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Mayor Eric Adams vowed Wednesday to fix the bureaucratic nightmare that’s left 2,500 city-funded apartments for New York’s homeless empty as City Hall comes under pressure to make progress on its high-profile plans to tackle the Big Apple’s homelessness crisis.
Hizzoner’s remarks came two days after The Post revealed the dysfunction at the city’s Human Resources Administration, where key portions of the application process are still done by hand and must be coordinated by a tiny office that has fewer than a half-dozen staffers.
“This is a dysfunctional city, we have to stop the dysfunctionality,” the mayor, who called the paper’s findings “unimaginable,” in response to questions during an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn.
“How do you have a vacant apartment, when you need people to be in the apartment and you have so much paperwork that they can’t get in the apartment,” he added. “That is not how I’m going to run this city.”
However, Adams also rejected calls to bolster HRA’s budget to expand the office and clear the massive backlog, which has let 10 percent of the city’s supportive housing units go fallow even as the average length of shelter stay approaches one-and-a-half years.
“We don’t need more staff, people just need to do their darn jobs,” he said, arguing that the process could be sped simply by reducing the paperwork involved. “We have the staff to do it, but we have layers and layers of bureaucracy that must be dismantled.”
Instead, Adams said that needy New Yorkers should have “confidence” he would get HRA sorted out.
Asked why New Yorkers should be reassured that something will be done to fix the problem, Adams said, “New Yorkers should have confidence because I’m the mayor. And I’m gonna get stuff done.”
Meanwhile, on the other side of City Hall, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) added her voice to the roster of lawmakers and housing activists demanding the mayor to take swift action to fix the mess.
“The lack of focus by city agencies to place unhoused New Yorkers, who need additional supportive services, in thousands of empty units is deeply concerning,” Adams (no relation) said in a statement.
“Fixing the bureaucratic inefficiencies from understaffing and broken systems that are responsible that are responsible for this failure must be a public health and safety priority,” she added.
The story was the third published by The Post in recent weeks that revealed significant shortcomings in New York’s sprawling social safety, which are hampering City Hall’s highly publicized effort to tackle homelessness and mental illness on city streets.
Many homeless people who live on the streets or on subway trains are fearful of going inside because longstanding safety and sanitation woes at city shelters continue to persist despite years of stories and promises of reforms.
Additionally, most of the shelters in the city — including those designed to help bring the chronically homeless in off the streets — fail to offer essential mental health services, like therapy, on-site.
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