New York Announces New System to Process Families Seeking Shelter -NYT

[Rose Siding]

City officials announced yesterday that they had thoroughly redrawn the system for providing shelter to homeless families, replacing it with a streamlined process that supplies beds and social workers more quickly and eliminates the system's rundown gateway in the Bronx.

The Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx, where scenes of destitute children and mothers sleeping on benches have come to symbolize the city's failure to cope with homeless families, will be razed next year, the city announced.

The $30 million construction of the office will not start until February 2006. However, beginning tomorrow, homeless families making their first request for shelter will go to a spruced-up building a mile away, and their cases will be handled more quickly, the city says.

The new system will also be much more skeptical of families who have applied in the past and been told they already have adequate housing, often with relatives. Now, such families are allowed to apply repeatedly while in temporary shelter for months. Under the new plan, such families, who account for two-thirds of those who visit the office, will not be allowed to return to a shelter..........

http://nytimes.com/2004/11/17/nyregion/17homeless.html?hp&ex=1100667600&en=74216742849fdf6c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[crasmane]

1. These people are exiles or refugees in their own country.

It seems to me that this is dealing with homelessness by making more people homeless. They're burning more than the Emergency Assistance Unit for sure.

[oscar111]

2. Last sentence:2/3 will be denied help

2/3 of those now applying will be denied.

They are in temp shelters, and somehow the state has decided they also have relatives willing to shelter them.

I bet the state made the decision based on "do you have any living relatives?".

Hostile relatives thus counted as good shelter.

such is my speculation.

Fittingly, NYC has a repub mayor. Last dem mayor, i think asked churches to help, only four did in huge NYC. Last dem mayor... his name? .. was a single guy attacked as possibly gay.

//Repub. mayor Bloomberg spent, to "buy" the election .. was it five times as much as Mark Green?

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Children left to die from exposure to the elements. That is our national shame. Hmless of all ages die at the rate of 84,OOO excess above normal, per year.. three times the normal rate. Why should foreigners want to copy our nation?

We are a failure.

Down Manhattan, about 54th street, the Hotel Parker Meridian serves up a $1,OOO omlet for customers.
And a CEO, Kozlowski, spends two million on a birthday party, with vodka flowing from a male opening.

We are a failure.

NYC was where 225 flat out starved to death in the early '3O's ... according to hospital records. Anyone know the national starvation total for that era? Oddly missing statistic.

[VivaKerry]

3. THIRTY MILLION F'ing DOLLARS?!!!!!!!

And therein lies the problem.

arrrgh!

[saigon68]

4. Land of the Free Home of the Brave

Our People are dying in Iraq to make the "World a better Place"

How ironic children should be put through this when mercenaries make $2000.00 a day guarding Negroponte's sorry ass.