After a homeless man allegedly bludgeoned four other homeless men to death on the streets of Chinatown, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Outreach NYC, a new plan to address the ongoing crisis of street homelessness in the city. The center of this plan involves training 18,000 city workers how to use NYC’s 311 hotline to share information about sightings of homeless people—information which gets passed on to homeless outreach workers who go to meet these reported individuals and offer them services and potential housing. As current and former outreach workers, we believe this plan is a massive misdirection of effort and resources, and has the potential to undermine the city’s ability to house and serve the people it is supposed to be helping.
By New York state law, any homeless individual can enter the city shelter system and must be provided a bed each night. More than 60,000 people, including 21,673 children, spent the night in shelters this past weekend. The Outreach NYC plan operates on the erroneous assumption that people aren’t aware of this law and that 311 visits help to make clients aware of shelter. The truth is that most street homeless people know about the shelter system and have weighed their current situation against the prospect of entering a typical shelter where privacy is nonexistent, curfews are enforced, theft and conflict are common, and future prospects for moving into permanent housing are nebulous. Outreach workers know that placing street homeless individuals in city shelter beds is incredibly rare.
The city has responded to complaints about the shelter system by fostering a network of Safe Havens, transitional housing buildings that address some of these shortcomings in the shelter system and caters to the specific health needs of individuals with histories of chronic street homelessness. The admissions process requires several in-person meetings with clients, and is not accessible through 311. Once in a safe haven, an individual works with onsite staff and outreach to apply for permanent supportive housing.
The work of getting people housed off the street outside of the shelter system can be broken down into three steps: getting familiar and building trust with homeless people, obtaining a suitable Safe Haven placement for whoever is interested, and working from there to find them permanent housing. Yet both safe havens and permanent supportive housing systems are effectively full, with very low turnover. If outreach workers suddenly had the complete trust of every single street homeless person in the city, we would have nowhere to place them and too few case managers to place them on waiting lists.
When a 311 call for homeless outreach comes in, members of the outreach team assigned to that area are called away from their other duties to go engage that person. Occasionally it puts a new person on our radar, helps them rack up the required number of engagements they need to get assigned a case manager, or results in crisis management. More often, it’s someone who is already known to other outreach workers getting approached yet again that day or that week by people they don’t know without new housing or information to provide. Sometimes it leads to locations being “cleaned up,” where police and sanitation officials force individuals to move their spot, often throwing away most if not all of their belongings.
The plan is called Outreach NYC, but outreach is so much more than 311s. We meet each individual where they are at, develop a relationship of trust, and let them set the pace according to their individual needs and goals. We gather vital documents, place them in available safe haven beds, connect them to medical and psychiatric care, and help them apply to supportive housing. We have to be available in the moment for clients when crises occur, and we have to have time to do the long-term work. The process is lengthened because our caseloads are too large to manage efficiently. Our offices have chronically unfilled positions and a high rate of staff turnover because of low salaries incommensurate with the level of responsibility the work involves.
We are troubled by the direction the city is heading in homeless services. In addition to the Outreach plan, the MTA recently announced the addition of 500 more police officers in the subways to crack down on “quality of life offenses,” which will mean more harassment and forced relocation for people sleeping on subways. Asking homeless people to move from whatever warm nook on the street or train they’ve found without providing them with housing wastes everyone’s time.
We would advise our fellow New Yorkers to call 311 for their neighbors who lack shelter, especially in harsh weather. And 311 can be a useful tool for homeless individuals themselves to get connected to services. But 311 calls need to be paired with accessible resources, like safe haven beds and housing. More 311 calls, without more housing, will not keep our clients safe. Bombarding a person already known to outreach with repeated visits from strangers does not build trust and can in fact alienate people even more from the outreach and housing process.
The murders of Anthony Manson, Nazario Vazquez Villegas, Chuen Kwok, and Florencio Moran, underscored what all of us outreach workers already know: every day on the street carries risk of assault, theft, and death. After the news of the murders spread, some clients told us that they were terrified to sleep; other clients told us they have just barely escaped similar fates themselves during their time in the streets. The mayor’s plan falls far short of doing any of our clients justice. They don’t need more 311 calls, they need safe spaces of their own to live in. We want our work to matter, and we know our clients deserve better.
The mayor’s focus on 311s without new housing, in addition to the MTA plan, paints a dystopic portrait of a city administration that would rather move, harass, and disappear their homeless residents than house them. The solution is simple; make material investments in housing and outreach agencies. The Coalition for the Homeless has called for an increase of permanent housing and safe haven beds, which we echo with the strongest possible voice. This absolutely must include permanent housing for undocumented people, which at this time does not seem to exist. We also call for more case managers, higher salaries, and more manageable caseloads, so we can do our work as quickly as possible without burning out. As current and former outreach workers, as well as New Yorkers, we feel obligated to speak out for our clients and our workplace. We don’t have time to waste.
The authors of this piece asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly without jeopardizing their jobs as outreach workers. Gothamist has confirmed their identities.
