Mayor de Blasio has sent 1,412 homeless people packing since taking office in January — keeping pace with Mayor Bloomberg’s bum-banishment program despite lambasting his Republican predecessor’s homeless policies.
Liberal advocates for homeless New Yorkers slammed de Blasio for ignoring his own “Tale of Two Cities” campaign rhetoric to “push poor people out of the city.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Luis Tejada, former head of the Mirabal Sisters Cultural and Community Center in West Harlem. “I worked for [de Blasio’s] campaign. We expected more from him. This is a big surprise.”
De Blasio is on pace to send roughly as many homeless from Gotham this year as Bloomberg did in his last year, when the city Department of Homeless Services moved 2,208 from the city to their former hometowns.
Instead of pawning New York’s homeless problem off on other cities, Hizzoner should be aggressively targeting landlords who put poor people out on the street, said Tejada, a Democrat running for state Senate against incumbent Adriano Espaillat and former Councilman Robert Jackson.
The program, dubbed Project Reconnect in 2007 when Bloomberg reintroduced it, provides one-way bus, train or plane tickets to homeless people free of charge if they can show they have relatives outside of New York they can live with.
It’s been in existence in different forms — as the Travel Assistance and Homeward Bound programs — since Mayor Ed Koch’s tenure. Advocates say it’s a far less expensive solution than adding them to New York’s generous homeless assistance rolls.
Under Bloomberg, the program cost $500,000 a year and homeless families were sent as far away as Paris and South Africa.
City officials declined to say how much it’s costing now but noted many people in the program head to Puerto Rico, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida.
De Blasio dodged questions Saturday about why he’s continued the program.
Other advocacy groups such as Partnership for the Homeless — whose president, Arnold Cohen, blasted the program in 2009 for “passing the problem of homelessness to another city” — were less critical when asked about it under de Blasio.
“Honestly, [we’re] trying to work with the de Blasio administration,” said Kris Dasgupta, the group’s vice president of development.
Additional reporting by Andrea Hay
Bet these homeless advocates are all for open borders. To be a leftist one must live in a world of absolute compassion. Reality and problem solving interferes with the simple minded "how can you do that to these poor unfortunate people" meme.
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