Consider housing as health care

By DAVID N. DINKINS and CHARLES KING
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
AUG 15, 2020

A global pandemic. A perennial and worsening homelessness crisis. A piercing demand for racial justice. The challenges New York City faced in 1990 are all too similar to the challenges we face today. It is time to meet our obligation to every New Yorker: access to the safe, affordable housing that is the essential baseline for good health.

In 1990, when Housing Works was founded and the Dinkins administration came into office, our city was in the midst of another deadly epidemic for which there was still no effective treatment: 37,000 people had already been diagnosed with HIV, and fewer than one-third of them remained alive. At that same time, more than 20,000 people were sleeping in homeless shelters each night, the majority of them people of color, including people with HIV who were at great risk for tuberculosis and other life-threatening infections.

The Dinkins administration and Housing Works navigated through some intense disagreements with each other at that time but never stopped hammering toward solutions. Ultimately, more families experiencing homelessness and HIV/AIDS got supportive housing, bending that curve. But 30 years later, the extremes of inequality in our city have boiled over again, requiring even more dynamic and aggressive responses. Today, more than 60,000 of our neighbors, most of them people of color, have to face a new deadly virus without adequate permanent housing, and they are dying at rates 60% higher than New Yorkers with housing. This situation is simply not acceptable.

Years of research and on-the-ground experience have shown that housing is essential to effective HIV care. In April, Housing Works applied the fundamental understanding that housing is health care to the current pandemic, transforming a hotel into temporary emergency housing with wraparound health services for New Yorkers experiencing homelessness and recovering from COVID-19. Housing Works is also pioneering a complementary care model, opening a second hotel as a stabilization shelter for people sleeping on subways or the streets, in many cases because they fear infection from crowded shelters.

To keep the homeless population from growing, elected leaders need to keep housing courts closed until a sufficient rental forgiveness plan with adequate funding is in place to keep people in their homes while our economy recovers.

At the same time, we need significant new investments in affordable housing for New Yorkers at every income level while simultaneously scaling supportive housing programs. That means renovating or developing at least 30,000 units of affordable housing — at least 24,000 set aside for formerly homeless individuals and families — and funding to develop at least 5,000 new units of supportive housing.

Instead, our elected leaders have cut affordable housing funds and balanced the city budget on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.

Finally, we must restructure the city’s Department of Homeless Services to provide transitional housing that affords people experiencing homelessness safety, privacy and dignity along with the medical and social services they might need. We need to make it easier to transition into permanent housing more expediently and sustainably.

Providing hotel rooms for some New Yorkers experiencing homelessness helps, as does finally offering testing for some who remain in crowded shelters. But a COVID-19 vaccine will not solve our homelessness and affordable housing crises or protect our neighbors from inevitable future public health emergencies. It will not erase the long-term damage inflicted on the health and economic prospects of so many Americans.

It is long past time to recognize that a homeless shelter is not a home. People cannot stay healthy, put food on the table, and raise their families without a decent place to safely rest — the challenges of public health, homelessness, and racial injustice are intrinsically interwoven. We must acknowledge that our homelessness crisis is a housing crisis, and that safe and affordable housing with supportive services for those who need them is a critical component of the solution.

Dinkins served as the 106th mayor of New York City from 1990 to 1993. King is the co-founder and CEO of Housing Works.