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Home : Knowledge Center : Homeless Population Down in New York City

Homeless Population Down in New York City

he number of homeless people living on New York City's streets has dropped 12 percent since last year, according to the city's annual count of the street homeless.

The results of the latest Homeless Outreach Population Estimate, or HOPE count, showed 3,306 people living on the streets and subways of New York's five boroughs, a 25 percent decrease since the first HOPE count in 2005.

The survey results were announced this week by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Robert V. Hess, commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services.

Bloomberg pledged to cut the number of street homeless by two-thirds - to below 1,429 people - by the time his second term ends at midnight Dec. 31, 2009.

Hess was recruited by Bloomberg in April 2006 after five years in Philadelphia as Mayor John F. Street's homeless czar.

Since then - as reported last month by The Inquirer in its series about homelessness - New York has overhauled the way it conducts outreach programs to the most intractable of the homeless, those people with severe drug or alcohol problems, mental illness, or both.

New York's existing contracts with homeless services providers were scrapped and rebid to have a single nonprofit agency be a "point of accountability" for homeless outreach in each borough.

The new contracts assign providers geographic areas and quotas, and fiscal penalties for missed benchmarks.

New York outreach agencies now are paid for the number of street homeless placed into long-term housing and, for the first time, can do it immediately rather than after a waiting period in a shelter.

The approach, part of what is known as "Housing First," de-emphasizes emergency shelters, focusing on quickly moving homeless people into permanent housing and then providing support to help them deal with addiction and personal problems.

Manhattan outreach teams, for example, have handheld computers that let them enter a homeless person's name, access background information, and immediately match the person to a vacancy in the agency's stock of 2,000 supportive housing units.

Unlike Philadelphia, where homeless street people tend to congregate around City Hall, much of New York's street population is nearly invisible because it is on the platforms and trains of the 24-hour subway system.

This year's HOPE count was done overnight beginning Jan. 28 and used 1,700 volunteers who walked a total of 8,291 miles and surveyed more than 1,000 subway cars.

Volunteers counted 1,263 homeless people on the street in Manhattan, 279 in the Bronx, 336 in Brooklyn, 135 in Queens, and 152 on Staten Island. Also, 1,141 were in the subway system.

New York officials said the census shows one unsheltered homeless person per 2,483 people in the general population.

Philadelphia's current count of homeless people on the streets is 621, a ratio of one unsheltered person per 2,254 in the general population.

New York also has about 35,600 homeless people living in its shelter system, compared with about 3,839 in Philadelphia shelters.

Mayor Nutter has said he is reviewing how the city handles the problems of homelessness to find ways to reduce what has been an increasing street population.