NEW YORK City cares about poverty. So much so, in fact, that the city is conducting an experiment in tracking homelessness--by denying aid to desperate poor people and studying whether they end up homeless as a result.
It may sound like a sick joke, but it's not. The city is conducting an experiment using a program called Homebase--which provides rental assistance, job training and emergency assistance to people facing "immediate housing problems that could result in becoming homeless."
As part of the experiment, according to the New York Times, "Half of the test subjects--people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted--are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless."
As the Times noted:
The New York study involves monitoring 400 households that sought Homebase help between June and August. Two hundred were given the program's services, and 200 were not. Those denied help by Homebase were given the names of other agencies--among them H.R.A. Job Centers, Housing Court Answers and Eviction Intervention Services--from which they could seek assistance.
Advocates for the homeless said they were puzzled about why the trial was necessary, since the city proclaimed the Homebase program as "highly successful" in the September 2010 Mayor's Management Report, saying that over 90 percent of families that received help from Homebase did not end up in homeless shelters. One critic of the trial, Councilwoman Annabel Palma, is holding a General Welfare Committee hearing about the program on Thursday.
"I don't think homeless people in our time, or in any time, should be treated like lab rats," Ms. Palma said.
Among those 200 households denied assistance by Homebase as part of the study was Angie Almodovar, a 27-year-old single mother who is pregnant with her third child. After being denied assistance, she told the Times, "I wanted to cry, honestly speaking. Homebase at the time was my only hope."
Luckily, she was able to cobble together an emergency grant with the help of a Legal Services NYC lawyer and the Coalition for the Homeless. But there are likely many more who will not be so fortunate.
Anyway, said Seth Diamond, the commissioner of the Homeless Services Department, "This is about putting emotions aside. When you're making decisions about millions of dollars and thousands of people's lives, you have to do this on data, and that is what this is about."
Forget the people whose lives are ruined in the process.
