In some obvious ways, the election of Bill de Blasio, New York City’s first progressive mayor since the ill-fated David Dinkins, represented a sharp break with the conservative governing coalition that had elected his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s policy of attracting wealth to the city and his lack of concern for economic inequality contrasts sharply with the tale of two cities that was at the heart of de Blasio’s political vision and of the progressive mayor’s passionate conviction that inequality is the great issue of our time. These contrasting overall visions are reflected in homelessness policies that also show obvious differences. De Blasio is explicitly and strongly committed to the idea of a right, not just to shelter but to housing. Bloomberg, despite showing more interest in homelessness policy than might have been expected from a billionaire Republican-Independent and even though in settling the litigation related to family homelessness he finally left the right to shelter in place, never embraced the idea of a right to housing. Also, Bloomberg, while he acknowledged homelessness as a serious problem, never saw it as a product of the city’s overall economy, which would need to be modified if the problem were to be solved. De Blasio sees homelessness as part of the overall crisis of inequality that he was elected to address and, more particularly, as caused by a gap between the demand for and supply of affordable housing that policy must fill.
So there is no denying that the change from Mayor Bloomberg to Mayor de Blasio is a big change, what I have been calling in this book a nonincremental change, but it is a rather different type of nonincremental change than I have focused on so far. Much of this account has presented nonincremental change as something precipitated by policy entrepreneurs who crystallize galvanizing public ideas and market them in a highly fragmented political environment. Bob Hayes and Steven Banks and the idea of a right to shelter, Andrew Cuomo and Rudolph Giuliani and the paternalistic paradigm, and Sam Tsemberis and Housing First are the most salient examples of local policy entrepreneurs who identified a social problem, distilled from the available research an easily graspable public idea, and remade homelessness policy by promoting that idea through whatever avenues might be most responsive, including courts, regulatory agencies, bureaucracies, the media, and policy networks. For this type of change I have borrowed the term “ideational/entrepreneurial change,” and an important theme of this book is that such change has happened frequently in the case history examined here.
De Blasio’s election represents a different, more traditional style of nonincremental change. In this model, a candidate for the chief executive identifies a perceived crisis, runs on a platform that promises a response, achieves a strong victory, brings the rest of the political system along with him, and is thus able to make changes that were previously politically impossible. At the national level this phenomenon has been termed “presidential/majoritarian change,” and its most obvious examples are Roosevelt and the New Deal, Johnson and the Great Society programs and, perhaps, Obama and health care reform. At the level of New York City, similar episodes of what might be called “mayoral/majoritarian change” can be identified, including the mayoralties of LaGuardia and Lindsay. Both these path-breaking mayors responded to an emergency—the Depression and what was called the “Urban Crisis”—made explicit calls for dramatic change central to their campaigns, won election convincingly, and used a unified government to usher in an era of striking reform. De Blasio’s rise seems so far to also exemplify this mode: He responded to a perceived crisis—the inequality crisis—ran on a platform calling for dramatic change, won overwhelmingly, and is setting out to implement his mandate. Whether he will be as successful as LaGuardia in terms of achieving lasting change or will set the stage for a financial crisis, as Lindsay did, remains to be seen.
One very striking charge wrought by de Blasio’s victory is one of personnel: Steven Banks, the legal advocate who had litigated with the city from the Koch through the Bloomberg administrations to advance the right to shelter for homeless families, has become commissioner of HRA. Some observers argued that Banks’s background as an advocate and litigator would not serve him well in his new role as a public administrator. In an article entitled “No Managers Need Apply,” Heather Mac Donald, writing in the conservative publication City Journal, argued that “[w]ith his choice of Banks, de Blasio has signaled that he’s not interested in even the illusion that he seeks nonpartisan technocratic managers for his administration.”1 But Banks turns out to have more managerial experience than is sometimes recognized. In 2004 Banks’s organizational base, the Legal Aid Society, ran into a financial crisis and needed to be rescued. According to Banks,
I received a battlefield promotion. The organization was about half a second away from going bankrupt. I became the head of the organization under that circumstance. We were literally on the verge of going bankrupt. We had a $21 million deficit. . . . Together with the Board of Directors and the managers and the unions, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, Auto Workers, and 1199, we worked together to save the organization. I ran it for ten years. It’s an organization with nineteen hundred employees, including eleven hundred lawyers, a budget of $225 million. So I had the experience of running a large organization, the largest legal services program in the United States, with a large budget, complex financial needs, and complex personnel needs. So I had experience in running a large organization and now I’m running an even larger organization. . . . I had actually extensive experience running an agency that needed reforms. Legal Aid needed reforms and HRA is in the middle of a reform process that we’re implementing and making substantial reforms. So the kinds of management approaches, albeit on a larger scale, are similar.2
Nonetheless, Banks’s transition from an outside, oppositional advocate to an inside manager and team player is striking and could only have come about through the era-marking change from Bloomberg to de Blasio.
But in certain senses de Blasio’s homelessness policy does not represent a root-and-branch repudiation of Bloomberg’s approach so much as a reaffirmation, consistent application, and extension of some of the former mayor’s most promising initiatives and a correction of his most egregious mistakes. The main Bloomberg initiative that de Blasio has embraced and is extending is prevention. The big Bloomberg mistake that de Blasio is correcting is the ending of housing subsidies to help shelter clients relocate rapidly to some form of permanent housing. The de Blasio administration would like to remain faithful to Bloomberg’s push for more supportive housing and emphasis on Housing First, but for political reasons to be discussed, has had trouble doing so. The commitment to ending homelessness has been abandoned for the short term, although the research and analysis behind the focus on chronic homelessness is still accepted and policies consistent with it are being deployed. Overall, de Blasio has not rejected the post-paternalistic paradigm broached, but insufficiently followed up on, by Bloomberg, but rather modified it in light of changing political realities and the new administration’s progressive ideology.
The most obvious point of policy continuity between the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations is the continued emphasis on preventing rather than just reacting to homelessness. As we saw, Bloomberg made a great fuss of elevating the goal of preventing homelessness to equal status with the goal of sheltering the homeless in the organizational culture of DHS, and even incorporated prevention into the agency’s mission statement. Prevention was to be achieved in various ways but especially by the new Home Base initiative, into which Bloomberg put considerable effort and achieved a certain amount of vindication when methodologically sophisticated analysis showed that the program was in fact reducing the number of families entering the shelters below what it would have been absent the effort. De Blasio embraced and greatly expanded Home Base, nearly doubling funding for the program in FY 2015 from $22 to $42 million and increasing the program’s offices from fourteen to twenty-three.3
However, the de Blasio administration’s commitment to prevention goes far beyond just expanding Home Base. Much of the new prevention effort is based at HRA on the theory that that agency is responsible for poor people before they lose their housing while DHS is responsible for them once housing is lost. Within HRA a Homelessness Prevention Administration headed by a deputy commissioner has been created. Legal services to prevent evictions and tenant harassment have been centralized at HRA. Writing of rent arrears checks, previously done at many locations all over the city, has been centralized at HRA to make for faster delivery. Redirecting HRA welfare policy away from strict enforcement of regulations and swift imposition of sanctions is also expected to play a role in homelessness prevention. “We found,” says Banks, “that 23 percent of the applicants for DHS shelter during a particular period in 2013 had an HRA case closing or sanction within 12 months of applying,” which is one reason why his agency is backing away from efforts of previous administrations to shrink the welfare rolls through administrative actions.4
The Bloomberg administration mistake that de Blasio is most visibly correcting is the ending of housing subsidies, such as Advantage and preferential access of shelter families to NYCHA apartments and Section 8 vouchers. Perhaps the new administration’s biggest initiative in homelessness policy is the Living in Communities (LINC) programs, which are a batch of rental subsidy programs designed to help various sorts of shelter clients move out of the system. LINC represents, in a certain sense, a reinstatement of Advantage. De Blasio’s deputy mayor for health and human services, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, went so far as to partially defend Advantage against its critics:
Well, Bloomberg did Advantage, which was a rental assistance. The census plummeted down and when Advantage stopped the census went right up. And I think it’s clear that that was the one thing that works, which recognizes that people just don’t have enough money to pay the rent. Now, how long you do it for, what social services you build in, all of that is a little bit different [in LINC]. But I don’t think it’s a complete departure. It’s acknowledging what works and the fact that when they stopped the whole thing just exploded again. . . . I feel that in criticizing Advantage, we sort of threw the water out and the baby with it.5
But LINC does more than simply reinstate Advantage; de Blasio’s initiative extends and refines the program Bloomberg abandoned in three ways. First, while the Advantage rent subsidies lasted only two years—reportedly because the Bloomberg administration felt such a short period would “discourage long-term dependence”6—LINC payments go on for five years, perhaps because under de Blasio there was less concern about possible perverse incentives. Second, LINC, unlike Advantage, requires recipients to participate in various social services designed to encourage housing stability. Third, LINC subsidies are available to a much wider variety of shelter clients than the working families to whom Advantage was limited.
LINC is in fact a set of programs, each tailored to the needs of a different type of shelter client. LINC I is for working shelter families, that is, families with a member working at least thirty-five hours a week for at least ninety days. LINC II is for families that have experienced multiple shelter stays. Survivors of domestic violence are targeted by LINC III. LINC IV is for the elderly or medically frail and for adult families (that is, families without children). Working singles or adult families are covered by LINC V. LINC VI relocates families with relatives or friends by paying a portion of the host’s rent.
The various LINC programs, and the de Blasio administration’s general embrace of rental subsidies, are more consistent with the insights of the early Bloomberg years than was Bloomberg’s own abandonment of subsidies. Under the influence of the research of Sam Tsemberis and his colleagues on Housing First, Bloomberg had succeeded in communicating to shelter managers that the paternalistic concern with diagnosing and treating the underlying cause of clients’ homelessness was to be dropped in favor of planning to rehouse them as soon as possible. But clearly rental subsidies are likely to be an important part of any realistic rehousing plan. In this sense LINC represents an extension of the post-paternalistic emphasis on Housing First.
The de Blasio administration would like to extend Bloomberg’s commitment to supportive housing, the most striking manifestation of which was the signing of the New York/New York III Agreement, by continuing to place street dwellers and shelter clients in supportive housing units and by bringing to fruition a fourth New York/New York Agreement. But as the supply of new supportive housing units produced under New York/New York III has declined, negotiations for a fourth agreement have been stalled due to budgetary politics in Albany. Patrick Markee, deputy executive director for advocacy of the Coalition for the Homeless, who follows the politics of homelessness and city/state relations perhaps as closely as anyone, commented on the city’s dilemma concerning supportive housing:
When de Blasio comes in you’ve already seen the fact that very few new permanent supportive housing units are still left in the . . . New York/New York III pipeline. There’s only about one hundred units that are still left to be created under that agreement. Almost all of the existing stock of New York/New York housing is full and has very low vacancy rates. . . . So the de Blasio administration has been stuck with the reality of the shortage of the supply of that stock of [supportive] housing while the needs have been growing. That’s one of the reasons that the one part of the shelter population that is growing, and I believe will continue to grow until we see a significant fourth New York/New York Agreement, is the single adults in shelters. That’s one of the reasons you also see the street population beginning to rise. Historically in New York there’s only one policy tool that has really made a dent in the number of single adults in shelters and that has been additions to the supply of permanent supportive housing. You saw that happen in the late eighties, early nineties, you saw that happen in the 2005 period. I don’t think there’s another way you really get at that population in a significant way.
So I think the reason you haven’t seen the de Blasio folks talking about it [supportive housing] as much has been this frustration. You have seen this dance . . . between the de Blasio and Cuomo administrations, around permanent supportive housing. . . . Many of us who had started this campaign to get a fourth New York/New York Agreement were hopeful, as was the city, that the Cuomo administration was going to come out in a positive place on the idea of a permanent supportive housing agreement. Fran Reiter, who was the point person for the [Cuomo] administration, spoke very favorably last summer at the Supportive Housing Network’s annual conference about the governor wanting to do a fourth agreement. . . . When the governor proposed his version of a New York/New York IV Agreement in January, we were all just stunned at how paltry it was: five thousand units over seven years. They called it five years but when we talked with state budget officials it became clear that it was really a seven-year development timeline. Only thirty-nine hundred of those units would be in New York City. Even that thirty-nine hundred was counting on eighteen hundred units being created by the city. . . .
So de Blasio to his credit went up [to Albany] and proposed . . . a twelve-thousand-units-over-ten-years agreement, still smaller than what we would like to see but obviously larger than what the governor was proposing and significantly larger than what the New York/New York III Agreement had proposed. . . . The Cuomo administration was just deeply unhelpful. . . . From a policy perspective they totally embrace the idea of permanent supportive housing, the de Blasio folks. They want more of it. You saw that de Blasio’s capital budget significantly expanded funding for permanent supportive housing and other specialty housing . . . [I]t’s about $2 billion over ten years just of special needs housing in his budget. It would fund, as I understand it, on its own the city’s portion would fund over twelve thousand.7
The decision to deemphasize the push for a New York/New York IV Agreement means that not too much can be said about Housing First either, for with no new supportive housing units in the pipeline, the promise implicit in Housing First to move street dwellers immediately into such housing has to be extended cautiously. It may also be that recent financial troubles into which the New York office of Sam Tsemberis’s organization, Pathways to Housing, has fallen, which resulted in the termination of contracts with the state Office of Mental Health and the transfer of the organization’s clients to other housing providers, has made it inconvenient for the city to publicly reiterate its commitment to Housing First.8 However, the de Blasio administration quietly continues to expand use of that approach by, for instance, recently having DHS take over contracts to provide outreach services in the subways from the Metropolitan Transit Authority for the sake of better coordination and to ensure that the Housing First strategy that has been successful above ground will be applied in the subways.
Another signature move of the de Blasio administration has been to reinstate the priority access of shelter families to available public housing (New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA) units and Section 8 rental vouchers that had been ended with considerable controversy by Bloomberg in 2004. Linda Gibbs had stated that the object of ending this priority was to eliminate the perceived perverse incentive to enter the shelter system in order to qualify for the units or vouchers. This decision failed to appreciate that research by Cragg and O’Flaherty and others showed that in fact access to these types of housing assistance produced only a weak incentive for nonhomeless families to enter the system and therefore did not drive up the shelter census. The de Blasio administration grasped this point. As Barrios-Paoli put the matter,
There is that belief that if you, if people get good things, whether it’s NYCHA or Section 8 or rental assistance, by becoming homeless or being in shelter, more people will do that to access housing. There may be a kernel of truth in that but it has to be a pretty desperate situation for people to do that. And you and I are not going to resort to that, right? These are people who are asking out of desperation or people who are very precariously housed, who are doubled up, who are very crowded, people who eventually would be homeless, maybe not tomorrow but will be. And maybe they accelerate their route to homelessness because of this. But I don’t really believe that. It’s like believing that people voluntarily go onto welfare, even if they had other options. I don’t think that’s the case. I worked on these issues for close to forty years. . . . Poor people are logical like you and me, they’re intelligent like you and me. And they make choices that are good for them. But if they have a better option they don’t opt for these things.9
While de Blasio’s executives were confident that reintroducing the preferences for shelter families would not ignite perverse incentives, a number of moves were made to respond to other criticisms that were launched against the Dinkins administration when it relied on extensive placements into NYCHA to reduce the shelter census back in the early nineties. For one thing, the preferences were reintroduced on a quite limited basis. While Coalition for the Homeless called for the new administration to relocate 2,500 shelter families a year into NYCHA under de Blasio, only 750 families are scheduled to get vacant units. Why so few? One concern was with retaining the right “mix” of working, elderly, and very poor tenants in NYCHA. Barrios-Paoli explained,
During the Koch years, even Giuliani, Dinkins, even the beginning of Bloomberg, most NYCHA vacancies went to homeless families. And I think that was in recognition of the fact that this is public housing, it’s our housing. Who’s more deserving than people who are really poor and cannot afford more than 30 percent of their income for this? And that’s one philosophy. I think over the years HUD and NYCHA felt that it was better to have a mix in public housing. That it worked better when you had people who were working, people who were on Public Assistance. You had a mix so there was better role modeling. It would be a better life for everybody. That’s the other philosophy. . . . They still believe that. . . . I don’t think it’s such a big danger. But they have a point. And I think to put everybody with the same problem in the same building is not a good thing.10
Also, eligibility for NYCHA placement is stricter than it was under Dinkins. To receive a unit a family must have a working member or some source of income such as SSI or other public benefits. Families must also be already on the NYCHA waiting list to partly address the concern that shelter families got to jump the line into public housing. Another issue broached during the Dinkins years resolved itself. In the early nineties, established NYCHA tenants expressed considerable resentment of the newcomers from the shelters and even staged demonstrations to keep them out. But by the time de Blasio came to office, attitudes had changed. According to Barrio-Paoli,
Now, because of the policy of allowing most of the vacancies to go to homeless families since the Koch administration, a lot of families that are in NYCHA have been homeless at some point. And they got their life together and their life went on and so forth. . . . We’ve never had a problem with families that have moved in. In fact there was a rally not too long ago where there were NYCHA tenants saying that it’s okay to bring homeless families in. . . . I think at the end of the day, in poor families, homelessness is not such an unknown phenomenon. Your cousin has been homeless, your neighbor has been homeless, maybe you have been homeless at some point. The recognition is that homeless people are just like us, one pay check away.11
In one interesting respect, however, the de Blasio administration did break with at least the rhetoric of the post-paternalistic paradigm. Part of the appeal of that approach was its commitment to ending, not merely managing, homelessness. Culhane’s refocusing of homelessness policy on the more manageable problem of chronic homelessness brought the goal of ending homelessness within reach. Mangano and others promoted to cities and states the idea of developing ten-year plans based on Culhane’s analysis to reach that goal. And under the influence of these policy entrepreneurs Bloomberg developed, not a ten- but a five-year plan to at least very substantially reduce homelessness and even incorporated the aim to “overcome” homelessness into the DHS mission statement. One might have thought that a progressive mayor would be at least as enthusiastic about eliminating a salient manifestation of inequality as a billionaire mayor had been. But under de Blasio the rhetoric of overcoming homelessness was quietly taken out of the DHS mission statement, which now reads, “With our partners, our goal is to prevent homelessness when possible; to provide temporary, emergency shelter when needed; and to help individuals and families transition rapidly into permanent housing. We do this through providing coordinated, compassionate, high-quality services and supports.”12
Asked whether the new mission statement represented a backing away from the Bloomberg goal of ending homelessness, de Blasio’s commissioner of DHS, Gilbert Taylor, wouldn’t quite put the matter that way. “I’m a realist,” Taylor replied. “I believe that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”13 Deputy Mayor Barrios-Paoli expanded on the matter. She felt that ending homelessness might be a realistic goal in jurisdictions like Utah where the housing market is slack and the homeless population is mostly made up of single individuals. In New York City, with its great gap between demand for and supply of affordable housing, and with a homeless population made up mostly of families, who are harder to place than singles, Barrios-Paoli felt the old statement of intention to overcome homelessness was an “overpromise”:
It is impossible to eradicate homelessness [in New York City] unless you produce apartments that are deeply affordable for people. And so until the time we do that we have to acknowledge the fact that there will be people living in shelters. [Will the number be] much less than fifty-seven thousand? I sincerely hope so. I really, really hope so. But what is that irreducible number? I don’t know. But we know zero is not something that’s going to happen in the next three or four years simply because the supply of housing isn’t there.
The deputy mayor was optimistic that after that period of time a fourth New York/New York Agreement would be negotiated and de Blasio’s would start to kick in and then some real progress—perhaps not overcoming homelessness, but at least making a substantial dent in it— would start to happen. In that sense de Blasio’s homelesness policy remains faithful to the post-paternalistic aim of not merely managing homelessness but trying to end it. Further, the LINC programs, by incorporating a broader range of clients than had been covered by Advantage, is consistent with the concern with chronic homelessness. LINC IV and V cover that population, according to Banks, and represent the continuing impact of Dennis Culhane’s identification of the chronically homeless:
If you look at the segmentation of the LINC program, that gives you a sense that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. And so focusing on seniors in the single adult system, or focusing on adults who have disabilities and are receiving federal benefits, this is all aimed at getting people out of the system who can be linked back to housing in the community. I think some of the flaws of the Bloomberg approach were it was broad brush: chronic homelessness. Chronic homelessness is a constellation of individuals that have individual needs. And so the LINC program and the other things that HRA and DHS are doing are focused on what are the individual needs. . . . What we’re doing is consistent with what Dennis [Culhane] has said.14
Asked about continuity and change in homelessness policy over the years, Banks, from his perspective as HRA commissioner after a thirty-year career in advocacy, responded as follows:
Well, let me tell you a story. I remember cross-examining an executive deputy commissioner during the Dinkins administration, Jeff Carples, who was ultimately held in contempt along with other city officials for violating certain court orders. I remember cross-examining him about what it would take to be able to comply with right-to-shelter requirements. The judge interrupted and said I would really like to know what your answer is about what it would take to comply. And Carples answered, it’s a combination of prevention, having adequate shelter for people who become homeless, and you need a place to move people to out of the shelter system. Those have been the basic truths for years. The first Bloomberg term, that was the focus. The second and third Bloomberg term he totally turned his back on that focus and that’s how we got into this mess that the current administration has inherited and is embracing the basics: prevention, adequate shelter, some place to move people to.15