NYC HOMELESS POLICY - Research Paper Example

Main reasons and causes for homelessness as written by many reports and studies include; poverty (that is caused by many factors like unemployment), war, abuse by the government or people with power, lack of affordable housing among others. This paper will focus on the temporary shelter policy for New York Homeless people. There has been a lot of criticism and debate on the temporary shelters policy for some time now. The coalition for the homeless says that the mayor’s tact relies on short-term emergency interventions, at the expense of long term federally funded options like housing programs that have had promising results in the past.

During an interview with WCBS 880’s reporter Paul Murnane, the coalition’s executive director, Mary Brosnahan said, “sadly this year, the state for the homeless in New York City has never been worse, today for the first time in New York history, we have 50,000 sleeping each night in our shelter system and that includes over 21,000 homeless kids”. The Homeless Service Commissioner Seth Diamond said the numbers of the homeless entering the system are falling. On the same issue, the mayor, Bloomberg on his part said “that the coalition is not a reputable organization.

He blamed the increase in the number of homeless in the shelters on Albany and Washington. . The temporary shelters are better than nothing at. This is because they keep the homeless people off the street as the shelters are located in designated areas. Because of this reason, they need to be maintained until a more permanent solution can be found. This can be done in a number of ways one being identifying the fakes from the genuine homeless people. According to a report in the New York Times, more than one out of four families in shelters, 28 percent, include at least one employed adult, city figures show, and 16 percent of single adults in shelters hold jobs.

This means that the City of New York is paying to run shelters for people who are employed. If this continues, there will be an overflow of people in the shelters leading to disease outbreak, congestion and worse living conditions. The mayor’s administration should stop this exploitation by the people able to rent cheap housing for themselves; so that they can have an accurate number of the city’s homeless for effective planning and maintenance. It would also be difficult to maintain the shelters because of the increasing number of the homeless population.

This refers to the homeless families that have been living in shelters for years and have increased the number of children in their families. This means that they will require more tents to fit the number of people in the family for privacy and a little bit of comfort. The maintenance money will also have to increase because there are more mouths to feed than the original number. The children of the homeless are more often than not faced with the same fate as their parents and part from growing up in shelters, they end up living in them when they grow up thus the shelter dilemma becomes a vicious cycle.

Poverty is another