New York City is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. On January 1, the Tenant Safe Harbor Act will expire—and with its expiration, the only real protection tens of thousands of local families have from eviction evaporates.
If New York fails to act now, the city will face a devastating surge of families entering an already overburdened shelter system. Thousands more children will experience the life-altering trauma of homelessness.
According to a recent survey, one-third of all renters with children in New York City have missed and deferred rental payments – and things are bound to get worse. Two-thirds of low-income renters with children are worried about their ability to make rent next month.
The back-of-the-envelope math is chilling. We cannot allow families with children to lose their homes—particularly in the middle of a pandemic.
Of the approximately 43,000 people currently living in family shelters in New York City, more than half are children, and 95% are Black or Latinx. For these kids, whose average length of stay is 446 days of their most critical developmental years, every moment is an eternity. New York City students in shelters missed a month of school on average, had double-digit deficits in reading and math scores, and a 10% higher rate of suspensions, a 2018 report by Advocates for Children found. With such extreme disruptions this school year, we won’t know for a long time just how much farther behind these students will be because of coronavirus.
But we cannot afford to wait to find out. We must act now.
Local, state, and federal leaders need to use all the tools at their disposal to protect the communities hit hardest by Covid-19. To this end, we must ensure that rental assistance programs offer the fair market subsidies required to compete for housing in the private market; expand key neighborhood-based services for tenants; redirect precious resources to long-term rental assistance; make it easier to apply for and secure rent subsidies (and at least temporarily dispense of eligibility requirements that get in the way); and make liberal use of tools like tax abatements, zoning bonuses, and other incentives that spur the development of affordable housing units and supportive housing for our most vulnerable New Yorkers.
This is more than a moral obligation; this is also an economic necessity for our city’s recovery in this recession and for our long-term fiscal health. The costs of homelessness are far greater than the costs of subsidized housing and prevention policies. And the long-term outcomes for children living in shelters include serious negative consequences for health, education, and future earning potential, which in turn have long-term impacts on the economic health of our communities.
Direct federal relief to New York State and New York City is absolutely critical to any of these efforts, and all New Yorkers must demand that our leaders in Washington get back to work on directing relief to where it is needed as soon as possible. But at the same time, our city and state must prepare for the possibility that the outgoing administration in Washington will fail to act before it is too late. This means that our City and State governments need to be bold enough to explore options like increasing tax revenue and expanding borrowing authority, and quickly.
We cannot sit idly by while an out-of-control pandemic triggers an out-of-control explosion in evictions. The economic damage to New York City and the deepening of intergenerational trauma in Black and Latinx communities is too high a price to pay. The time to act is now.
Adrienne Adams is a New York City councilwoman representing Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Rochdale Village and South Ozone Park.
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November 21, 2020 at 06:14AM
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Only direct federal relief will stave off a wave of pandemic evictions - Crain's New York Business
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