined to the Bowery (then the city's skid row).
*For most homeless families, homelessness is nearly always a temporary thing; two 1990s studies found that 80-90 percent of the city's homeless families are in regular apartments a few months later. (However, families tend to be less likely to have major mental/addiction problems than the most chronically homeless single people).
*the city's dependence on state funding; when state support for the homeless dropped, so did city support.

Although this book was certainly educational, I do with that the book had focused a little more on the unsheltered homeless; most of the book is about policies related to homeless shelters.

[Michael Pellagatti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can be hard to read during stretches with the plethora of acronyms you have to remember when trying to go through the history New York's fragmented bureaucracy. Essentially Maine illustrates that the Dinkins administration was on track to solving modern homelessness, but was derailed by the emergence of fiscally neoliberal politically conservative movement.

[Mills College Library]

362.59256 M224 2016