As Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has risen in the polls, scrutiny has increased over his record as mayor of New York. A recent report in THE CITY provides a critical overview of the Bloomberg legacy on homelessness, noting the 71% rise in the shelter census under his administration.
These old debates are worth revisiting, both for the contrasts they draw between Bloomberg 2020 and Bloomberg as mayor, and because what we make of the history of homelessness under Bloomberg has much bearing on how best to respond to this challenge.
In homelessness circles, the conventional wisdom on why the shelter census increased during the Bloomberg years is that he slammed the back door shut: He didn’t offer enough subsidized housing to facilitate shelter exits.
The truth is slightly more complicated. Bloomberg believed in housing subsidies, but he thought they should be structured in a certain way. He had a program that towards the end of his tenure was called “Work Advantage” (more often, “Advantage” for short), which offered time-limited rental subsidies to shelter clients. It was jointly funded with state government, which slashed its contribution amidst the Great Recession’s budget chaos, thus ending Advantage.
Advocates criticized Advantage for its paternalistic overtones. Indeed, their scorn ran so deep that they supported Albany’s cuts. Former Bloomberg officials have spoken with great bitterness about the Advantage funding saga.
THE CITY reminds us that Bloomberg once considering using a cruise ship to shelter the homeless, with the strong suggestion that this was an outlandish notion. But floating shelters have been discussed, and even tried, throughout history and in other jurisdictions such as San Francisco. New York’s homeless would not have been more segregated on a cruise ship than they are on Ward’s Island or in outer-borough hotels or the many other jerry-rigged facilities that mayors have used to meet the unyielding demands of the city’s right to shelter.
That leads to the question of shelter quality and Bloomberg’s 2012 remark that “pleasurable” conditions were creating moral hazard for shelter clients.
Shelter quality is a conundrum. There’s no point in running a shelter system that’s so wretched that most people prefer life on the streets. But it turns out that it costs a lot of money to make shelters safe and sanitary. And what about services? If shelters are where we can connect with the homeless, don’t we want to make available to them various educational, health care and behavioral health resources?
Eventually, though, investing in shelters hits a point of diminishing returns. It begins to divert resources away from other, equally pressing priorities, and when there isn’t enough subsidized housing for everyone in shelters, which is always, some people will stay longer than they should. Even if moral hazard only leads to a small portion of long stayers, that’s still a serious problem in a place like New York, which is desperate to avoid having to open new shelters.
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At least in terms of funding levels, Bloomberg was probably right to say that, under him, New York had “done more than any city to help the homeless.”
But it’s somewhat awkward trying to defend the Bloomberg legacy on homelessness since, as with stop and frisk, Bloomberg 2020 appears to grant that his progressive critics were right all along. The Bloomberg campaign characterizes homelessness as a “national emergency,” and pledges a huge investment in subsidized housing.
Homelessness is not really a national emergency. New York City, the Pacific Northwest and California face homelessness emergencies. Elsewhere, homelessness is just a problem. Every jurisdiction that faces a genuine homelessness crisis happens to be wealthy enough to raise sufficient revenues to respond to the crisis. It makes little sense to use income tax revenues raised in Florida to build more supportive housing in New York City.
As for his subsidized housing proposal, which Bloomberg claims will cut the homeless population in half, that approach will prove impractical in crisis cities. Where rent’s cheap to begin with, it’s easiest to build new subsidized housing to meet the ongoing need. But places where the rent’s cheap to begin with are not the places that have the worst homelessness challenges. Moreover, most of the homeless are not disabled and thus should be expected to be as self-sufficient when it comes to finding their own housing as the rest of the working class.
Bloomberg the mayor was more comfortable raising questions about self-sufficiency and the homeless. On a range of issues, he has had to move to the left to pursue the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. But, at the city level, the Bloomberg approach to social policy questions remains the best among available alternatives.
This piece originally appeared at the New York Daily News
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Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News