According to the Coalition report, HPD has named 14 landlords currently renting to Plus program tenants as owners who repeatedly neglected to fix serious housing violations. Additionally, six buildings used by the program are targets in an HPD enforcement project to get reticent landlords to finally fix buildings with long histories of neglect.
Troubled or not, the Plus program is still a program – which is more than many cities have, said Price, who has been homeless himself. “I’ve been to a lot of cities where the homeless do not get even this kind of consideration. This city is attempting to deal with the problem, and I must commend them on that, even though the program that they came up with is flawed.”
Hess sees flaws in the Coalition report, not his program. He criticized the report’s “flawed methodology,” which calculated a building’s average number of violations per apartment, “because some apartments may have multiple violations and others none.” Coalition senior policy analyst Patrick Markee, who edited the report, says pending City Council legislation would use a similar method to identify buildings as too dangerous for homeless families to live in.
But ruling out whole buildings that may have livable apartments inside would be counterproductive, Hess said. “We don’t want to see any New Yorker living in housing that has been cited with violations,” he said, “but banning homeless people from competing for decent apartment units in buildings with code violations would be a restriction without precedent, and would keep families homeless longer than necessary.”
He added, “The health and welfare of our clients is our top priority.”
