Mayor Bill de Blasio at the Corona Family Residence, a homeless facility in Queens. | AP Photo De Blasio claims ownership of homeless crisis, plans 'comprehensive vision'

The number of New Yorkers living in homeless shelters reached a record 60,686 people earlier this week, and as Mayor Bill de Blasio prepares to enter his fourth year in office, he claimed ownership of the problem, while still placing much of the blame for the still rising shelter population on policy decisions made by his predecessor.

“Look, I own it,” de Blasio said in his weekly interview with WNYC's Brian Lehrer on Wednesday morning.


De Blasio, who has cited the 2011 decision by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg to end a rental subsidy program known as Advantage as one of the largest contributing factors to the rise in homelessness over the past five years, said that the city has "never recovered" from the program’s demise, even as he conceded that the city has more work to do under his own administration to help bring down shelter populations.

“We had almost a year-long period where we were able to stabilize the shelter population,” he said. "It grew again, but we are arresting that growth and starting to turn it, and I think we will be able to show some real progress soon on turning it. Then we have to turn it even more for the long term."

De Blasio said the numbers surrounding the Advantage program were "astounding."

"There was about 35, 36,000 people in shelter at the time Advantage was canceled. By the time I took office there were 50,000 people in shelter. That was the moment when we really lost momentum,” he said.

De Blasio and Department of Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks, who has been overseeing the Human Resources Administration and Department of Homeless Services for more than a year, have said that the rental subsidy programs developed under the mayor’s watch are working, and that the shelter population would be roughly 10,000 people higher than it already is if not for the programs they have implemented.

Still, de Blasio said he plans to offer even more policies to address homelessness in the coming months, and said his policies are working, even if they have not reduced the shelter population.

“I have to own everything," he said. "The things that worked, the things that didn’t. We’re going to come up with a much more comprehensive vision on homelessness in the coming months, but I can tell you that a lot of these initiatives are taking hold and I believe we will turn that number.”

De Blasio’s former deputy mayor for health and human services, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, has given multiple interviews in recent weeks specifically criticizing the city’s handling of homelessness, and particularly, the set of rental subsidy programs she and de Blasio implemented after he took office to help homeless people exit shelters and find new permanent housing.

Barrios-Paoli resigned last year amid disagreements with the mayor over his policies. "Once you find yourself riding a dead horse, you dismount," she told WNYC earlier this week, in explaining her decision to leave the de Blasio administration.

De Blasio’s vouchers and subsidy programs, which she helped develop, work “in some ways but it doesn't work sufficiently so that the [homeless shelter] numbers begin to come down,” Barrios-Paoli told WNYC.

De Blasio has said that one of the solutions to the city’s homelessness crisis is creating more affordable housing, but Barrios-Paoli said that is unrealistic, because much of the affordable housing de Blasio plans to build is targeted toward people with incomes that, while still low, are much higher than those of the extremely low-income New Yorkers who are currently living in shelter.

“It seems to me that we’re not going to build ourselves out of this crisis,” Barrios-Paoli said.

“There’s just no way that we’re going to be able to create sufficient apartments that are affordable to the population that is in shelter,” she said, before calling on the administration to begin thinking “outside of the box.”

De Blasio’s rental subsidies have not been a success in part because landlords are reluctant to begin taking them, fearing that any program could end with the arrival of a new mayoral administration. Barrios-Paoli suggested the city create a permanent rental subsidy for people with low incomes, something like a city-funded Section 8 voucher.

It would be expensive, she conceded, but it’s not like the city isn’t already spending a fortune to house the homeless — with many living in hotels that cost the city hundreds of dollars a day, or shelters that cost the city $40,000 a year for a family.

On Wednesday, de Blasio shelved the idea, citing the precariousness of the city’s federal funding situation under the incoming administration of Donald Trump.

“We don’t know what our federal support is going to be going forward,” de Blasio told Lehrer.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to the current, federally-funded Section 8 program," he said. "We may be having to make up for a lot of ground in some very troubling ways. Until that shapes up, I think we need to keep doing what we’re doing and keep people out of shelter with rental subsidies."