NYC SEES RECORD-HIGH 100K HOMELESS PEOPLE

Fri 30 June 2023:

There are now more than 100,000 homeless individuals living in shelters in New York City (NYC), breaking previous records. This has raised questions about how local governments in the US handle this population, US media reported.

According to a New York Times (NYT) report, local officials claimed on Wednesday that for the first time in history, there are more than 100,000 people staying in homeless shelters due to an influx of migrants from the US southern border.

The number of migrants in shelters passed 50,000 a few days earlier. And among the 50,000, more than two-thirds are families with children, the NYT cited the city’s deputy mayor.

There are currently over 50,000 migrants under the care of New York City, Deputy Mayor of Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said during a briefing, a number she called “unsustainable” as it surpasses the number of unhoused New Yorkers in its shelter system.

“You see from today’s numbers that we have reached a tipping point,” Williams-Isom said. “We now have more asylum seekers in our care than longtime New Yorkers … who were in our existing DHS system.”

“We all are facing a humanitarian crisis right here in the five boroughs,” she said, and called on federal partners to help in the form of financial aid and national coordination.

The city said it has spent over a billion dollars to house the migrants since they started arriving in large numbers in the spring of 2022, and the figure is expected to rise to over four billion dollars by next year.

However, the New York Post said that according to a comptroller’s report released on Wednesday, among the 2,308 homeless people present during the NYC sweep between March 21, 2022, and November 30, 2022, only three people landed in permanent housing, and nearly 95 per cent of them didn’t even go to a shelter.

The comptroller also said about a third of the homeless encampment sites popped back after being cleaned up by municipal workers.

For the homeless in Los Angeles, the situation is also gloomy.

According to a leaked email from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), homeless persons camping in the West Hills “will be arrested and all of their belongings will be taken away by sanitation,” the TV station ABC7 reported on Wednesday.

The LAPD has received widespread criticism, and their scheduled cleanup on Thursday was postponed as a result of the internal email release.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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