Cold War Veterans Blog

A Bulletin About Homelessness from NY Metrovets

“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master." - George Washington



“That is not why people were elected. They were elected to lead.” - Mayor Bloomberg to local lawmakers who complain that they are reluctant to support congestion pricing because it is unpopular with many of their constituents.



"Our city and our country owe a debt of gratitude to our veterans, and those who have had the misfortune to become homeless deserve our help to get back on their feet...“I hope our new partnership with Veterans Affairs will become a national model.” - Mayor Bloomberg, December 6, 2006

The article below is FYI, however, as I have been saying for several years now, (read my report entitled "Behind the Bloomberg Press Conference" from 2006 in the files section of NYMetroVets) there were many problems in what Mayor Bloomberg and his administration did with homeless veterans and we (the community) allowed the Mayor - through force and by keeping us in the dark - to change things to make it appear that the homeless veteran numbers had gone down when in fact, it is being done with the community in the dark.

Some of the programs stated in the article are exactly what is happening to our fellow veterans, like moving them to substandard housing. However in the case of veterans, the city has done other things - taking a harder line on determining who is and who isn't a veteran (which has and will lower the number of veterans the city says it has), putting some on busses back to their families, and spreading homeless veterans to shelters and SRO's around the five boroughs, which had the effect of removing their voice when there was a problem (drugs in shelter, etc.).

As an example - The Borden Avenue Veterans shelter, before the "modernization" had 410 beds, enough to serve about 60 percent of the estimated (code word for guess) 700 homeless vets officials believed were in the 5 boroughs. Now after the modernization, there are only half the amount of beds there (about 230). So the question is - Where did the rest of the homeless veterans go? What happened to the special task force created in 2006 to: "end veterans' homelessness once and for all?" What happened to the promised homeless veteran numbers that Commissioner Hess stated he would have when he testified in front of the City Council Veterans Committee last fall?

I continue to say and believe that once this administration closes and/or the war ends, we are going to have some serious problem in the five boroughs with veteran issues and homeless veterans will be a major issue.

The bottom line is that while you have to give Mayor Bloomberg credit for do something, he went about it the wrong way by radically reinventing the way the city engages homeless people and then forcing it on everyone and not working with those in the community who could have helped make a difference; but working only with those groups that had money to help the city overcome the problem. As someone said, you can throw millions of dollars onto a problem, but that doesn't address the variables and I always said that there were too many questions that were never answered by the city in bringing the VA into the city homeless process.

Lastly, I continue to state that an ounce of prevention today can help prevent problems tomorrow but in truth, I feel for the next mayoral administration as I believe Mayor Bloomberg will say as his term ends next year that he brought homeless numbers down but once it all washes out and the new administration comes in, the number will probably have increased, as New York Magazine say they are doing now. Read on...Joe

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http://nymag. com/news/ features/ 45103/

A Night on the Streets

Homelessness is the single biggest failure of the Bloomberg administration, which has tried a radical new policy that’s made an intractable problem worse. There are over 35,000 homeless now in the city. On a single cold night in February, we met six of them.