Here’s your Sunday Morning Homelessness Moment

“Mr. Bloomberg announced a plan to reduce homelessness by no longer giving homeless families priority in public housing.”

Yeah.

Makes absolutely ZERO sense. Right?

It’s kinda’ like ending hunger by ceasing to feed the hungry.

How or why?

Because they eventually die.

But, ’tis true.

In a New York Times story by Alan Feuer published, February 3, 2012 entitled “Homeless Families, Cloaked in Normality,” Mr. Feuer wrote “In 2004, Mr. Bloomberg announced an ambitious plan to reduce homelessness by two-thirds over five years by building housing units, by putting more restrictions on those trying to enter the system and, most controversially, by no longer giving homeless families priority in receiving public housing or what is known as Section 8 assistance, which gives people federal vouchers under which they pay no more than 30 percent of their income for privately rented apartments.”

Literary criticism aside – the sentence is too long, among other things – it says “In 2004, Mr. Bloomberg announced an ambitious plan to reduce homelessness by two-thirds over five years by building housing units, by putting more restrictions on those trying to enter the system and, most controversially, by no longer giving homeless families priority in receiving public housing or what is known as Section 8 assistance, which gives people federal vouchers under which they pay no more than 30 percent of their income for privately rented apartments.”

“At the time, officials said that other New Yorkers at risk of being homeless — the disabled, for example, or former foster children — should have first claim on available public housing. (Each year, 5,000 to 6,000 public-housing units turn over and are sought by more than 100,000 people on a seven-year waiting list.) They also said that because Section 8 vouchers were in short supply, families were entering shelters as a shortcut to obtaining them. Once the practice ended, the argument went, the number of homeless people entering the system would decrease.

“That didn’t happen. At 40,000 people, New York’s shelter population is higher than it has ever been.”

Be certain to read the entire article at the New York Times website.