NYC mayoral wannabes need to step up on homelessness: Donovan and Quinn drop gauntlet
Christine Quinn isn’t impressed with the current crop of candidates running for City Hall when it comes to dealing with homelessness.
Quinn, the former City Council Speaker and 2013 mayoral hopeful who now runs Win, a non-profit for homeless families, is planning to host the hopefuls at an upcoming candidates’ confab, and recently told the Daily News she hopes they step up their game before stepping to each other at her May 20th candidates’ forum.
“You hear the candidates talk about family homelessness and homelessness, but they’re not actually talking about it in any way that is realistic or reasonable,” she said. “They don’t really have any meat on the bone, and that concerns me.”
Quinn’s words came in conjunction with a new Win report outlining her own vision for how homelessness should be prioritized — and as mayoral hopeful Shaun Donovan made a similar plea hours before the first mayoral debate Thursday.
Donovan, who served as President Obama’s former housing czar and as housing commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, called on his rivals to present detailed plans to end homelessness, instead of using the debate as “a platform for snark.”
“I have the most comprehensive, robust plan to end homelessness,” he said Thursday in Brooklyn. “I challenge all of my opponents to put their money where their mouths are and put their plans on the table.”
Donovan is proposing better coordination between city social service agencies, getting homeless people into permanent housing more quickly and preventing homelessness through improved rental assistance and foreclosure prevention programs.
Quinn, a favorite in 2013′s Democratic primary for mayor who ultimately lost, is now focused on dealing with the fact that almost 20,000 city kids were forced to live in homeless shelters last year.
To address that, she wants the next mayor to adopt a fundamental restructuring of city government by creating a “permanent cross-agency team” to coordinate their responses to the web of challenges faced by poor families.
In Win’s report, Quinn is calling for the city to make housing vouchers for homeless families permanent and increase their value. She’s also demanding that the city and state increase and expand benefits to include more people who are at the risk of facing homelessness and said the city should streamline the complex process of applying for benefits.
“It’s never been a priority for any mayor. Look, the homeless are the people we look away from when we walk down the street. The mayor who looks at those people, in their eyes, in the homeless child’s eyes — that’s the mayor who will end family homelessness,” Quinn said. “We’ve had mayor after mayor after mayor whose entire homeless policy is getting it off the cover of the newspaper ... that’s not substantive.”
As of Thursday, she has not endorsed anyone for mayor.
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