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City To Remove 400 Children From Deplorable Homeless Shelters
By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 21, 2014
Modified Feb 21, 2014
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By
Rebecca Fishbein
Published Feb 21, 2014
Modified Feb 21, 2014
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The city will be removing 400 children from two homeless shelters accused of harboring horrific conditions, with multiple inspections yielding evidence of everything from vermin, mold and insufficient heat to violence and sexual predators.
According to the Times, the city has already begun transferring children and their families out of both the Auburn Family Residence in Fort Greene and the Catherine Street shelter in Lower Manhattan; they hope to be able to set up temporary shelters or find alternate housing for them in the system. Auburn was notably the subject of a harrowing Times series on child homelessness, where it was described as "a place where mold creeps up walls and roaches swarm, where feces and vomit plug communal toilets, where sexual predators have roamed and small children stand guard for their single mothers outside filthy showers." The Catherine Street shelter has been cited for violations over 150 times since 2006, with city investigators repeatedly recommending children be removed from the premises.
Mayor de Blasio's administration has pledged to improve shelter conditions for homeless families. "We just weren’t going to allow this to happen on our watch,” the mayor told the newspaper. About a dozen families have been moved out as of January, and the city plans to have the rest transferred to new housing by the fall. The facilities, meanwhile, will undergo security and infrastructural refurbishments, a move that will cost the city $13 million.
Advocates are pushing de Blasio to instate even more policy changes that will help improve conditions for children and families in the city's shelter system, including re-instating a pre-Bloomberg program that gave homeless families priority referrals to federal subsidy programs. And some argue that the changes are coming too late. “It takes all of this for something to happen?” the mother of Dasani, the homeless child featured in the Times series, said after hearing about changes to the Auburn facility. “Why was it so hard to do this three years ago?"
According to statistics from the Department of Homeless Services, over 22,000 children slept in city homeless shelters nightly in 2013.
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Rebecca Fishbein
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