In the past five years, the city has spent $241 million housing homeless families in hellholes rife with a catalog of code violations from vermin to lead paint, a Daily News investigation has found.
The money flowed to the operators of 24 fleabag hotels and rundown tenements that, despite being repeatedly cited by city inspectors, have become last-resort housing for thousands of desperate families.
All told, taxpayers have coughed up a stunning $1.7 billion to shelter a steadily rising tide of families since fiscal year 2010, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Law show.
Throughout that time, the city has consistently spent more on family shelters than it did on parks, libraries or senior programs.
During the last four years of the Bloomberg mayoralty and the first six months of Mayor de Blasio’s administration, the annual cost of family shelters rose 34%, peaking at $406.2 million in the last fiscal year.
As the number of homeless families seeking shelter rose from 37,000 in 2010 to top 60,000 in December, city inspectors kept citing many of the shelters for a long and horrific list of infractions.
Inspectors found dead rats and mice, bunk beds and cribs jammed up against windows leading to the fire escape, and numerous nonfunctioning smoke detectors. At one fleabag, staff claimed they weren’t allowed to turn on air conditioning without a doctor’s note.
At a Harlem shelter run by HELP USA — where tenant Kysha Lewis, 39, lived until recently with her 3-year-old autistic son, Michael — she awoke several weeks back to find a mouse on her neck.
“I jumped up and the mouse jumped up. I turned and the mouse is scrambling under the bed,” she said. “It’s unhealthy. It’s disgusting. There’s an infestation in the building. It’s clear.”
With help from city Public Advocate Letitia James, Lewis and her son were relocated the day after Easter from the Hamilton Place facility to a clean shelter in Brooklyn.
Hamilton Place was one of the 24 shelters red-flagged by the city Department of Investigation last month for a history of unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
The DOI found that the city Homeless Services Department routinely gave shelters with serious open code violations a “passing grade,” and in some cases did little to punish the nonprofits it pays to run these flophouses.
Hamilton Place got a Homeless Services Department passing grade on April 2, 2014. When the DOI showed up June 5, it found 31 open violations.
HELP USA Vice President George Nashak said his organization has repeatedly pressed the building owner to resolve code violations, and insisted the “passing grade” was “appropriate and accurate to the conditions of the building.”
Since the DOI’s report, he said, many of the violations have been resolved, and Help USA is working to resolve the rest.
“We’ve stepped up our efforts. (Homeless Services) has stepped up their efforts. We want to operate these buildings in a code-compliant manner,” he said.
The average rent at these shelters is sobering: $2,451 to $3,125 a month. In fiscal 2014, the city was paying on average $24.9 million a month in rent for all the facilities.
At 58 of these sites, mostly hotels and a handful of apartment buildings, the city had little recourse if codes were violated because for years there were no actual contracts.
Instead the providers were hired on no-bid “emergency” basis. Last week, DOI Commissioner Mark Peters told the Daily News, “Historically, lax contracting and inspection procedures have created many of the problems we are seeing today regarding the homeless shelters.”
The DOI said the Homeless Services Department should “expeditiously implement the reforms we recommended — including establishing contracts that tie payment to elimination of code violations and timely inspection and writing of violations so that they can then be enforced.”
On Friday, Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor said the agency was moving aggressively to address the many problems after “years of stagnant wages, loss of affordable housing and adverse social policies . , , (that) led to an unprecedented homeless crisis.”
“While we are focused on preventing more people from becoming homeless and helping those in shelter find permanent housing, we are also working on addressing the loopholes that for years fostered neglect and poor upkeep of shelter facilities,” Taylor said. “We have already begun implementing meaningful changes to improve our accountability and oversight of shelter providers, including increasing compliance and doing more inspections. Our main concern is bringing order to a complex shelter, while providing humane and safe shelter to homeless individuals and families.”
The agency has begun putting shelters getting “emergency” payments on contract and hopes to finish the job by year’s end. Homeless Services also recently toughened contract language, adding requirements that allow the city to withhold payments if serious code violations aren’t addressed quickly. And it’s in the process of staffing a new “compliance officer” unit.
It’s already moved against one of the worst offenders: the perennially troubled Aguila, a nonprofit repeatedly cited by the city controller for unexplained expenses and questionable accounting.
Aguila, which runs or manages seven of the 24 problem shelters red-flagged by the DOI, has seen its city contracts almost double to $52 million from $27 million in the last four years.
In 2013, the Bloomberg administration brought in an outside auditor and heightened monitoring of Aguila. The mayor’s contracts office also made sure the group replaced its entire executive board.
After the DOI report in March, the city shut down two Aguila shelters, Mike’s House and Mike’s House Annex on Eagle Ave. in the South Bronx. At Mike’s House, inspectors found a mouse inside a bureau drawer.
At the Ellington Hotel on W. 111th St. in Morningside Heights, managed by Aguila, the shelter had accumulated $45,277 in unpaid fines on dozens of code violations.
“I’m not authorized to talk about that,” Carmen Cabrera, Aguila’s director of finance, said Friday.
