Rats And Rot: NYC Report Rips Family Homeless Shelters

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- New York City investigators say decrepit and dangerous conditions and poor enforcement have been rampant in shelters that house nearly 12,000 homeless families with children.

The Department of Investigation released a report Thursday on the city-paid, largely privately run family shelter system. It costs the city Department of Homeless Services about $360 million a year.

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"The building was filthy," DOI Commissioner Mark Peters described of one location, WCBS 880's Marla Diamond reported. "There was garbage in the common areas. There were rats and vermin infestation."

Investigators say one family of six was living with a dead rat festering on the floor for two days. At another shelter, a puddle of urine soiled the floor of the only working elevator. And at another, one stairway was so treacherously rusted that inspectors ordered guards to block access to it.

"In one instance, the stairway was so rotted through that the fire department actually contemplated closing the shelter and only agreed to let it stay open after 24-hour, round-the-clock fire guards, those are people hired to stand in the stairway to keep people from going up and down, were put in place," Peters told 1010 WINS.

"At its worst, DHS is turning a blind eye to violations that threaten the lives of shelter residents,'' the report said, calling for repairs, stiffer inspections and new mechanisms to compel fixes.

The homeless services agency said it had already axed some unacceptable apartments from the system, stepped up inspections and asked for money to hire 19 new inspection staffers, among other steps. The agency said it had closed two problematic shelters and fixed more than half the over 600 building and fire code violations the report identified.

"We will use the report's recommendations to further inform our system-wide reform work,'' Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor said in a statement Thursday.

While that's progress, "much work still needs to be done,'' Peters said.

"To its credit, DHS recognizes the need for change and is reforming the way it does business to address the concerns raised in the Report and better serve the City's homeless families," he said.

Mary Brosnahan, president of the Coalition for the Homeless, said the findings are "deeply disturbing and reveal how much further New York City must go to provide decent shelter for our homeless neighbors in crisis."

"These horrendous conditions may have been years in the making, but they clearly demand an urgent and comprehensive response from the City," she said in a statement.

"The City has a legal and moral obligation to provide these families -- mostly women and children -- with shelters that are at minimum clean and safe, and we are heartened that DOI has provided a roadmap for improving conditions at these shelters. Given that the most hazardous violations exist in so-called cluster-site shelters, the report provides more ammunition for the City to accelerate steps already taken by the de Blasio administration to phase out that disastrous Bloomberg-era program."

New York City is legally obligated to provide shelter to all homeless people and has long grappled with how to house them. The problem has grown more acute as the numbers of people seeking shelter rose from an average of about 39,000 a night in the start of 2010 to over 60,000 this past November, according to the most recent data the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless has gathered from city agencies.

Conditions in some family homeless shelters were bleakly spotlighted in December 2013, when The New York Times profiled an 11-year-old girl who lived amid mice, rotting walls and communal bathrooms in a Brooklyn shelter that no longer houses children. Mayor Bill de Blasio took office the next month and asked for an investigation.

Investigators inspected 25 of the over 140 family shelters last spring and summer. They range from converted hospitals and schools with on-site social services to single-room occupancy hotels and "cluster sites:'' apartments within buildings that also house private tenants.

The "cluster sites'' proved particularly deplorable, the report said. Inspectors reported roaches crawling on the walls, holes in the corners and unlocked front doors with inadequate security in lobbies of buildings with histories of shootings and other crimes. Garbage was piled in halls, beds were broken and there were rats, including the reeking, dead one that had lingered for two days, the report said.

The city pays an average of $2,450 a month for cluster site apartments, while the average rent in some of their neighborhoods is $1,200 a month and lower, the report said.

"What we found is in that many instances, the city is paying two to three times market rent for the deeply sub par facilities," Peters said.

But even some better-equipped shelters had fire code violations and other problems, including the rusted-out stairwell, the report said. It was one of two in a 140-family building.

The homeless services agency had known the stairway was deteriorating since 2012 and tried to get money to fix it. Ultimately, the city spent $637,000 for the guards who were ordered after the DOI inspection, plus over $750,000 to fix the stairs. They reopened in September.

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