As Bill de Blasio Prepares To Leave Office, Part II -- Homelessness

It’s almost time for the ball to drop in Times Square, and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s remaining time in office is reduced to minutes. Let me wish all Manhattan Contrarian readers a Happy New Year! But before de Blasio finally goes, we ought to take a quick look at how his progressive policies have succeeded in solving another one of his signature issues, namely homelessness.

In my post on December 26, I described de Blasio’s legacy on all his major issues as “more and more spending and no positive results of any kind.” In the area of homelessness, the description of “more and more spending” certainly applies, in spades. Here is a March 2021 Report from City Comptroller Scott Stringer giving the figures for City spending on “homelessness” on de Blasio’s watch. Fiscal year 2014, ending on June 30, 2014, is the one that was in progress when de Blasio took office in January 2014; and fiscal year 2020 was the one that ended June 30, 2020:

[T]otal spending for homeless services grew by 138 percent between fiscal years 2014 and 2020, rising to a total of $3.5 billion.

In other words, the spending grew from $1.5 billion to $3.5 billion per year over an eight year period. Surely then, that huge level of spending would be sufficient to reduce the population of “homeless” people dramatically. Of course not. On the other hand, New York did not have the kind of huge increases in homelessness experienced in the West Coast cities in these years.

New York’s population of “homeless” consists of two distinct groups, those in shelters and those living “unsheltered” either outdoors or in public spaces like subways and train stations. The overwhelming majority of those counted as “homeless” actually live in the shelters. An advocacy organization called the Coalition for the Homeless has compiled a spreadsheet since the 1980s from City data giving a month-by-month census of the population in the City’s homeless shelters. According to the spreadsheet, the population in the homeless shelters has basically been stable during de Blasio’s tenure. It was 53,615 in January 2014, when de Blasio took office, and was 47,916 in the most recent figure for September 2021. Should we credit de Blasio for achieving about a 10% drop? Perhaps. On the other hand, looking at the Coalition’s spreadsheet, it appears that the number of sheltered homeless increased substantially from the beginning of de Blasio’s tenure into early 2020, reaching over 60,000 at the time the pandemic hit. Since that time, as Comptroller Stringer’s Report notes, a combination of fear of infection with state and federal eviction moratoriums has led to somewhat decreasing numbers of entrants into the system.

But whether de Blasio deserves some credit for the small decrease or just got lucky in the last couple of years, the level of spending remains astonishing. $3.5 billion for about 48,000 homeless represents about $73,000 spending per “homeless” person. That’s close to $300,000 for a family of four, a level that, if the family earned it, would put it in about the top 5% of income earners in the country — not to mention subjecting it to an income tax bill of close to $100,000 among the federal government, New York State and New York City.

Well, at least we’re doing better than San Francisco. You might remember that back in 2018, San Francisco voters passed an initiative, strongly backed by billionaire Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, imposing a new payroll tax on employers intended to raise some $300 million per year specifically to deal with homelessness. San Francisco is about 10% the size of New York (880,000 people versus 8.8 million), so that $300 million would be comparable to about $3 billion of spending for us. Did it work? According to this Report from San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the sheltered homeless population in San Francisco has jumped from 2855 in 2019 to 4000 in 2021.

But then, as noted here many times, no government bureaucracy ever solves the problem it is tasked to solve. To solve the problem would be to risk ending the program and putting the agency out of business.

Anyway, the bottom line for de Blasio on homelessness: spending well more than doubled, little if any progress in solving the problem as defined.