[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and thanks to Brigid Bergin and Rebecca Ibarra for filling in the last four days while I took some summer downtime. Thank you. Thank you.

When the mayor is on next hour, we're going to play him a clip from Rebecca's interview with Gridlock Sam, the former traffic commissioner, Sam Schwartz, on a master plan for New York city traffic that was presented to the mayor and never went anywhere. A good question for now with that new national report out that finds New York, past LA and everybody, as having the worst traffic in the country in the last few months, apparently, as people are going back to work, but still avoiding mass transit in certain numbers. Thank you, Rebecca and Brigid for this week.

One thing I can say about the difference between the last time I did a show just a week ago, and today is that the New York area went from an almost COVID is over mode to, "Oh, wait, what? Cases are still low with the test positivity rate of 1%, but that's twice as high as two weeks ago? Wait, what? Does it stop here or does it keep rising?" That's the question? How do you protect people in lower vaccination neighborhoods?

Los Angeles, you may have heard, just re-imposed a mass mandate for indoor spaces, vaccinated or not because of the Delta variant rising there. Delta is now, as of yesterday, officially the predominant variant in New York, too. The Yankees-Red Sox game for last night was postponed. Maybe you heard, because six Yankees players, three of them, at least vaccinated, we don't know about the other three, tested positive. It's the Yankee second vaccinated people's cluster this year.

It's another uncertain time in COVID. Another round in the race between variants and vaccines. Primarily, health officials say 99% of those being hospitalized or dying from COVID now are unvaccinated. You might get it, even if you're vaccinated with the Delta variant, but if you're bad enough for the hospital or God forbid die, chances are 99 to 1 that you have not had the vaccine.

The FDA yesterday said no vaccine approval for kids under 12, probably until next year. I read this week that as of last month, the vaccination rate in the NYPD was only 41%. In the fire department, just 50% including EMT's. We'll ask the mayor about that. Against the backdrop of all of that, there's the moral question of what kind of shelter the city is responsible to provide for people experiencing homelessness as the Delta variant rises.

About 10,000 people without homes have been scattered among 60 hotels during the pandemic to avoid the congregate shelters. You heard a lot about the conflict around a small number of men staying at The Lucerne Hotel on the upper west side, but in all, there were 60 hotels in use, sheltering 10,000 of our fellow New Yorker men, women, and children in rooms so they wouldn't be subjected to super spreader conditions in congregate shelters. Now what? What's the moral choice? Well, here's what Mayor de Blasio said on our show last month.

Mayor de Blasio: Folks were never meant to be in temporary hotels. It was an emergency measure at the height of COVID. We are putting COVID behind us now, we can go back to the work of getting people onto a better life.

Brian Lehrer: I'll ask the mayor what he thinks about that now with the Delta variant, more than 3,600 of those 10,000 people have already been moved out of the hotels, but did you hear the breaking news this week, in addition to COVID? That a federal judge ruled that the city would be illegally risking the health of homeless people with disabilities by forcing them back into congregate shelters so quickly. Let's see where we are. Back with us now is Jacquelyn Simone, senior policy analyst with the Advocacy Group Coalition for the Homeless. Jacquelyn, Thanks for coming on again, welcome back to WNYC.

Jacquelyn Simone: Thanks so much for having me back, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: The coalition was a plaintiff in the lawsuit, as I understand it. What exactly did you sue for, and what did you get?

Jacquelyn Simone: To back up for your listeners, last month in mid-June, Mayor de Blasio announced that he thought it was time to start moving people out of these hotels, where they had been sheltered during the pandemic and back into congregate dorm style shelters. He said that he wanted to finish that process by the end of July. This was essentially going to be moving thousands of vulnerable, single adults from a place where they had been able to better protect themselves during the pandemic into what we would consider to be still a very dangerous and risky situation of sharing, sleeping, bathing, and dining facilities with many other people, particularly as the Delta variant is surging in the city as you said in the introduction.

When the city began these transitions, we sent out our shelter monitors, many other advocates also went and saw what was happening on the ground. What we witnessed was an incredibly chaotic process. Many people had not been adequately communicated with about what was going on, about where they were going to be moved, about what their rights were.

Particularly for people with disabilities, we saw that many of the most vulnerable clients did not actually have an understanding of their right to request a reasonable accommodation. This includes people who have underlying conditions that would place them at serious risk where they too contract COVID-19. People didn't realize that they could request to stay in a single or double occupancy hotel room at another location if they needed to. Even sometimes when people had been granted that accommodation, because of communication issues and bureaucracy, occasionally, people were still being shuttled back to a congregate shelter instead of to a hotel.

It was just mass chaos on the ground. As a result, we worked with The Legal Aid Society and Jenner & Block to file a motion in our disability rights lawsuit. We had a settlement in 2017 called Butler V City of New York that forces DHS to uphold the rights of people with disabilities. On Tuesday the 13th, a judge granted, in part, our motion for a temporary restraining order, which would put in place requirements before DHS can move any people with disabilities from these hotels back into congregate shelters.

Brian Lehrer: Be more specific, if you can, about what kinds of disabilities the people you sued on behalf of have mostly, and how prevalent those conditions are among New Yorkers experiencing homelessness compared to the population overall.

Jacquelyn Simone: As part of the Butler settlement in 2017, the city had to undertake an assessment of the rates of disabilities among the shelter population. They found that actually a majority of single adults in shelters have some a disability that could affect their placement. Now these disabilities range from mental health conditions, to mobility impairments, to-- particularly in light of the pandemic, we are very concerned about people who might have auto-immune issues, or heart issues, pulmonary issues.

There's quite a range, but we do know that largely because homelessness and health are inextricably linked, if you don't have the stability of permanent housing, your health is in a much worse situation, generally speaking, as well as systemic discrimination against people with disabilities, there are higher rates of people with disabilities among the unhoused population in New York.

The court papers that we filed had dozens of examples of real people that we had encountered through our monitoring and through our casework, who expressed a range of needs that were just not being met in the course of this process. For example, some people who use a wheelchair and required joint replacement in their knees were transferred from an accessible hotel to a congregate shelter that didn't have any accessible showers or bathrooms. Obviously, those sort of access needs should have been taken into account when moving someone from one place to another.

There was someone who had a variety of medical issues, including fibromyalgia, who needed a single occupancy room on the ground floor and access to an elevator because she couldn't use stairs. She had recently had heart surgery as well. Instead, she was shuttled around to multiple shelters, but was ultimately returned to a hotel after being taken from place to place to place because of miscommunications. This caused her to miss two medical appointments, and obviously contributed to significant distress. These moves and this chaos were having very real and very damaging impact on some of the most vulnerable people in our city.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your phone calls, if you have any connection to this issue. If you're personally affected by this ruling, we would love to hear from you. If you yourself are dealing with the shelter system or are with one of the hotels that's transitioning people out of your hotels back to normal business in shelters, what is your hotel's role in this? Anyone with a connection or anyone with a question for Jacquelyn Simone, from the Coalition for the Homeless 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. This ruling just delays as I understand it for a few days, the transfer of people with disabilities, the forced transfer from hotels back into shelters. Can it do any more than that?

Jacquelyn Simone: I should say a caveat upfront. I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but I will do my best to describe the layperson's interpretation of what this means for our clients. This order is really essentially taking a pause to slow down and make sure that this process is much more deliberate and less chaotic and haphazard. The order specifically requires the Department of Homeless Services to give hotel residents with disabilities seven days notice in advance of a scheduled move, and then to schedule a meeting to discuss each resident's access needs at least five days before any move. Then during those meetings, one-on-one with a caseworker, the staff have to use a specific script to make sure that people are understanding what is going on and that they know their rights to request a reasonable accommodation.

In effect, because the Department of Homeless Services didn't have such a script or notices that met the requirements, there is in effect a pause currently while they work out the content of the script and the notices before they can resume these transfers, but in a much more deliberate and client-centered way. It didn't completely end the plan to return to congregate shelters. That was outside of the scope of this particular legal motion, but I think aside from the lawsuit, we also have this larger moral question, like you said, of, "Is this really the right time to be repopulating congregate dorm style shelters with maybe a dozen people in a room while we have the Delta variant surging, and while we have a largely unvaccinated population with many underlying health issues?"

Even though this might help a subset of people who have disabilities to ensure that their rights are not violated, I'm still very concerned about the people who ostensively don't have any underlying conditions, but who are still at significant risk of contracting the virus that causes COVID-19 in these dorm style shelters

Brian Lehrer: With the Delta variant on the rise in the city and data showing that now, during this week, when this ruling came, did that news play into the judge's decision at all? I take it from the answer you gave, maybe not.

Jacquelyn Simone: I think the motion in the disability rights lawsuit was pretty focused on ensuring that a subset of people had their rights to a reasonable accommodation granted, and that DHS wasn't just moving people on mass from hotels into shelters without considering their needs and their risk factors. I think the rise in the Delta variant might've played a role, but I think the dysfunction and just the abject failure of DHS to follow the process within the Butler Settlement of having these individualized assessments was the larger factor, I think, but we continue to advocate with DHS and with the mayor to use this pause as a moment to really rethink the overall transfers back to congregate shelters.

I think that this was an arbitrarily rushed decision. The mayor set this end of July deadline for no apparent reason. We think that instead of rushing forward with this, just because they might be legally allowed to. Is it morally and practically and from a public health perspective, the right thing to do? That's the bigger question, and we would say, "No, instead of trying to move people back to congregate shelters, as quickly as possible, we should really focus on keeping people in the safest place possible." Which in the interim would be hotels for as long as needed during the pandemic, but I think, ultimately, we want to help people move into permanent affordable housing so that we don't have to be even thinking about moving back thousands and thousands of people to dorm style shelters.

Brian Lehrer: How much are they being moved back to dorm style shelters? I read that, while the conflict over The Lucerne has been getting all the press, 23 of the 60 other hotels have already been emptied of homeless occupants. Who are they, and where are they being housed?

Jacquelyn Simone: Before the pandemic, the city was already using some commercial hotels as overflow capacity for the shelter system. Because we have this very important legal right to shelter, the city has to provide a shelter bed for anyone who needs it. Because we're facing record homelessness, about 3,500 single adults were already in commercial hotels even prior to the pandemic. Then as the city, thanks to advocacy by many directly impacted homeless New Yorkers, as well as organizations like my own, advocated for the city to make more use of those hotels during the pandemic. At the peak, more than 13,000 single adults were in commercial hotels. That was about 70% of the single adult population.

Now, we have about half of the single adult population in commercial hotels. It's about 8,600 people. We've already seen a decline in the number of people who were in commercial hotels and an increase in people who were in those congregate shelters. We are seeing the program ramp down, even though we know that virus rates in the city are going up.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the vaccination rates earlier. What do you know about the vaccination rates among homeless people who were being, or are being housed in the hotels? One listener tweets, "Was there ever an attempt to vaccinate these people when they were in the hotels? It seems they would have been a good place to set up vaccination sites"

Jacquelyn Simone: We have rather incomplete data. We know that the Department of Homeless Services to their credit has been offering vaccinations to DHS residents. Pretty early on, as soon as vaccinations became available to this population, they had set up a designated point of distribution for DHS shelter residents and were scheduling appointments for anyone who wanted to come and get vaccinated. Then they've also been doing mobile vaccinations in shelters.

We don't know the exact number of DHS shelter residents who have been vaccinated. DHS has only really talked about the total number of people that they've vaccinated through their own programs, but it's also possible that some shelter residents might have gone to a pharmacy or one of the city vaccination sites. We don't have the total numbers of how many people are vaccinated.

We do know based on the limited data we have that it seems to be less than half of the single adults in shelters have been vaccinated through the DHS vaccination program. Part of this is because people have skepticism of the vaccines, like many other people in the city. Sometimes people don't necessarily trust the agency that is delivering these messages, whether that be the Department of Homeless Services or the health system for a variety of reasons, including structural racism and the legacy of discrimination in our healthcare infrastructure.

We do think that vaccinations are a very important part of moving people to other settings, but we think that we need more time be building up that trust and to be allying some of the concerns that our clients have. Instead of just rushing them back to congregate shelters, when you still have a largely unvaccinated population.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener asks. This tweeter says, "Thought I heard the mayor say several months, weeks ago in your show that people would go from hotels to housing, not congregate shelters." True? How does that look to you at Coalition for the Homeless?

Jacquelyn Simone: I think that's the goal. The ideal would be for people to move directly from hotels to permanent housing, and some people have during the course of the pandemic as well. I think one thing that I would like to rebut is the notion that people were not getting any services in the hotels. That's just factually inaccurate, and yet the mayor keeps repeating that people aren't getting services in hotels and would somehow get different services in shelters. When in reality, the caseworkers, the housing specialists, the social service providers moved with the residents from shelters to hotels.

We actually did see at The Lucerne, for example, many people moved from The Lucerne Hotel directly into permanent housing because there was this pressure to reduce the census at that particular facility. I think if you can do that by moving people into permanent housing, that's really the ideal.

The problem is that because the mayor has set this arbitrary deadline wanting to move everyone out of the hotels so quickly, we don't actually have the time we need to make a really concerted effort to move more people directly into permanent housing. We have a few very exciting opportunities right now that we could use if we had more time to move people directly into permanent housing.

For example, the federal government has given New York City about 7,800 emergency housing vouchers that the city is just now setting up a process for how to distribute those. If we had some more time, many of the people who were in hotels could be given those vouchers and could use them to find housing on the private market. We also just had the city council pass a bill called Intro 146, which became local law 71 of 2021 on June 27th. This bill would improve the city's vouchers program to more align it more closely with Section 8 levels, which would make it a more effective tool for helping people move out of shelters and into permanent housing.

That local law has not actually taken effect yet. The law says it would take effect 180 days after enactment. There is a possibility that the city, if they wanted to, could accelerate the implementation date of that bill and that would help people move out of shelters. Right now, we're in this waiting period where the bills passed, but it's not in effect yet. People have vouchers that they can't use to move out of hotels. Meanwhile, they're being shuffled back to shelters instead of being helped in moving to housing. We also have-- Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: I was just going to follow up on that by asking you, would it be in the mayor's power to just decide to implement that new law more quickly? We have several people tweeting this morning with things like, "Ask the mayor, when he's on next hour, to implement Intro 146 this morning." Could he take that even though isn't supposed to take effect for six months? I'm going to ask you about how Eric Adams is on this issue in your opinion, but could the Mayor say, "No, we've got too much of an emergency situation on our hands. I'm going to implement it tomorrow."

Jacquelyn Simone: Again, I'm not a lawyer, but my interpretation of the bill is that that is within the mayor's power to do so. They could publish an emergency rule and raise the voucher amounts before the 180 days. There is some language in the bill that seems to open up that possibility. Now, it's notable that this bill became law, not by the mayor's signature, but just by aging into law.

I think the mayor could have signed it as soon as it passed the city council and started that clock ticking much sooner, but instead he waited the full 30 days until it aged into law. That leads me to believe that without significant public advocacy, he probably is not open to accelerating the implementation date for the same reasons. Even though we know that it's actually much more cost-effective as well as just morally the right thing to do, to help people move out of shelters and out of hotels and into permanent housing much more quickly.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Jacquelyn Simone, from the Coalition for the Homeless. We'll take some of your phone calls if you want to call in, if you have a connection to this issue of the transfer of thousands of people being planned by Mayor de Blasio from temporary housing in hotel rooms back to congregate shelters, despite the Delta variant rising. 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280, or continue to tweet. Some of you have been tweeting questions that we've used already with Jacquelyn Simone from Coalition for the Homeless. Tweet @BrianLehrer, and among the things we'll do when we continue is, I'll ask what you know about Eric Adams' position on all of this since he's our likely next mayor. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, as we talk about the transfer already in progress though partly delayed by a court this week of 10,000 homeless New Yorkers, New Yorkers experiencing homelessness, men, women, children from temporary hotel rooms, back into congregate shelters with Jacquelyn Simone from Coalition for the Homeless. Jacqueline, before we get to Eric Adams, what about the families with children? How different is the policy? How different is the temporary housing compared to the single men who get most of the press?

Jacquelyn Simone: Thank you so much for asking that, because I realized that might not have been clear from our conversation so far. The court order that we've been talking about and the issue of the pandemic era hotels has really been primarily affecting the single adults in shelter because that is the population where their shelters tend to be congregate dorm-style facilities with many strangers sharing one room.

In contrast, families who are homeless, who also have a right to shelter in New York City tend to be sheltered in more self-contained units. It might be a room with their own bathroom, usually their own kitchen, but they're not in a dorm-style setting with other strangers. There wasn't really an applicable need to move people into hotels as a COVID prevention measure for that population.

Now, we've certainly seen other issues during the pandemic for families in shelters, particularly families with children often did not have access to WIFI in the shelters where they were. That made remote schooling incredibly difficult for many homeless children. We worked with the Legal Aid Society on other litigation that has also resulted in the city installing WIFI in shelters for families with children across the city.

Brian Lehrer: A caller wants to know-- He didn't want to go on the air, but he wanted us to pass along this question. Do you know of any housing options for people experiencing homelessness who are blind that are not congregate housing?

Jacquelyn Simone: This is such an important question. Honestly, Brian, when our staff go out to shelters and are talking with people, the number one question we get from people is, "How can I get into housing?" People want to move out of shelters and out of hotels and into permanent housing. The reality is that we just have such a dearth of affordable housing in New York City that many people are languishing in shelters and on the streets for many months or even years.

This is particularly challenging for people who have disabilities because finding both affordable and accessible housing is nearly impossible in New York City. We do have protections against discrimination for people who have disabilities in New York, as well as in the United States, but I think the affordability issue is one of the biggest challenges that people face.

The Section 8 Voucher Program, which I mentioned briefly earlier is really the gold standard for helping low income people afford housing in the private market. This is a federal program that is proven by research to reduce homelessness, to help people, including many people with disabilities, move out of congregate settings and into independent housing on their own.

Unfortunately, the federal government has chosen to ration this vital housing assistance. Only one of every four eligible people nationwide actually receives a Section 8 Voucher. When we talk about things like Intro 146 at the city level, even though that's a huge step forward, these city funded vouchers are really just a replacement to make up for the fact that we don't have adequate housing assistance from the federal government.

If we actually had Section 8, not as a benefit only for a minority of people who need it, but rather as an entitlement for everyone who's eligible, that would both alleviate much of the need for the city and the state to have their own voucher programs. It would help so many more people, including many people with vision impairments and other disabilities, move out of shelters and off the streets and into permanent housing.

This is something that then candidate Biden had promised on the campaign trail, and we really want to hold him to that promise, particularly with the infrastructure and budget negotiations, because we think this would be entirely transformative with how we deal with housing insecurity and homelessness in New York city and nationwide.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, with Intro 46, which raises the city housing voucher rates to match the federal Section 8 voucher value. You said it doesn't officially take effect for 180 days, but do you know if people have already been applying for it? Or if the demand is measurable in any way since the law passed city council?

Jacquelyn Simone: Yes. It is really changing some of the rent levels and requirements for an existing city voucher program called CityFHEPS. People already have CityFHEPS shopping letters, people already have CityFHEPS vouchers in the community. That aspect hasn't changed. What will change with this bill is making it so that those vouchers are worth more, so that people can actually find more units that are realistic rent levels with their voucher.

It's not a matter of having to apply now versus later, it's a matter of how much is that voucher worth, and how likely are you to succeed in finding an apartment within those prescribed voucher rent levels, so that you can actually use it to move out of shelters? Because many people right now have a CityFHEPS shopping letter in shelters, but they still can't find an apartment because the rent levels that those vouchers would pay are so artificially low.

Brian Lehrer: Nathaniel on Christopher Street, you're on WNYC with Jacqueline Simone from Coalition for the Homeless. Nathaniel, thank you for calling you.

Nathaniel: Thank you for taking my call. I just want to say anyone who knows Jacque Simone knows that she should be in charge of all this because she's so brilliant and dedicated. I just have a personal plug. I'm the co-director of Cornell's Center for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, but also, we run the health policy course with Amanda Ramsdale and Jacque was a wonderful lecture for our medical students about this very topic.

Specifically, I want to just weigh in as an epidemiologist about some comments that people have made about, maybe just moving back to native homeless individuals to congregate shelters. What we've seen, of course, especially with the Yankee Pitchers and others, is that we just don't know enough about the Delta variant and potentially about new variants to come to say that that would be safe or not. I think one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that all of these moves are being made against the backdrop of really serious scientific uncertainty about how COVID is going to work its way through our community in the coming weeks and months.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Jacqueline Simone, now that he's praised you to the heavens, deserved I'm sure, what would you say on the policy level?

Jacquelyn Simone: I'm very flattered. Nathaniel, thank you for calling in. It's always great to have your perspective on the science behind this. I think he's absolutely right that we're pretending that the pandemic is over when it very clearly is not. I can tell you from personal experience, I contracted COVID-19 in February of this year following all of the CDC guidance, wearing a KN95 mask every time I stepped outside my apartment. The reality is that even though my partner and I had no underlying conditions, he's still experiencing significant debilitating impacts of this virus five and a half months later.

We're pretending that we can flip a switch because we want to and have a parade and say that the pandemic's over and that vaccination is enough. In reality, we just don't know enough about the virus, about the efficacy of the vaccines to protect long-term effects of the virus. Also, I just don't think we should be using the most vulnerable people in society as guinea pigs to test whether it's safe to have people back in congregate settings, when we have the option of keeping them in hotels and ultimately permanent housing, instead of rushing them back at the time the virus is surging.

Brian Lehrer: Nathaniel, if you're still there, as an epidemiologist, we probably should add that even though there are some breakthrough cases, 99% of the hospitalizations and deaths from COVID recently are in unvaccinated people. I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that vaccinations don't do that much, doctor, correct?

Nathaniel: Absolutely. I do want to stress that vaccinations are absolutely the proper way to respond to this disaster and this epidemic. As was mentioned by Ms. Simone, even people who don't wind up in the hospital who get this virus, do have an uncertain future. Really good studies coming out of England now, where they have better overall country records to show, yes, it's very unlikely that, for example, kids under the age of 12 will have serious impacts.

Oher studies show that somewhere the reported numbers are 10 or 15% of individuals, regardless of age, who get this may have long-term effects, and those are still being investigated. Absolutely, vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate. We've written editorials about this, we've tried to work with our engineering colleagues about how to do it better. There's a lot of resistance, the curve for vaccinations in this country is obviously on the way down and it should not be. I think we definitely need to keep in the back of our minds that anyone who says, it's over is really not talking to science.

Brian Lehrer: Nathaniel, thank you again for your call. As we finish up, to wrap up and sum up, Jacqueline, assuming the city can't just permanently commandeer these tourist hotels, these private businesses for the number of homeless people staying there now, and in case it's a relatively long time before we can really say COVID is over. What does your group, The Coalition for the Homeless, think for moral choice for the city actually is in the immediate future before the voucher value takes effect and that's not even going to take care of some number of thousands of people.

Jacquelyn Simone: I think we really need to double down on permanent housing. This is something we can do immediately, we don't even have to wait for Intro 146 to take effect necessarily to make use of some of the vacant units that agencies like the Department of Housing Preservation and Development have in their portfolio to ensure that people who are approved for supportive housing, which is permanent housing with onsite support services are being quickly connected to those units.

We need to increase the supply of affordable housing, but I also think there's a lot we can do right now to help people access our current affordable housing stock. We also could pass Intro 2047, which is the Fair Chance for Housing Act, that would make it illegal for landlords to discriminate against people based on prior involvement with the criminal legal system. There are many people who have a period of incarceration in their past and that's used as a barrier to prevent them from accessing housing.

If we actually protected those people and helped them move into permanent housing, it would reduce the shelter census. It would make them better able to get back on their feet and really thrive and it would also further racial justice, because we know that homelessness is fundamentally a manifestation of systemic racism. About 57% of people in shelters are Black and 32% are Latinx. That's by policy design. I think we really need to connect the dots here when we talk about criminal legal reforms, when we talk about systemic racism, when we talk about sexism and we talk about ableism and actually help the most vulnerable people move into permanent housing as quickly as possible instead of treating them like chess pieces on them.

Brian Lehrer: In just 20 seconds, how is Eric Adams on any of this compared to Mayor de Blasio, if you have a firm sense yet? 20 seconds.

Jacquelyn Simone: He has definitely expressed the need for more affordable housing and more supportive housing. I believe he's also expressed support for raising the voucher levels through Intro 146. It's just going to be a matter of making sure this is a priority and that we are not criminalizing homelessness and pushing people out of sight, but rather addressing the issue as a fundamentally human issue that needs trauma informed interventions to connect people to that permanent housing.

Brian Lehrer: Jacqueline Simone, senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, thank you for coming on again.

Jacquelyn Simone: Thank you so much. Bye.

Brian Lehrer: We will follow up on this when the mayor is on next hour. More to come in a minute here on The Brian Lehrer Show.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.