The Moral and Economic Answer to NYC’s Homelessness Isn’t Shelter, It’s Housing
Q&A with Christine Quinn
Christine Quinn is the President and Chief Executive Officer of WIN (formerly Women in Need), the largest provider of shelter, social services, and supportive housing for homeless families in New York City and the nation. Quinn is also the Vice Chair of the New York State Democratic Party and serves on the Democratic National Committee. Quinn served as a member of the New York City Council from 1999-2013 and served in the elected role of Speaker of the Council for seven of those years. She is the first woman and the first LGBTQ Speaker in New York City history, as well as the highest-ranking openly LGBTQ official in New York City history. Christine Quinn currently serves on the Boards of the National Institute of Reproductive Health Action Fund (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice New York) and the Center for Democracy in the Americas. She was a Grove Leader in the inaugural Grove Fellowship Program at the Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and a former Harvard University Institute of Politics Fellow. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies and Education from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
New York City is one of a growing number of U.S. cities struggling under the weight of providing resources to confront growing homelessness. The graphic below, from the Coalition for the Homeless, illustrates just how stark the recent growth is relative to the past 40 years:
Based on statistics from the Coalition for the Homeless’ State of the Homeless 2022, between 1985 and 2000, the size of New York City’s homeless population ebbed and flowed through economic cycles and policy interventions, but generally ranged between 20,000 and 25,000. From 2000 to 2015, the numbers trended steadily upwards and stabilized around 60,000. During the Covid-19 pandemic, between 2020 and 2021, pandemic-related eviction moratoriums temporarily reduced the numbers to below 50,000. However, two pandemic-related measures have since expired, driving the recent unprecedented growth in the homelessness population. New York state’s Covid-19 eviction moratorium, which began in March 2020, expired in January 2022. Over the following twelve months, New York City’s homeless population balloonedby 50% to levels far in excess of pre-pandemic peak levels – by February of 2023, the population was just shy of 75,000. Then, in May 2023, the public health clause (“Title 42”) invoked by the Trump administration in 2020 that had prevented migrants from entering the United States, also expired. The number of homeless people in New York City has skyrocketed with an estimated influx of 90,000 migrants since the law’s expiration. As of September 2023, New York City’s homeless population officially topped 87,000. Because these figures only include the portion of asylum seekers in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), the recent increases in the chart are understated. As of late October, current articles suggest that there are currently almost 120,000 homeless people in New York City shelters.
Growing homelessness is not a challenge unique to New York City; however, the city’s “right to shelter” mandate that since 1981 has required the provision of shelter for anyone in need who requests shelter, stands alone in both scale and breadth. Washington, D.C. and the state of Massachusetts are the only other U.S. jurisdictions that have similar laws, but each is more limited: Washington DC provides shelter only during times of extreme temperatures and Massachusetts’ law only assists families with children.
Since the spring of 2023, in New York City, the Adams administration (“the administration”) has sought relief from this mandate, citing the exhaustion of city resources as a result of the continued and unabated influx of migrants. Currently, the Manhattan Supreme Court is considering the law’s temporary suspension, specifically with regard to single adults. Within the last few weeks, New York state governor Kathy Hochul has indicated her support of the city’s attempt to suspend the mandate.
Against this backdrop, the authors interviewed Christine Quinn, who now leads New York City’s largest shelter for families with children after having served as the Speaker of the New York City Council between 2006 and 2013, which is widely considered the second most powerful job in New York City. This combination of experiences provides her with a unique vantage point on the complex nature of this dual homelessness and migrant crisis and its potential solutions.
Belinda Juran/Paige Warren: In early 2023, the New York City Council advanced a series of bills intended to address the homelessness and eviction crisis. One measure that received significant publicity, as well as pushback from the administration, was the elimination of a rule that required homeless people to remain in shelters for at least 90 days (referred to as “the 90-day rule”) before becoming eligible to apply for rental assistance to transition to permanent housing. After initially threatening to veto the rule’s elimination, Mayor Eric Adams ultimately conceded and temporarily suspended the 90-day rule via executive order. What was behind the resistance?
Christine Quinn: Money. There is a disagreement between the City Council’s math versus the Mayor's math on the cost of moving people out of shelter more quickly. The administration cited longer shelter stays as their rationale for not supporting the rule’s elimination. And yet it seems like it would be just the opposite. Moving people out of shelter more quickly would result in shorter, not longer, shelter stays.
Despite the executive order, the City Council is still going to enact the bill that eliminates the 90-day rule because an executive order isn’t permanent and would have to be re-issued by the next mayor to remain in effect. But once a law is passed, in order to undo it, the Council would have to pass another law.
Juran/Warren: You are leading a newly formed coalition – New York Shelter for All in Need Equally (NY SANE) – comprised of a group of religious leaders, affordable housing advocates, and labor leaders who all oppose the administration’s request to suspend New York City’s right to shelter mandate. New York City is unique in having this requirement. Why do you so strongly support upholding the right to shelter?
Quinn: Having the right to housing is important and a good policy on both a moral and humanitarian level. It says people shouldn't sleep on the street. It says children shouldn't sleep on the street. It says domestic violence survivors shouldn't have to stay with the batterer so their children have a roof over their heads. The law recognizes housing is a right. That's incredibly important.
Juran/Warren: Even prior to the most recent surge in homelessness, some housing advocates have argued that the provision of “right to shelter” absorbed resources that could otherwise be spent on permanent affordable housing solutions and innovation. This critique highlights a resource trade off, where money spent on temporary housing is money not being spent on permanent affordable housing. Your organization, WIN, recently conducted a study which analyzes the relative costs of providing temporary housing versus permanent housing. Can you offer your thoughts on the implied resource trade-off and share the bottom-line findings of your study?
Quinn: If you set up the system where the exit door from transitional housing is opening a new door to permanent housing by qualifying for and receiving a housing voucher, how does it end up costing money?
Our analysis shows that if it is done right, the City actually pays far less than it currently pays. For example, it costs $72 a night for someone to live on a housing voucher, versus about $180 a night to live in a shelter, and $383 a night to live in a welfare hotel. Where you're paying the most and getting the least? Welfare hotels don't even go through the Comptroller’s process, so, the city pays multiples more and could be dealing with sketchy providers. Over a one-year period, the cost savings of housing 25,600 households in permanent housing with vouchers versus in emergency welfare hotels is almost $3 billion!
When people say that the resources required to deliver on “right to shelter” requirements is taking resources away from permanent housing solutions, what they really might be saying is they don't want to develop affordable housing and they don't want to accept housing vouchers from those homeless transitioning into permanent housing. That's not a policy statement. That’s a different issue entirely.
Juran/Warren: Who was the intended audience for WIN’s study? Were you intending its findings to impact the administration’s actions?
Quinn: The Mayor's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is one audience, but not our primary audience. Once it became clear in June 2023 that the Mayor was planning to veto the City Council’s bill seeking to eliminate the 90-day rule, we wanted to show the City Council the real data on the costs and the potential savings that a faster transition to permanent housing could generate.
But we also wanted the Mayor’s office to have the data so that they know that we know that their math is wrong. We've legitimately analyzed the costs and delivered a fact-based document. This Mayor's Office of Management and Budget, like every mayor's OMB, does not like the idea that $1 spent today will save you $2 down the road. They just don't like the math of spending money now to save money later.
I remember once that when I was Speaker of the City Council, my finance director went over to negotiate with the OMB. He presented this whole package that would add six-day service to libraries, and we had a way to fund it, and I was just so proud of the whole thing. But in the end, the OMB didn’t want to spend the $1 today to get $2 later. If you said to the OMB the health equivalent of what we're talking about, “You need to open more primary care clinics because people are going to the emergency room, and that's not the best place to get care and it costs more, so you will save money in the long run, because people won't go to the emergency room,” they would not buy that argument because that means they have to spend more now to save later. I don’t agree with it, but I do accept that that's where they're coming from. It's a very short-term perspective.
Lastly, we wanted to make a case to the media that we are right, and the Adams administration is wrong, on a dollar and cents basis. This study gave us the ability to do that.
Juran/Warren: There has been criticism of the Adams administration’s focus as being too much on temporary housing over permanent housing. Where do you fall on this?
Quinn: I think there's some truth to the criticism so far in this administration, and certainly in sum total in the last administration. But it's not so much that there's been too much focus on shelter, but more that there is absolutely not enough focus on the affordable permanent housing side.
I started working around housing and tenant issues in 1989, and if I had said “affordable housing” then, I would have meant housing for homeless, or very low-income people. Now, when you say “affordable housing,” you mean housing for the homeless, very low income, low income, moderate, and even higher incomes, because the housing crisis is so deep that the stereotypical firefighter and teacher couple can't afford an apartment in New York City anymore. I don't begrudge us having units for working class families, because we need to keep economic diversity. What I begrudge is having no units that are available for people with the greatest need. In fact, the first iteration of Bill de Blasio's affordable housing plan did not include one unit that would be affordable for someone attempting to exit shelter. Not one.
Juran/Warren: The national homeless policy is based on a “housing first” model. What is your view on a right to the provision of shelter being conditioned on a requirement for treatment?
Quinn: If you're found with drugs in a shelter, that's an enormous problem, but we don't drug test. And I'm glad we don't. Forcing people to go into drug or alcohol treatment when they have not made the decision to do so, at least on some level, doesn't work. If you're somebody who's housed, it doesn't work. If you're somebody who's homeless, it doesn’t work. And, by the way, there are lots of housed people out there who have drug and alcohol problems. They just have the means to pay their rent even while they're struggling with drugs and alcohol. Nobody checks their urine before cashing their rent check. But one thing I know for a fact is, unless there is some level of readiness, pushing someone into treatment is just going to be a waste of money.
When people get into shelter, they're at their most vulnerable, probably in their whole lives. That's a moment where they might really be open to getting treatment. The problem is not that we don't know who's using or who isn't using – the problem is we don't have enough places to send the people who are using and have addiction issues. We recently looked for a mental health provider to make a referral for someone who was having suicidal ideations. The wait for an intake at a mental health group we work with, which is a terrific group, was three and a half months! So, what's the point of requiring treatment and of doing testing when we know we don't have the resources out there at a scale that we need?
Juran/Warren: Speaking of the conditional provision of services, the administration’s suspension of the 90-day rule included a “work” provision that requires adult-only households to work 10 hours a week to qualify for housing vouchers. This requirement was a surprise to housing advocates. What is your view on it?
Quinn: We need to get people into permanent affordable housing but requiring that they work is not the answer. Facilitating, so they can work, that's the answer. The truth is that 52% of our moms ARE working when they come to WIN. That's a sin in and of itself. You're working and you can’t afford housing so you’re living in a shelter.
I do believe there needs to be a connection made between housing, job creation and job placement. Job placement, job training, financial literacy, etc., are not part of the city's contracts for housing. We offer it at WIN but that's because we pay for it privately. 91% of WIN’s families who get placed in permanent housing don't return to shelter. That's in large part because of our income building program. If we want people to move out of the state of homelessness and not return to it, we have to invest in wraparound services that are not conditional while people are in shelter.
Juran/Warren: People are often surprised to learn that research confirms WIN’s experience – approximately half of homeless people living in shelters are actually employed. Many people also assume that the homelessness population is primarily men with mental health and substance abuse issues. What is the reality?
Quinn: The truth is that 70% of the people in shelter in New York City today are families with children. Yet, if there's a story tomorrow in the New York Post about homelessness writ large, they will include a picture of a man of color who looks “scary”, because so many of our media outlets are racist and really trying to pull New Yorkers apart from each other, as opposed to uniting New Yorkers in a sense of “what can we do to help,” or even “just tell the facts.”
Juran/Warren: The population of homeless people in shelter depends both on pathways in as well as pathways out. We’ve spoken a bit about improving the pathways out to permanent housing. Now let’s talk about improving the pathways in. In 2022 the New York City Comptroller released findings of a study auditing the Department of Homeless Services’ (DHS) intake, or PATH, process. It revealed that 40% of family shelter intake applications were initially denied, even though many were ultimately approved after several reapplications. You were not surprised by the findings and called the intake process grueling thereby accentuating the trauma from which many of those seeking shelter were escaping. Has the front end of the process improved since the study was published?
Quinn: I think every mayor wants there to be fewer people in homeless shelters, because that's a good fact. It’s a good thing to be able to say, “This vexing problem in the city of New York – I have conquered it.” How do you get there to be fewer people in shelter? One way is by not letting them through the front door, and that has always been the case at PATH. It was the case at PATH under former Mayor Bloomberg, under former Mayor de Blasio, now under Mayor Adams. Mayor Adams could have changed the PATH process or left it alone, and so far, he has made the conscious decision to make the door to shelter as narrow as possible, led by the unbelievably aggressive and trauma-inducing behavior of the PATH employees.
I think the Comptroller’s study will be part of an upcoming City Council hearing. This is something you'll be seeing as the next line of focus of the City Council's work on homelessness.
Juran/Warren: If you were mayor, what would you do differently than is currently being done? Where do you see the best solutions that address the pressure points and how would you pay for it?
Quinn: I would make the housing vouchers available to undocumented people and other migrants, regardless of formal immigration category. The increase in vouchers would be paid for by the money saved, because they are currently the long-term stayers in shelter. They tend to average 5 or 6 years in shelter. I would do that immediately.
I would also focus on providing wrap-around care to support people’s stability once they leave shelter because I think that will really reduce the number of people returning to shelter. And it's that return-to-shelter number that really drives up the number of people in shelter. We’ve found, on average, our clients have experienced at least four unstable housing situations before they come to WIN.
Also, we have to better utilize the vacant apartments in the housing authority. Instead of paying for people to be in homeless shelters, they could actually be in a home. There shouldn't be vacant housing units in the housing authority, but there are and the number is growing. We should fill those immediately.
I would enforce the law that the Council passed requiring that 15% of all units in new developments be set aside for the homeless. If that requirement isn't rigorously enforced, it’s just not going to happen. Developers would wait for a building to be done and then say, “What do you want us to do now, take a floor down? I don't think so.”
I would force real estate and affordable housing advocates to be at the table together and lock them in a room until they came up with answers that they all could live with.
Lastly, I think that the Mayor needs to take positions and not back down. He should not let the opposition scare him or cause him to change positions. There was a proposed shelter in Chinatown which Mayor Adams was originally in favor of. Then he met with the Chinatown residents and changed his mind. His administration had been the ones that originally proposed it!
Juran/Warren: This human and financial crisis has evolved rapidly since our initial discussions. Are the solutions headed in the right direction?
Quinn: I'm both pessimistic and optimistic. I do not think the major players in this – the President, the Governor, the Mayor – are making the right decisions. Generously, I think they're making ill-informed decisions. But more realistically, they're making fear-based decisions.
That said, I am optimistic because there is a very significant and growing public response. I believe that growing public response will both change the narrative as it's being portrayed in the press and create pressure on the Mayor and the Governor and the President to change their behavior. Sadly, I don't think the President will change his behavior until after the presidential election. But I’m optimistic the public pressure will get change from the Mayor and the Governor much more quickly than that.
About the Authors:
Belinda Juran was a 2020 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) Fellow whose social impact is focused on her adopted hometown of Lowell, MA. Prior to ALI, Belinda served as partner at WilmerHale, a global law firm where she co-chaired both the technology transactions and licensing practice group and the life sciences practice group. Earlier she was a software engineer, engineering manager and consultant at various software and hardware companies. Belinda is a board member of both the International Institute of New England, which supports refugees and immigrants in the eastern Massachusetts and New Hampshire areas, and the Pollard Memorial Library Foundation, which raises funds to support Lowell’s public library. She also serves on the advisory boards of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the University of Massachusetts Lowell School of Education, the Lowell Early Childhood Council, UTEC (which helps proven-risk young adults achieve social and economic success), and the Free Soil Arts Collective (which amplifies the voices of artists of color).
Paige Warren recently returned to public service to serve as the Assistant Commissioner Portfolio Management and Customer Engagement for GSA’s Public Building Service (PBS). In this role, Paige oversees the capital investment, planning, policy, and strategy of its 370 million square foot portfolio across 8,800 buildings and 2,200 communities, which is the largest leased and owned real estate portfolio in the nation. Paige returned to public service believing that our nation is at an historic time with a once-in a lifetime opportunity to deploy public resources to lead on some of the most pressing social issues of our time: the more just and equitable economic development of our urban areas, the sustainability of the built environment (including net zero buildings, renewable infrastructure, and becoming a green technology proving ground), and the innovation evolution of workforce and workplace solutions. Prior to joining GSA, Paige Warren was a 2021 Harvard ALI Senior Fellow. Prior to ALI, Paige had a distinguished career in financial services at the nexus of business, government, and neighborhoods. Over the course of her 17-year tenure in the investment management arm of Prudential Financials' investment management arm, Paige served in various senior roles including Global COO and Head of Strategy, President, and Portfolio Manager. Much of Paige’s career was spent in affordable and public housing development and finance. Prior to joining Prudential, built and led a federal governmental organization to preserve the physical condition and restructure the debt of the nation’s affordable housing portfolio. Paige is currently the vice chair of the board of trustees and chair of the finance subcommittee at The Washington Center, a non-profit, higher education-adjacent organization whose mission is to enhance the pipeline of diverse talent and to build more equitable, inclusive workplaces and communities. She is an ESG FSA Credential-holder and holds a certification in ESG Investment from the CFA Institute.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.