NYC details 5-year plan for homeless

NEW YORK— New York City would increase its number of homeless shelters but seek to stop putting up homeless people in hotels and private apartments under a plan unveiled Tuesday by the mayor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s latest effort to deal with a surge in homelessness would open about 90 new shelters citywide in five years and expand 30 others. There are currently nearly

300.

Meanwhile, the city would end by 2023 its use of hotel rooms to shelter the homeless and its similar use of private apartments by 2021. The apartment deadline was pushed back from an earlier date of 2018 after officials concluded the use of pricey hotels would rise.

Even if everything in the plan comes to pass, the city projects the homeless-shelter population would drop by only 2,500 people by 2021 — a fraction of the roughly 60,000 homeless people who now spend their nights in shelters in the city, with thousands more on the streets.

It’s not immediately clear where the city would seek to put 90 new shelters. They’ve encountered neighborhood resistance in the past. It’s also not immediately clear how the proposal might affect the city’s $1.3 billion budget for services for the homeless.

The shelter population has jumped by about 70 percent in a decade in New York City, which is required by decades-old legal agreements to provide shelter to everyone seeking it.

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