The Empire City of Homelessness

I supposed that I was returning to my beloved New York City, resurging since the economic catastrophe that sent me to Washington.  I spent a few years working hard on the national bailout (TARP) and other programs through 2013.  By 2014, things should have been much better.  Bill de Blasio assumed the Mayor of New York City office that year as well, relieving Michael Bloomberg of his 12-year run as mayor.  That was also the year that the Freedom Tower opened, projecting a ¼-mile above the ashes imbued from 9/11.  The S&P 500 spent early 2014 in the mid-1800s, a record high then, and the Federal Reserve began to taper their treasury-bond purchases.  So what could be wrong?  The first thing that strikes someone upon returning to NYC is that the streets are flourishing with a severe homelessness problem.  One not noticed before, quite frankly, in nearly two decades and a problem falsely assumed to quashed.  They are now everywhere, similar to a second-world country, including at popular landmarks.  For example, sleeping all over New York Pennsylvania Station, as soon as you deboard.  Bumping into you, meekly asking for food or change.  And continue to line the front steps of buildings, and poking into dirty trash cans, up and down the island.  Were they previously “hidden” for so long, hunkered down in shelters?  Or was what I saw now emblematic of destitution that had simply gotten so much worse?  And if it was the latter, how had the government policies (either under President Obama or Mayor de Blasio, or both) failed to address this matter?  We show in this article that the number of NYC homeless has grown at a brusque pace starting in 2012, and has only continued essentially unabated -and crucially across all demographics-  at this same brisk pace since 2014, and on through today.  Aligning to NYC mayors, we witness that for five terms (20 years), through 2013, homelessness grew at an annual rate that was ½ of what we saw in this gloomy era, post-2013.  We don’t presume to offer off-the-cuff naïve prescriptions for this complex social tumor, but any compassionate reader should be able to easily absorb the heart-wrenching struggle that so many New Yorkers now have quickly fallen into.  They must demand something (led by the private or public sectors) be done, in order to aid our trapped neighbors in the melting pot known as the world’s only, Empire City.

Let’s start by offering a simple table of the level and annual growth rate in homelessness, over the past couple decades:

 

Period	Homeless average	Homeless annual growth	Mayor
1994-2001	27,500	4%	Giuliani
2002-2013	36,200	3%	Bloomberg
2014-2016	56,900	6%	de Blasio

And the staggering data we assembled from the government sources above, are worse given some context.  We had two recessions during the table above (one at the end of the Giuliani office, and one in the middle of the Bloomberg office).  And recent data sources concede that there may be under-counting and reconciliation issues.  Finally, the population growth rate for NYC is just ½ a percent, so the homelessness we’ve seen in recent years is nearly 10x the population growth!  Obviously if that continues, which it mustn't, then we'll all be homeless... 

We should also note that when exploring the annual data, we see the uptick in homelessness growth that didn’t start until 2012, several years after the global financial crisis.  This delayed response also contradicts official labor reports showing the city unemployment rate fall below 6% (dropping faster than the national average while still remaining above it), and to levels not seen since 2008, or 2000.  Or all the way back to 1988!  NYC’s labor force participation is strong given the optimism in the economic cycle, and so is the employment-to-population ratio.  See record homelessness below, statistically strong results as it is consistent across head of household census demographic data, and all age-groups (but for senior citizens).

So the question is, what gives?  As employment is strong, poverty remains stubbornly well above the national average, and people are wasting their savings on lottery and migrating out of the city.  And of course homelessness is also up.  Clearly the economic growth and prosperity that I and many of my peers enjoy, has also left a growing class of misery behind and with it Mayor de Blasio's ratings squat.  Having a job also isn’t a guarantee that one won’t be homeless, as the homeless do not all look like Will Smith’s character in the true story “The pursuit of happiness”.  What they share in common with his character is that the downward-spiral is problematic to arrest.

And with each year we are watching thousands (magnitude of a percent) of New Yorkers get added to the rolls at the shelter, where they are cared for as homeless (at a tax-payer cost of over $40,000 a year for a homeless family: ironically a multiple of the federal poverty threshold, and far more than many working families who have a home even see in take-home, or net pay).  New York City is also the only place in the U.S. required to provide temporary housing to anyone needing it.  And yet as homelessness rises across big cities nationally (particularly since the financial crisis), we see it rose at the fastest clip in the biggie of it all, the Big Apple:
 

 

As mentioned earlier on, we don’t provide any strong remedy for such a complex and expensive social ill.  Seeing it up close in government, and in regular volunteer work at soup kitchens and churches along the East Coast, this is a tough nut to crack, as visible as it is (here, here).  People who are homeless truly come in all age groups (and in NYC they happen acutely among children and prime-working age people: here, here), and ethnicities, and many are emotionally and physically battered.  No mailing address, and no ID.  Also often without even a bar of soap and a sink to wash themselves.  But underneath it all they are not much different from any of us.  Bad luck got in the way; but they have the potential and desire for so much more.  What is clear, and the impetus for the article, is to raise awareness of the dramatic and statistically significant rise in homelessness, and one whose upward trend seems unbroken, for the time being.

We hope that something is done soon.  Either by policy force, or by luck.  We can appreciate that Ol' Blue Eyes' "if you make it here, you can make it anywhere" could nicely be reversed to be: if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.