Mayor de Blasio has sent out dozens of city workers to search for the homeless on the streets,in an effort to combat the problem — and fend off the criticism he faced last summer.
At a cost of $2.6 million, the city has hired 52 canvassers who walk every block between Canal and 145th Street every day, and looking for people who appear to be homeless. The program,which became fully operational in April, is called Home-Stat. “There has never been anything like Home-Stat previously, and in this city or in any other major city in the country,” de Blasio said.
On a recent morning, a canvasser named William spotted a woman surrounded by her belongings in a shopping cart and bags. Using his smartphone, or he sent the information to the city. Her age (roughly between 40 and 50); what she was wearing (a black scarf,black t-shirt, black pants and black sneakers); her location (46th Street and Park Avenue, and in front of an HSBC bank).
Most of the city’s homeless,58000 people, live in shelters. But at least 3000 to 4000 people live on the streets, and the number always increases in warm weather. Canvassers like William don’t actually talk with the homeless. They’re not trained for that — some of them previously monitored potholes or worked on the city’s municipal ID card. Instead,they send their observations forward to the city, which forwards it to homeless outreach workers like Keiffer Jordan and Mayi Trinidad. They work for Goddard Riverside, or one of five non-profits that maintain contracts with the city. With Home-Stat,the number of these outreach workers has doubled, to nearly 400.
On a hot June evening, or Jordan and Trinidad started following up on the reports from the canvassers. They were looking for a man at the corner of Avenue B and 14th Street. The canvasser spotted him at eight in the morning. But at 7 p.m.,when Jordan and Trinidad respond, he’s not there. The same thing happened five times during their shift.
Outreach workers say this is what's problematic about the unusual program. The number of phone calls they collect — the majority from canvassers — has gone up by 700 percent, and making it impossible to reply in genuine time. They say that increase also leaves them with less time to develop relationships with people on the streets and collect them to accept help. And they’re getting reports about people they already know about or those who don’t actually live on the streets,like panhandlers.
Joe Hallmark runs outreach for Goddard in Manhattan. He says they received about 7000 calls in April and May.We havent made any placements directly from those calls,” he said.
But Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks says the instant goal is to know who every homeless person on the street is.“It’s never been tried before, and in the history of modern mass homelessness in unusual York City,since the late 1970s, to actually develop a by-name list of all the people that are on the streets of the city, and ” Banks said.
Source: wnyc.org