Homelessness in New York City

Political scientist and public policy expert Thomas J. Main has written a compelling and insightful analysis of homelessness policy in New York City between 1979 and 2015 that seems particularly relevant amid our current crisis in wealth and income inequality. Tracing municipal efforts to combat housing insecurity through five mayoral administrations, Main argues that there has been a series of important nonincremental policy changes over the past few decades. The author explains that several factors have combined to produce this evolution in public policy: the desires of public officials to create effective policy, a fragmented urban governing structure that creates spaces for change to occur, and an assortment of entrepreneurial activists who worked on behalf of the city's homeless population. Main concludes that urban policy makers have made striking, yet insufficient, progress in fashioning programs that adequately address the problems of homelessness in the city. Main organizes his analysis into three broad phases. During phase one, which included the first attempts to develop a specific policy for homelessness under Mayor Edward Koch, policy makers and activists pursued a philosophy of entitlement and argued that shelter was a legally protected right. Phase two, which Main describes as paternalistic and which spanned the David Dinkins, Rudolph Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg administrations, saw the imposition of conditions placed on the homeless that required them to meet certain behavioral expectations before receiving assistance. Finally, in the postpaternalism environment of phase three, implemented in the later years of the Bloomberg administration and extending into the tenure of Bill de Blasio, recipients of housing assistance no longer had to comply with behavioral expectations. They instead had an array of optional social services offered to them. During all of these phases, according to Main, policy makers took effective steps to solve the problem of homelessness in New York City while simultaneously grappling with the severe policy limitations of their ideas and programs

Economics · Entitlement (fair division · Inequality · Paternalism · Political science · Politics · Population · Public policy · Sociology · Urban planning · Urban policy · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Public Administration

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