Homelessness in New York City
At this moment, the number of New Yorkers who are experiencing homelessness is higher than it has ever been before. With more than 8.3 million people living in New York City, one in every 106 of the city’s residents is homeless, which is nearly 80,000 men, women, and children. While homelessness is not a new occurrence in the US or in New York City, it is certain that modern homelessness which started in the late 1970s is a historical phenomenon. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, homelessness has never been so constant and visible, affecting such a wide spread of people and communities within the city. Modern homelessness first emerged in the late 1970s as a result of the reduction in single-room housing units as Koch, then mayor of the city, began his first term with the conversion of SROs into luxury hotels. Some improvement was achieved with Koch’s housing plan, but his inability to understand the complexity of the homelessness crisis ultimately prevented the city from making permanent change within the issue.
In the late 1970s, the city’s housing stock experienced drastic changes, the most significant one being the reduction in the number of single-room housing units. Single room housing includes single-room occupancy (SRO) units and residential hotels, and it has played a vital role in housing the homelessness population of New York. Single room housing was also essential for discharged patients of psychiatric centers and hospitals, especially when in the 1950s the state adopted a new policy of “deinstitutionalization” for thousands of patients of State facilities who were living with mental illness. This led to thousands of mentally ill patients being discharged from centers and hospitals while the government failed to invest the money saved from letting these patients go into community-based housing. Because of this, “many deinstitutionalized individuals living with mental illness had no alternative but to move into single-room housing”.
In the 1970s, single-room housing stock began to decline rapidly as a result of conversion and demolition while by the end of the decade the number of single-room units decreased by more than 100,000. Today, the city has what is called a right to shelter. As Sarah Gonzalez said in Counting The Homeless, this means that “New York City is legally obligated to find a bed for every person who needs one — every single adult, every family, every couple — every night of the year”. However, in the late 1970s this law did not yet exist so thousands of homeless New Yorkers were forced to live on the streets and look out for themselves.
