The de Blasio administration is struggling to stem the city’s relentless rise in homelessness — up 6% since the mayor took office in January.
The city says it housed an average of 54,754 people a night in August, including 23,000 children — up from an average of 51,470 in January.
The number is 10% higher than in August 2013. Overall, in the last five years, the city’s homeless population has soared by a stunning 52%.
The increases, de Blasio officials say, stem from the city’s lack of affordable housing and the long-term effects of a crisis they inherited from the Bloomberg administration.
“Since Day 1, we have been working to serve an unprecedented number of people entering and living in shelters,” said Maibe Ponet, a spokesman for de Blasio.
“The staggering numbers that we see today are a compounded problem that has been building for years.”
The huge numbers have forced Mayor de Blasio, who was elected in a landslide by promising to advocate for the city’s most vulnerable, to add several controversial new shelters to the teeming system.
By law, the city is required to house anyone who needs shelter within the five boroughs.
In his nine months in office, de Blasio had added three shelters in Queens and is planning several more to address the crisis.
But those desperate measures have created a different set of problems, with many communities balking at having homeless shelters in their neighborhoods.
Angry protests sprung up in Elmhurst when the city turned the 46,000-square-foot Pan American Hotel into a shelter.
It was initially supposed to hold just 24 families, but is now housing 648 people from 180 families.
Residents are “freaking out” about the growth of the facility, said Roe Daraio, of Communities of Maspeth and Elmhurst Together, which is trying to get the city to move the shelter.
“I worry about crime all the time, but now they have close to 700 people here.”
Plans to add a shelter housing 350 to 400 people in middle-class Glendale at a vacant chemical plant have also caused an uproar.
“De Blasio is shooting from the hip,” fumed Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Civic Association.
“They have no plan. You dump hundreds of homeless people in a middle-class neighborhood, where are they going to go?”
City Hall says they are doing all they can to address the severe crisis.
“People placed at these shelters are families with children struggling to make ends meet,” said Ponet.
“We hope communities find the compassion to embrace them as they try to get back on their feet.”
The mayor is also engaging in other methods to address the problem, including new programs that will place some struggling families in public housing, and rental assistance programs tailored to find apartments for the homeless.
The rental assistance program, which was created through a deal crafted in the state budget, gives rental subsidies to homeless families where at least one person holds a full-time job. A second program helps the chronically homeless.
