New York Has Disproportionate Number of Residents in Shelters, Report Finds

By SAM ROBERTS

For two-and-a-half years after she was evicted from her apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Ellen O'Shea lived with her young daughter in a shelter for homeless families.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 10 - the worst,” Ms. O'Shea, 50, recalled. Among other indignities, she said, she was bitten by a rat.

Ms. O'Shea left work as a telephone solicitor after suffering a heart attack in 2004. While surviving on food stamps and public assistance payments, she saved enough from her monthly $605 supplemental security income check to finally find another Brooklyn apartment with her 8-year-old daughter last June with help from the shelter's housing specialist.

A lack of affordable housing is one reason that New York's homeless population is breaking records. And the population of state residents in homeless shelters is also high compared with the overall population, according to a Census Bu reau report released last week.

New York State residents, who represent about 6 percent of the nation's population, comprised about 17 percent of homeless people living in emergency and transitional housing in the country in 2010, the bureau said. State residents make up one in four of the homeless people under age 18 and one in five women living in shelters in the United States, the bureau's analysis found.

New York City residents, who make up less than 4 percent of the nation's population, accounted for 14.1 percent of the nation's shelter population, according to the bureau.

Even that figure appears to have been understated. It did not include people living outside on streets and sidewalks. Moreover, the federal estimate was lower than the city's own count. The bureau placed the shelter population in 2010 at just under 30,000; the city's count was about 38,000, plus more than 3,000 living on the streets and in the subway that January. By July 2012, it wa s more than 45,000.

“Despite several earnest measures by the Census Bureau, the federal effort to enumerate the homeless population in the national census remains inadequate,” said Brendan Kearns, a researcher with the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Patrick Markee, a policy analyst with the city's Coalition for the Homeless, attributed the soaring number of homeless to a combination of increasing poverty and high housing costs.

“The gap is wider here and has been widening over the last 10 years,” Mr. Markee said. “More and more families are priced out of housing, and there's not enough affordable housing assistance to help families move out of shelters.”

Another reason, cited by the Fiscal Policy Institute, a research group supported by organized labor, is that housing foreclosure rates in metropolitan areas in the state are higher than for the nation as a whole.

City officials saw a silver lining, of sorts, in the census fig ures.

“New York State guarantees shelter to those in need, and in New York City, we work hard to move those who are on the streets into shelter,” said Seth Diamond, the city's homeless services commissioner. “That's why New York City has one of the lowest rates of street homelessness in the country â€" and far lower than most other major cities.”

City officials also pointed out that some other states do not provide shelter to the extent that New York does.

The Census Bureau found that New York State had the biggest shelter population, at more than 36,000. New York had the third highest percentage of children under 18, nearly 30 percent of its shelter population, trailing Minnesota and Hawaii.

The bureau also broke down the shelter population by county, although in New York City that reflects not only where homeless people are from, but also where they are sheltered. The list was topped by Bronx County (8,990), New York (8,496), Los Angeles (8,492) and Kings (8,409).