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 The history of homelessness in New York City over the last 30 years looks like something of a roller coaster ride. The numbers of individuals and families living in City-funded shelters have risen sharply; then dropped precipitously at times, only to continue what seems like a relentless climb to the current peak of approximately 40,000.
Sidebar: Shelter Means More than Just a Bed
When and how the system will be able to find its way back from these perilous levels – either through a new found capacity to provide adequate supplies of supportive and affordable housing … or through a collapse in the City’s ability or willingness to provide emergency and transitional shelter … remains a question.
Women In Need was founded in 1983 when there were approximately 12,500 individuals in City shelters – less than one-third the current number. Most were single men; some were single women. “Families were a very small part of the homeless population at that time,” says Bonnie Stone who has headed WIN since 2000. It was the needs of this group, however, that WIN was created to focus on. And, it is this group – women and children – who now make up the overwhelming majority of people living in New York City’s homeless shelters.
“Rita Zimmer, a well-known activist and community leader founded the agency,” says Stone. “She brought together a great group of volunteer board members and they were very focused on the homeless women and children living in the Martinique Hotel.”
WIN began by partnering with the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan to open St. Mary’s House, an emergency residence for ten homeless women with children. Next came Monica House, a shelter in Brooklyn that evolved into the Monica Apartment Program, a scatter-site “shelter without walls” that WIN still operates 28 years later.
During these early years – and ever since – WIN has played an important role in identifying and meeting those needs of homeless families that extend well beyond a roof and bed.
In 1984, just one year after it was founded, WIN launched the Services to Prevent Placement Program (STOPP) which offered counseling and essential services to homeless families with children at risk of foster care placement due to potential child abuse and neglect. A year later, it founded Camp WIN, an eight-week summer day care program serving children of homeless families living in midtown welfare hotels. Soon after, it would open a NYS OASAS-licensed Alcohol and Drug Treatment Center exclusively for women, begin providing child care and launch aftercare services for recently re-housed families. 
During these early years, New York City’s homeless population continued to skyrocket, rising to a peak of 28,737 in 1987. Much of this early growth, however, consisted of single adults while families represented a smaller portion of the overall census. WIN responded by opening several transitional residences, including the Lehman Brothers Residence in the Bronx which continues to provide shelter for 27 families.
After some decline and several years of relative stability in the overall census, New York City’s homeless shelter population once again began to explode in 1999. From a little more than 22,000 near the end of 1998, the numbers would surge to 38,662 in May of 2003. This time, the growth would come almost entirely from an increase in the number of families in the system – from 15,287 individuals in families at the end of 1998 to 30,408 in May of 2003.
Once again, WIN responded – this time with shelter programs of larger size to address the growing scale of the family homelessness crisis. In 2000, the agency began to operate the Jennie A. Clarke Residence in East Harlem in partnership with the Hope Community. It has a capacity to serve 73 families. 
In 2003, WIN opened its largest facility, the Junius Street Family Residence in East New York, a newly renovated manufacturing building serving 216 families in studio-style apartments. Three-years later, the agency completed development of the Liberty Family Residence, another renovated manufacturing building located on the same block, with a capacity for 203 families. Together, these two adjacent facilities can accommodate 419 homeless families – approximately 1,800 individuals in total.
WIN now operates six transitional shelters for families in Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn and over 200 supportive housing apartments which accommodate more than 800 families with 2,500 people every night, including 1,600 children.
The Challenge of Homelessness
With New York City’s total shelter census now hovering around 40,000 -- approximately 31,000 individuals living in families and 8,500 single adults -- homelessness is an extremely complex, multi-faceted, and solution-resistant problem.
“Homelessness is not an illness,” says Stone. “It is not a mental health issue or an educational issue. It is not a children’s issue. It is not even a housing issue. It is all of those things. It is really the end result of what happens after all these other systems have failed.”
As a result, she explains, strategies to successfully address the problem must reach beyond the mere symptom of homelessness and tackle the underlying factor – or more often the multiple factors – which have caused individuals or families to find themselves in the shelter system.
“The only underlying sets of issues which have been successfully tackled are those affecting single people with serious mental illness,” says Stone. “Supportive Housing has been enormously successful. A whole series of programs -- created in large part through the New York New York I, II and III Agreements created by New York City and New York State -- have targeted that specific population, developed the programming and the permanent housing produced by it allows these individuals to move out of the shelter system.” Stone credits the development of Supportive Housing for the dramatic decline in the numbers of single adults in the system, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the overall homeless population.
Supportive Housing
for Families
Until recently, however, supportive housing has not been readily available as a tool to address issues driving homelessness for many families. “While it has been recognized that Supportive Housing works for singles, it was never recognized until quite recently that it can also be effective for some number of families,” says Stone. “We at WIN started doing this years ago. We took some federal money that was available and defined it as supportive housing for families.”
The agency began by developing housing programs for families headed by women with a history of substance abuse. In 1999, it developed Triangle House with 12 family units for families headed by women in recovery. In 2007, WIN did its first replication of this program model at the Brooklyn Recovery Program which provides housing and services for 15 families. The Bronx Recovery Program for 22 families followed in 2008. A similar program, Families in Recovery, serves eight women and their children in the Bronx.
Two other supportive housing programs – both opened in 2003 -- addressed other key causes of homelessness for families.
SHINE (Supportive Housing In a New Environment) is a Bronx-based, scattered-site apartment program for 77 families with histories of domestic violence. “Approximately 40 percent of families in the shelter system have histories of domestic violence,” says Stone. “It is one of the things that homeless people don’t always talk about right away. We find out about it as we get to know them in our programs.”
WISH (Women In Supportive Housing) is 62 scattered-site apartments in Brooklyn for young mothers who have aged out of foster care. “Fourteen percent of families in shelter are headed by young people who have graduated from foster care,” says Stone. “They have no network, nothing to fall back on. Imagine being 18 or 19 years old, after having had a difficult experience growing up and now having a child of your own with no place to go. A lot of them end up in the homeless system. They have a lot of needs.”
In 2010, WIN collaborated with Robin Hood, the Department of Homeless Services and three other homeless service providers to create Home to Stay, 120 scatter-site apartments for families who have experienced repeated episodes of homelessness and who have returned to homelessness even after receiving rental subsidies. WIN has 30 of those apartments.
“We now have 226 units of supportive housing for families which has grown up over the years,” says Stone. “I think we are the largest provider of permanent supportive housing for families at this point.”
And, Stone is hopeful that additional opportunities to provide supportive housing for families will be available in the future. “For the first time, New York New York III allowed 10 percent of housing development to go for families,” says Stone, noting that there are still mental health and/or other disability criteria for eligibility. “It is great. It is a nose in the tent.” NYNY III also included an allocation of supportive housing slots to serve young people who have aged out of foster care.
Economics and
Affordable Housing
In addition to personal challenges such as mental illness, substance abuse or histories of domestic violence, homeless families must also find a way to afford housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. For much of the last 30 years, families in shelter had received a priority in the allocation of Section 8 vouchers and NYC Housing Authority apartments. In 2005 the Bloomberg administration ended this policy and replaced it with the Housing Stability Plus program which offered homeless families a rental subsidy which declined steadily over a five-year period. In 2007, the City changed its strategy again and implemented the Advantage program which provided a one-year rental subsidy with the possibility of renewal for a second year. Over the years, both Housing Stability Plus and Advantage had been criticized by advocates for the homeless. But last April, when the Advantage subsidy was eliminated by the State and the City, in response, announced that it would be ending the program completely, everyone was very concerned. While a series of legal challenges have kept the program alive for existing recipients on a month to month basis, no new families are now being provided with rental subsidies of any kind.
“I was very disappointed,” says Stone. “There is a huge amount of anxiety and fear in the shelters. Poor people are not able to afford normal rents in this city without help. We are working with families to see if we can help them with employment and other assistance to piece something together, help them to find some way of moving out of the shelter. It is very difficult.”
WIN provides a variety of education and employment services to help homeless residents find jobs in the hopes of supporting themselves in their own permanent housing. (See “Shelter Means More than Just a Bed” at left) At the same time, however, the sudden loss of rental subsidy has hindered WIN’s ability to help residents find their way out of shelter. “People are moving out, but at a much slower rate,” says Stone. The average length of stay in WIN shelters had been six months but is now rising. “It’s probably seven or eight months now,” says Patience Oti, Director of the Junius and Liberty Shelters.
The sudden change in City policy is nothing new for WIN and other homeless service providers, says Stone. “Usually social service programs will have a major change in policy and then everything settles in for ten or twenty years. In homeless services, every six or nine months there is some major change in the way you do business, the way you finance your programs, the expectations on staff and clients. It is endless, endless, endless change. We have to be very responsive. The policies change and we change; the system develops and we develop; needs shift and we shift.”
In part, WIN has maintained this resiliency by seeking private contributions to supplement government contracts. “We raise a lot of private money,” says Stone. “We believe that we need to fill in the gaps in the system and make this whole thing work.” In FY2010, it raised $3.5 million of its $33 million budget through private contributions. This year, the agency’s benefit gala alone raised $2.5 million. “People are generous. They want to help,” says Stone.
WIN uses these private monies to offer or strengthen a variety of different services. “We don’t get any funding from any source for domestic violence services,” says Stone. “Child care is huge for us. We get some money within the shelter structure to do a limited amount but we enhance that as much as we can.” Private contributions also help to support WIN’s substance abuse health clinic, which exclusively serves women and offers on-site child care, in the Bronx.
“We have lots and lots of volunteers who come in to run programs for work readiness, employment readiness and computer literacy,” says Stone. “We have esteem groups for teens.” Kid Sista, for example, serves young girls ages 10-16 in the hope of reducing HIV transmission among young women of color by reducing high-risk behaviors through knowledge and empowerment.
Robin Hood has been one major supporter, providing a Single Stop program at WIN, building the state-of-the-art Robin Hood Playground that serves children and youth living at Junius and Liberty shelters, and giving much needed general operating support. “They have been incredibly generous with us,” says Stone. In November, Robin Hood honored WIN and Mutiya Vision, a volunteer and former resident, with its 2011 Hero Award. The Foundation noted that as a child, Vision and her mother had “moved to a safe and clean WIN shelter for about a year… The experience changed her life.”
Looking ahead, WIN has several major new projects in the pipeline.
The Glenmore, located close to the Junius/Liberty Shelter complex in East New York, will provide 160 units of combined supportive and affordable housing. “It took us a year and a half to get the zoning approval,” says Stone. Now, WIN is working on financing for the $50 million project. “We have a NY NY III commitment for social services. If all goes well, we should have people living there in two-and-a-half years.”
WIN is also in discussions regarding the opening of another women’s shelter and has several other plans in the works. “These all take a great deal of time,” says Stone.
With almost 40,000 individuals living in shelters, it is clear that New York City has yet to solve the problem of homelessness. Yet Stone believes that the City deserves significant credit for what it has done to provide shelter for those in need. “New York is really special,” she says. “It made a promise in the form of a consent decree in 1981 to provide shelter for those who are homeless and we spend a huge amount of taxpayer money making sure that the promise is kept. New York works incredibly hard to take care of all of its homeless people. There has been a lot of arguments around the edges, but in the end of the day, that promise has been kept.”
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