XPost: alt.society.sustainable, sac.politics, alt.politics.democrats
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, misc.survivalism, nyc.politics
From: leroysoetoro@bho-rejected.com

http://nypost.com/2017/08/19/nyc-is-screwing-citizens-by-housing-the-
homeless/

Let’s face it: Nobody really knows what to do about the homeless crisis.
The sheer numbers of 60,000 people in city shelters and nearly 4,000 more
on the streets — many in the latter group psychotic, drug-addicted and
violent — overwhelm the best-intended plans to help them.

That said, there are better and worse ways to cope with the nightmare.
It’s bad enough that the city now spends $2.3 billion a year on homeless services including $1.4 billion on shelter housing, twice what it spent
just three years ago.

But making things worse: City Hall is now paying landlords more money to
put up the homeless than the property owners could make by renting
apartments and hotel rooms to non-homeless people at ordinary market
rates.

Shouldn’t developers be incentivized to create actual affordable housing
for permanent residents — not more shelters for transients with no links
to a community?

The hapless Department of Homeless Services has gone off the deep end at a
site in The Bronx, whether out of stupidity, incompetence or sheer
desperation.

As first reported by The Post’s Carl Campanile this past week, the city tentatively agreed to let politically connected Bronx developer Mark Stagg
use his brand-new building at 5731 Broadway, in the Kingsbridge
neighborhood, as a homeless shelter.

Stagg designed it as an ordinary, six-story rental residential building
with ground-floor storefronts. He originally planned to rent out 83
apartments at an average of $641 per room to ordinary, stable tenants.

Last winter, he asked the city for a property-tax break in exchange for
keeping 20 percent of units “affordable” — a not uncommon step.

But then, in one of those murky, backstage dealings that define Mayor de Blasio’s irredeemably corrupt administration, the city agreed to let Stagg
use the whole building as “transitional housing” for homeless families. (Homeless Services would pay a nonprofit management oufit, Praxis Housing Initiatives, $5.3 million to run the shelter. Praxis can use $2.4 million
of that to cover rent payments to Stagg — an average $2,409 per unit or
$1,028 per room.)

Not only will Stagg make more money, the deal will spare him the nuisance
of managing and marketing the building. All he has to do is sit back and collect a monthly check from Praxis.

This is a truly terrifying precedent. It bodes no long-term good for those truly in need. It’s also bad for taxpayers and disastrous for neighbors
who didn’t expect a shelter to be plopped in their midst.

Working- and middle-class Kingsbridge is on the brink of an economic boom, according to real-estate tracking site StreetEasy. The last thing such a community needs is the destabilizing imposition of a large, out-of-the-
blue homeless shelter.
Scarier still: When de Blasio talked last winter about opening 90 new
shelters, he was awfully vague about where they’d be or how they’d be
funded.

Stagg’s 5731 Broadway sure looks like City Hall’s answer. Let’s get
private developers to build new shelters, and we’ll pay them tons of money
to use them for the homeless!
The administration’s s bumbling, counterproductive approach to “solving”
the housing crisis comes as no surprise. De Blasio has ignored and lied
about the problem since the day he took office.

Some of the crisis is of the mayor’s own making. He and his Homeless
Services commissioner, Steven Banks — who previously “spent a lifetime advocating and agitating for the poor,” as The New York Times delicately
put it — loosened requirements for shelter entry. The acceptance rate is
now 50 percent, more than twice what it was under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the number of shelter residents has swelled 14 percent
under de Blasio.

Lax admissions opened the floodgates to “homeless” families from far
beyond the city itself. As Nicole Gelinas wrote in The Post, “New York is
one of the only places in the country, by inclination and court order,
that will give a free apartment to any family from anywhere in the world”
if they try hard enough.

Of the 60,000 people in the homeless system, more than 6,600 are from out
of town. That figure is certain to swell as word spreads that jobless,
unstable drifters might luck into a room at a nice hotel or new apartment building.

Like other mayors before him, de Blasio has pledged to create “affordable” housing one way or another. But his long-touted “Housing New York”
strategy to “create or preserve” 200,000 affordable units in 10 years is uniquely misleading. Some 120,000 of the apartments the mayor has in mind
are, in fact, existing ones that the city is paying to fix up.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But relatively few of the 80,000 units supposedly to be created from scratch have actually come on line. Many of
them were prompted by previously existing mechanisms such as rules that
require developers to include a certain number of affordable units in
exchange for putting up larger buildings than zoning allows.

And most of the “affordable” apartments encouraged by de Blasio’s various zoning changes are still too expensive to the truly poor who are at risk
of needing shelter housing.

Meanwhile, Homeless Services has made an incredible 425,000 hotel bookings
for homeless families costing taxpayers $72.9 million in a single year,
city Comptroller Scott Stringer reported. Nearly 8,000 homeless now stay
in hotels.

Not all seem grateful for it. Homeless residents at a DoubleTree in the Financial District had the chutzpah to complain that the neighborhood
where they’re living for free is too expensive. “We live out of Burger
King,” one told The Post.

Now the city’s giving them the keys to nice new apartments, too. What a scandalous waste of public money — and a disservice to those truly in need
of our help.


--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party has run out of gas.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for ending the disaster of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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