The modern homelessness debate centers on the future of Housing First. That approach, which calls for giving the homeless permanent housing without strings attached, has become so dominant that many wonder what the previous system looked like. The answer: the one designed early in his career by Andrew Cuomo, now running for mayor of New York City.
Cuomo’s history with homelessness is not well known because, as governor during the 2010s, he distanced himself from the street crisis that, incidentally, his mental-health policies contributed to. Now, as he seeks a political comeback, he has no choice but to engage with the issue. In his mayoral campaign announcement, Cuomo underscored New Yorkers’ concerns over encounters with “mentally ill homeless person[s].”
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Homelessness policy gave Cuomo his first big career break. He founded HELP USA, one of New York’s largest homelessness agencies, in 1986. Housing First had yet to be formally articulated back then, but the Coalition for the Homeless and other advocates were already pressing its core tenet—that permanent housing is the only serious solution to homelessness. Cuomo rejected the idea. “I didn’t believe that you could simply pick people up from grates, install them in apartments in a remote new neighborhood, and call the job finished,” he writes in his 2014 memoir. “Victims of domestic violence needed support services. Drug addicts needed rehab. The jobless needed to find work. Parents needed child care.”
Cuomo developed this perspective by touring some of New York’s “welfare hotels,” including the notorious Martinique, where he was struck by the array of problems afflicting the city’s homeless population. The city’s homelessness-services system, still in its infancy, was floundering, and the enterprising Cuomo seized his chance. His program helped families transition out of homelessness through a combination of intermediate-length shelter stays and a service-rich environment. Cuomo instituted with HELP clients a “social compact,” as he calls it in his memoir, that included a curfew, firm rules against drugs, and mandatory participation in “classes and counseling sessions.”
In 1992, Mayor David Dinkins named Cuomo to a blue-ribbon commission that would issue a report, “The Way Home: A New Direction in Social Policy,” prompting two major administrative changes in the city’s homelessness policy: the creation of a Department of Homeless Services, separate from the larger social-services bureaucracy, and the turning over of control for most shelters to publicly funded nonprofits. The report reaffirmed the need for an “intelligent continuum of care” that included “assignment to transitional programs which will end dependency and transition families and [single adults] to self-sufficiency and independence.”
“Continuum of Care” remains the name of the federal government’s main homelessness program. This is another Cuomo legacy. He took charge of homelessness policy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development when President Bill Clinton appointed him assistant secretary, about a year after “The Way Home” was released; he would later rise to secretary. Using federal funding as leverage, the Cuomo-era HUD encouraged U.S. communities to organize their systems along the lines that his commission did in New York City. About 400 “Continua of Care” programs now operate across the nation.
The system never achieved much, though, because shortly after Cuomo left office, HUD began embracing Housing First. Prioritizing permanent housing, Housing First proponents call for a flatter homeless-services system than that envisioned by the continuum-of-care approach. They grudgingly acknowledge the need for emergency shelter but see no value in intermediate-length transitional services. In keeping with their vision, HUD’s Continuum of Care program now devotes only 2 percent of its budget to transitional housing, down from more than one-third two decades ago. Faced with a homelessness crisis that, under Housing First’s ascendance, has grown to unprecedented proportions, HUD’s Continuum of Care program needs major reform.
That, of course, will not be Cuomo’s charge as mayor. He’ll have other challenges—including fixing the problems that he created as governor. To cut costs and shift patients into supposedly more effective community-based programs, the Cuomo administration slashed state psychiatric hospital beds, including in New York City. The move pushed burdens onto city systems such as shelters, police, and transit. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration bore the brunt of Governor Cuomo’s misguided mental-health policies. New Yorkers in those years tended to attribute subway chaos to de Blasio’s bungling, and Cuomo saw no point in disabusing them of that view.
Cuomo further insulated himself from criticism by launching the 20,000-unit Empire State Supportive Housing Initiative. This massive program—only California and New York have supportive-housing units of such capacities—protected Cuomo politically, because nothing is more important to progressives on homelessness than supportive housing.
Now, on the mayoral campaign trail, Cuomo has indicated a mental-health policy shift by endorsing Mayor Eric Adams’s proposed changes to state civil-commitment laws. Specifically, on his website, Cuomo calls for “[c]odify[ing] in statute the existing standard that permits involuntarily committing individuals who are a danger to themselves because they cannot meet their basic needs.” Cuomo should further consider pledging to retain Adams’s mental-health staff, just as other mayoral candidates have committed to keeping Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. On mental health, continuity with Adams is the right approach, politically and substantively.
As he sketches out a broader homelessness-policy vision, Cuomo should embrace his old conception of the continuum of care and transitional-housing programs. For certain cohorts, such as domestic-violence victims and ex-offenders, intermediate-length programs are the best fit. Housing First policies have neglected these individuals’ needs.
Embracing his earlier vision makes political sense, too. Cuomo’s progressive rivals have gone all in on Housing First; he can credibly make the case for quality transitional services that emphasize values such as work and sobriety and dispel the fatalism that suffuses the system under the current Housing First regime. By drawing on his past work, he can present a more inspiring vision, one that affirms the need for permanent housing for some homeless people but rejects warehousing those capable of a better life. Nationwide, amid record levels of homelessness, this message could revive New York’s reputation for innovative homelessness policymaking.
Cuomo’s evasiveness on homelessness as governor contrasted with the approach taken by governors in some other states, who were willing to confront Housing First and its failures. Avoidance will not be an option for New York’s next mayor; disorder-related problems poll high among likely voters’ concerns. Long political histories create baggage for candidates, as Cuomo well knows—but they can also offer opportunities.
Top Photo: Former governor and now mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo at a recent campaign fundraiser (Photo by Johnny Nunez/WireImage)
