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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, on Tuesday, June 29th, the day when a number of things are happening. It's a day when we should know a lot more about the results of the New York City mayoral primary. Remember, last week they announced the first-place votes among all those who voted in person, either early or on primary day.

Today, they'll release the ranked-choice voting results from those same in-person ballots. That's around 800,000 voters, more than 80% of all the votes cast. We should know a lot about whether Eric Adams, first place showing so far, seems like it's holding up, or whether Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia got enough second or third place votes to make it close. That would leave it up to the absentee ballots, which have yet to be counted. If these rank choice numbers get released during the show, we will, of course, let you know.

This is also a day when the temperature should approach 95 around here and the heat index with the humidity could reach 100 degrees. Please check on people you know who are living without air conditioning or otherwise at risk from the heat.

Later in the show, we'll have the author of a new National Geographic article about people's uneven access to shade. It's also a day when the Delta variant is showing its contagious power increasingly in the United States and around the world. Please check on people you know who are living without a COVID vaccine or otherwise at risk from COVID-19 and the Delta variant. We'll have Dr. Leana Wen on the show to talk about the Delta variant and your unvaccinated children, among other topics, in about a half-hour.

Today is the first day that people experiencing homelessness who were living at The Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side are all waking up somewhere else after the final evictions yesterday. Please check on people you know living without permanent shelter or otherwise at risk from the shortage of appropriate housing. That's where we will start the program today.

Remember how the battle was over Mayor de Blasio's decision to move The Lucerne residents to a different hotel downtown? De Blasio actually won that argument in court, but guess what? The easing of the pandemic in New York City has led the mayor to say, "Never mind, no hotel rooms at all, you guys. You're going back to the barrack-style shelters you were in before COVID hit." It's the end of the best thing that had happened to many New Yorkers in years, a temporary room of their own.

It's not just the infamous Lucerne. According to the news site, City Limits, the city has used more than 60 hotels as alternatives to congregate shelters during COVID. They just didn't all make the news with residents' pushback. We will ask this, could the tortured story of the men at The Lucerne and the neighbors who were divided about their presence offer an opportunity to reset New York's conversation about the right policies to help the thousands among us for whom shelter is a legal right but housing is not?

Let's have that conversation with an advocate for New Yorkers living with homelessness and with your calls. Joining me now is Jacquelyn Simone, senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless. Now, if you go to the Coalition's website and click on the tab called About Homelessness, this is really worth a few minutes for everybody, homeless connected or not, because it's so interesting, you'll see some New York City history that includes what was considered normal before modern street homelessness really broke out in the city in the 1970s.

What was normal was low-cost rooms for otherwise homeless families and individuals and buildings often called hotels, usually with shared kitchens and bathrooms, but changes in policy and changes in economics made them largely obsolete. Jacquelyn, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

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

Brian: Usually history is what's old. Today, this history of single-room occupancy hotels might be what's new to many of our listeners. The Coalition's website says the most significant single change in New York City's housing stock during the emergence of modern homelessness was the extraordinary reduction in the number of single-room housing units. Can you describe what some of those pre-1970 units were like and why they mostly disappeared?

Jacquelyn: Yes. The important thing to remember is that the reason we have mass homelessness in New York City and frankly across the country is because of the dire lack of affordable housing. SROs and the decline in the SRO housing supply was part of the reason why we saw a spike in homelessness in recent decades.

SROs or single-room occupancy units were very affordable units that were typically a bedroom where you shared a bathroom and kitchens with other people. They were considered to be the most affordable housing option for many single adults, sometimes families, but typically single men and women who did not have much money to spend on housing. Especially after World War Two, single-room housing was a really vital part of the housing supply in New York City.

In 1955, there were changes to the housing codes that made it much more difficult to convert or construct new SRO housing, and then subsequent changes to the zoning code, as well as the tax code made those conversions practically impossible. What was once the housing of last resort for many low-income people in New York City really declined after 1955, and essentially the bottom rung of the housing market fell off.

Brian: That history on your site says, just to elaborate on what you just said, in 1960 by one measure, there were approximately 129,000 single-room housing units citywide. That number crashed to about just 25,000. That's 129,000 to 25,000 by 1978. As you just pointed out, the units had become increasingly regulated starting in the 1950s, and changes in the housing code made it pretty impossible to build new single-room occupancy hotels or convert existing buildings to them. Do you know why they fell so out of favor?

Jacquelyn: There were a combination of factors. I think there was a common perception that the SROs had a lot of crime and danger. Some of this certainly might have been overblown and might have been a tendency to pathologize poverty and to criminalize people who are very low-income. The reality is that there were many people who were dealing with mental illness or substance use issues, who did not have access to adequate services.

Sometimes people conflate the SRO housing of the past with our current model of supportive housing, even though they're very different things because supportive housing is permanent, affordable housing with on-site support services to really help people thrive. Whereas I think, the absence of some of those services did lead to some issues in the old SRO units.

It's unfortunate that rather than trying to increase services and give people supports, including economic and mental health supports in those units, the city, and the state-regulated SROs to completely eliminate that housing option. There were also economic pressures to convert housing to serve people who were higher-income. Some of the SRO units were in neighborhoods like the Upper West Side that were becoming more affluent. I think that understandably when the public favor turned against SROs, there were many owners who were all too happy to remove the lower-income people who had been living there and replace them with higher-income renters.

Brian: Yes, because the article also says that property tax changes at the time gave developers incentives in places including the Upper West Side to convert SRO buildings to higher-income rentals and co-ops and condos. The other thing that that history piece on your site says contributed so much and intersected with the decline in SROs was deinstitutionalization of mentally ill New Yorkers, reducing the inpatient psychiatric bed population from around 85,000 to around 25,000 people by 1979, just as the exact kind of housing people in their situation used to depend on was disappearing.

Is your understanding of deinstitutionalization that it was positively motivated to basically give more people with various kinds of mental illness more freedom to live outside in society?

Jacquelyn: This is also a rather complicated part of our history because I think some people have this knee-jerk reaction that if deinstitutionalization contributed to the rise in homelessness, then we need to return people to institutions to address homelessness when in reality, we know that those institutions were often not meeting people's needs. Many of them were unsafe, and were not respecting people's rights and their own self-determination, and it was not enabling people to live in the least restrictive setting possible.

We don't want to go back to those types of institutions. The problem was that when people were released from these often very problematic institutions, the city and the state failed to actually give people the community-based housing and support that they needed to thrive. There was this tendency to discharge people, but without any supports, and they fell through the cracks, and many of them became homeless.

I think rather than returning to institutions, we need to emphasize a more holistic infrastructure of mental health and housing supports to enable people to live in the community and to really thrive and have their needs met in a more respectful and dignified setting.

Brian: There was a question that polarizing Andrew Yang moment from the final televised debate where asked about mentally ill homeless people he said, "What about the rest of us?" and proposed restoring many psychiatric hospital beds. Of course, so many people saw that as a cruel response, but your site's history gives the context for that response. He just, I think by almost everybody's lights, proposed a cruel answer, which is reinstitutionalizing tens of thousands of people, rather than providing more of the supportive housing with services. That supposedly was the original intent of deinstitutionalization.

Let's flash forward to today. Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about homelessness in New York City on this first day that people who were housed at The Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side are waking up somewhere else, the first day that all of them who used to be there are waking up somewhere else. My guest is Jacquelyn Simone, senior policy analyst for Coalition for the Homeless. The men who are living in The Lucerne, where are they being relocated to?

Jacquelyn: As some background to rewind to a little over a year ago at the start of this horrific pandemic, we realized that many people who were homeless and sleeping in congregate dorm-style facilities were at significant risk of contracting the virus that causes COVID-19 because there are about 20,000 single adults sleeping in Department of Homeless Services shelters every single night. The vast majority of them were in dorm-style shelters with shared sleeping, dining, and bathing facilities.

When dealing with the risk of an airborne virus, we knew that these facilities could not adequately protect some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers. With pressure from many homeless people themselves, as well as advocates and the City Council, the city began to move people from these congregate shelters into hotels where they could better protect themselves from the virus. There were about 3,500 single adults who were already being sheltered in hotels prior to the pandemic but then at the peak, about 13,000 homeless single adults were in shelters that had relocated to hotels.

There were still some people who remained in those congregate facilities with less density. We and other advocates had been long calling for all of those people to also have the ability to be sheltered in hotels. That's why these men were moved from their congregate facilities into the hotels initially. That happened at The Lucerne last summer. It wasn't immediately at the start of the pandemic, but it was over the course of the summer. That caused a significant amount of backlash in the neighborhood.

I will say I've met many people who are living on the Upper West Side who were very welcoming and supportive of their new homeless neighbors. Unfortunately, a vocal minority of people were very up in arms and were really vilifying these men. For months now, there has been pressure from the NIMBY voices to move people out of those hotels and back into those congregate facilities.

A couple of weeks ago, Mayor de Blasio announced that with the state's blessing, the city would begin the process of returning people from those pandemic era hotels into the congregate facilities where they had been prior to the hotel program. For the men at The Lucerne, that process began yesterday. They're going to be returning to the congregate dorm-style shelters where they had been prior to The Lucerne.

Brian: Listeners, our phones are open if you're experiencing homelessness yourself or if you ever have or if you know someone who has, or if you're concerned about this as a quality-of-life issue in your neighborhood if you're not homeless. Is the easing of the pandemic, is what we've learned about housing and homelessness because of the pandemic, offering a chance to reset, to build back better, as they say? When it comes to homeless services or homelessness policy what would you do, or what would you like to ask our guest, Jacquelyn Simone, senior policy analyst with the Coalition for the Homeless? 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280 or tweet your thought or question @BrianLehrer.

Jacquelyn, some people interviewed by journalists among the population leaving The Lucerne and other hotels, say going from a hotel room back to a congregate shelter is like going from heaven to hell and other comments like that. In the view of your organization, the Coalition for the Homeless, are the congregate shelters that bad across the board? Or is there a range of quality of life? Or how would you describe that landscape?

Jacquelyn: In New York City, we have a legal right to shelter and that was established 40 years ago as part of what's called the Callahan Consent Decree. This is essential because no other city in the United States has a guaranteed right to shelter for homeless people who need a safe place to stay. As part of that consent decree and other regulations, there are minimum standards that must be met in the shelter system.

I don't want to undercut the right to shelter by any means. I think that this is why we have the vast majority of homeless New Yorkers in shelters and not on the streets, however, we also know that a shelter is not a home and that shelters can be very intimidating and scary places for homeless New Yorkers to be because of the congregate nature of the shelter system.

If you were sleeping in a dorm with 12 strangers, that can be a really intimidating environment. I think particularly during the pandemic when people were able to have a room of their own, either double or single-occupancy hotel room, their own bathroom, and a door that closed and that sense of privacy and dignity, we did see that many of the people who were sheltered in hotels reported significant increases to their mental well-being. They felt that they could get their lives back on track more when it came to their employment and education goals, and they were really able to thrive.

I think that returning back to the less private congregate facility feels like a step backwards for many people. There's a range of quality, I would say. Some shelters might have many people in one dorm, some might have fewer people in a dorm. When you are homeless, you lose a sense of control over your own life. When people were told that it was time to return to these congregate shelters, they didn't necessarily have the ability to say where exactly they wanted to go.

The government agency overseeing the shelter system controls where you go and where you don't. We know that some people have already reported that they would feel safer returning to the streets as opposed to returning to a congregate shelter, particularly with the Delta variant continuing to spread and with not high enough vaccination rates across the city. We know that some people are going to leave the shelter system entirely and go to the streets because it just feels like such a step backwards in terms of safety and mental well-being to return to the congregate facilities.

Brian: For listeners just tuning in, Jacquelyn, I'm going to tell them that we started this conversation with some of the deeper history of when single-room-occupancy hotels, for very low-income people were very common in New York City before they pretty much got regulated out of existence and that that contributed mightily to the rise of what we think of as modern street homelessness by the 1970s. Well, in light of that history, or in the context of that history, here's what looks like a very interesting caller, Pam in Manchester, New Jersey, who has a 1950s story to tell us, I think. Pam, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Pam: Hi, thanks for taking my call. My grandfather owned three brownstones on the Upper West Side, West 80th, and West 81st Street. When he died in the 1950s, my aunt inherited one of those brownstones on West 80th and she turned it into an SRO. They had several individual rooms on each floor. They shared a bathroom and a little kitchenette that she provided and she lived on the ground floor of the brownstone. I spent many weekends. My mother would drop me off there and spend weekends with her. I met a lot of the people, and my aunt was a little eccentric, to begin with, so they all fit in together.

Brian: What happened to that brownstone? Why isn't it an SRO anymore?

Pam: Oh, well, she died in the late '70s and her two sons inherited it, and they turned it into a regular apartment building with an apartment on each floor. There were four floors if I remember.

Brian: Right, because the incentive was not there to keep it as an SRO, there was more money to be made.

Pam: Right. They didn't live there. None of them lived in the area, so they were going to be absentee landlords.

Brian: Got it. Thank you, Pam. Thank you so much. It's a tiny microcosm, that story of the big picture, right, Jacquelyn?

Jacquelyn: Yes, definitely. I think the question becomes, when that presumably affordable housing option for the people who had been living in that brownstone went away, what happened to those people? Were they able to find another also affordable housing option? Or were they completely priced out?

This is why we really need the city to be redoubling efforts to move people into permanent housing, to both prevent homelessness among people who are on the brink and to also help people who are already homeless move into housing much more quickly because the sense of security that many of the men at The Lucerne and other hotels have reported could also be replicated in permanent housing. People want that dignity. They want the privacy of a room of their own with a door that locks.

I think that if the city were giving more energy and more resources to move people into permanent housing, then we wouldn't have to deal with this really destabilizing move from hotels into congregate shelters right now. I think the de Blasio administration has made some progress when it comes to preventing homelessness, but we continue to be disappointed by their efforts to move people out of shelters and into permanent housing and to ensure that the affordable housing goals of the administration are aligned with the reality of record homelessness.

Brian: Listener on Twitter asks, have the people returning to shelters been vaccinated twice?

Jacquelyn: That is a big issue. One of the many reasons why we, at the Coalition and many other people, are objecting to these returns to congregate shelters. We know that because of systemic racism in the healthcare system, many people who are homeless and particularly vulnerable are very skeptical of the healthcare infrastructure. They might not be connected to doctors and they might not be fully sold on getting a COVID-19 vaccine. They might not even know where to get one at this point because communication does not always filter down to the most vulnerable communities.

We know that the Department of Homeless Services was doing and continues to do mobile vaccination clinics at various shelters. The latest numbers we received from them was that a little under 7,000 shelter residents had been fully vaccinated. That's not just single adults, that also might include some adults in family shelters, which are different, but that means that a sizable percentage of people who are being bussed back to congregate dorm-style shelters right now are not vaccinated.

Given that the federal government would be willing to reimburse for the cost of these emergency hotels for another few months and given that we don't have high enough vaccination rates, I think, in the city overall or in the shelter population and the fact that the Delta variant is increasingly a threat, we think this is a premature move. Instead, they should be focusing on making sure that everyone is protected, making sure that the shelters have upgrades to their ventilation systems and other safety measures to reduce the risk of the virus, and also primarily trying to move as many people into permanent housing instead so that they don't have to return to the congregate shelters at all.

Brian: Let's take a call from Shams in Harlem, a former resident of The Lucerne, who, I think, has been on the show before. Shams, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Hi.

Jacquelyn: Hi, Shams.

Shams: Hi, Jacquelyn. I'm so glad to hear you because you're basically saying everything that I would've probably said so I appreciate you for amplifying our issue and speaking on our behalf. I appreciate all the work you've done. Yes, Brian, I was here with Helen Rose [unintelligible 00:25:32] early on, I believe, in this whole thing with The Lucerne and stuff so-

Brian: You go by The Homeless Hero, right?

Shams: Yes. I'm The Homeless Hero, yes, indeed. I'm not going to take up too much of your time. One, I would definitely love to come back on your show, but really quickly, Jacquelyn spoke a lot about a lot of the things, the issues and the underlying things and they'd been involved in dealing with these things for many, many years. This is where we have this problem, not just isolated to the case of The Lucerne.

I've been in the shelter system, raised my son in a family shelter system, many of the same problems that we have now have existed forever. In this recent experience, with my advocacy, I'm seeing that the way New York City and this current mayor has dealt with homelessness is so inhumane and so flawed that we have to really reimagine what we're doing as a city to address homelessness.

One of the problems I have is that I believe we should be moving away from the right to shelter policy that's under Callahan to a right to housing. The issue I have with Callahan with that thing Jacquelyn said was something that was needed 40 years ago, is that under Callahan, I believe that the mayor, and this is my lawsuit against the mayor or my intervention in the lawsuit against the city, basically the foundation of that was to challenge the assertion that those of us who were dealing with mental illness and substance use disorder are not afforded the same protection that others with disabilities are. Therefore, we cannot question what the mayor does to us, even if it has a negative effect on our mental health or our ability to combat substance abuse.

I challenged that because I knew that under Callahan, the mayor, and if you go into the lawsuit, his contention was, "We don't have to do that, not in the shelter. All we have to do is provide you with the [unintelligible 00:27:47], with the three hot, the locker and the roof, that's it. We don't have to treat you for mental illness. We don't have to treat you for substance use disorder."

Now, we have this thing where we talk about public safety, when we talk about people that are in the street, that are untreated for mental health issues or substance use issues. I'm saying that these things are all co-related, but this mayor has refused to deal with it in a way that solves the problem. Instead, his policies is only perpetuating those issues, is making it worse.

You take a brother like Joe Humphries, who was on that bus yesterday, someone who was begging for a job in Kenton Hall and we got them that with the [unintelligible 00:28:31] Riverside residents got jobs through [unintelligible 00:28:34] Riverside, they didn't care about these men losing the job. They said, "Forget the job. We're going to put them back where they came from, and they're going to have to start from where they're at.

I'm like, "This is inhumane. This is not the way that we deal with vulnerable people." I've been through the experience, I know what the dehumanization of this experience does physically to me, mentally to me, emotionally, to me. It ends up building up anger, resentment, anxiety, and other mental and emotional issues. I'm saying that I'm just one person, but all of the people are going through this.

This mayor needs to address, not just address, he needs to be called out for his inhumane policy against a vulnerable population in order to sustain and support his shelter industrial complex. I don't know who the next mayor is going to be, but that next mayor has to be engaged with ripping that pot, ripping that down. All of the activist and advocacy organizations, including Coalition for the Homeless has to go after Steven Banks, has to pressure this mayor right now in such a way that we let it be understood that the mayor is committing crimes against humanity. He is actually creating opportunities for death. I've seen it in Kenton Hall where people were OD'ing all the time, in Wards Island, where I stayed at the [unintelligible 00:30:10] centers where people were overdosing and dying all the time on a regular basis because there's no such thing as services on site. There's no programs on site. There's no mental health professional. There's no peer specialist. These things don't exist in that shelter system, and under Callahan, it's okay, it's permitted, it's-

Brian: Shams, I'm going to have to jump in and get a response from our guests as we're also coming near the end of the segment. We have our next guest standing by. I appreciate every word of what you said there, clear and specific and detailed. Jacquelyn Simone from the Coalition for the Homeless, first, for our listeners who don't know what Callahan is, again, it was the court case that established a right to shelter in New York City, that's being challenged now as Shams was describing in favor of, they hope, a right to housing, as opposed to a right to just shelter.

To finish very briefly on what he said about this mayor and the prospect that there's going to be a new mayor, an article in City Limits cites a policy push by the de Blasio administration to get more families out of hotels into permanent housing the last four years. That has included closing more than 260 shelter sites deemed inadequate. Do you judge the mayor as harshly as he does?

Lastly, do you see meaningful solutions coming out of the mayoral or city council, primary campaigns? That's what campaigns were supposed to be about, right? Competing policy solutions, not just arguing over where someone girlfriend lives or whether they have private security in their neighborhood. Did that happen to your eye in the case of homelessness policy on the campaign trail?

Jacquelyn: We're running out of time so I'll try to be brief. First of all, I just want to thank Shams for always speaking your truth and for being such an incredible advocate on the front lines. With everything else going on I think you've been such a powerful voice for people who are directly impacted, and it's been a pleasure to work with you over the past year-plus of this saga.

I just want to say, I don't think that it's an either-or, either we have the right to shelter or we have a right to housing. I think the right to shelter is incredibly important for people to have a safe place to stay tonight, but we know that we need to do better. We need to help people move into permanent housing much more quickly. We do need a right to housing. We need to prevent homelessness in the first place. We need help people move out of shelter as much more quickly. That shouldn't come at the expense of making sure that that person has a safe shelter in the immediate term.

There are a few things that we think the city needs to do immediately. Some of these have come up in mayoral campaigns as well as council campaigns, but we need to be focusing more on permanent housing as the solution to homelessness. Right now, we have about a little under 8,000 emergency housing vouchers coming from the federal government as part of the American Rescue Plan act. We need to prioritize those for people who are homeless, particularly those who are in hotels, who are at risk of going back to congregate shelters so they can move into housing.

The federal level, we really need universal Section 8. We need to start treating housing assistance as an entitlement instead of rationing it so that only one out of every four eligible people actually has access to a housing voucher that would help them pay their rent. This is a proven solution, but we haven't made it available to enough people. As a result, people are languishing in shelters and on the streets.

At the city level, we have Intro 146, which became law officially over the weekend. That would raise the CityFHEPS voucher amount, which is the city-funded voucher to match those Section 8 voucher levels, which are higher. That'll help a lot more people move out of shelters more quickly by expanding the number of units that are available to them. We need the implementation to be immediate rather than in 180 days as prescribed in the legislation.

We also already have vacant units that the city has some control over, such as units that receive financing from the Department of Housing Preservation, and Development that are sitting empty because they're too expensive for the people who really desperately need housing. Why don't we help people move directly out of shelters and into those units and reduce the pressure on the shelter system as a whole?

When it comes to supportive housing, which I mentioned at the start of the segment, that's permanent affordable housing with onsite support services for people like those that Shams was discussing, who need a bit of extra support for mental health reasons for substance use, we need to increase the supply of supportive housing because right now there's a dearth of supportive housing supply. Those units are not coming online quickly enough. We also need to streamline the applications for those units and really have a housing-first system that moves people with significant vulnerabilities into housing, and then wraps those supports around them.

Something we could do right now also is combat more discrimination against people who are trying to seek housing in the private market. Right now, many people who have vouchers are facing landlords who turn them away because they would pay their rent with a voucher. We need to have more enforcement of that. We also need to pass the Fair Chance for Housing Bill that would ban discrimination based on a history of incarceration for some of the most vulnerable people.

There are many steps that the mayor could do immediately. We also need the governor to step up and we need the federal government to step up. I think that we can achieve a right to housing without undermining the right to shelter. I think that if we help people move out of shelters more quickly, that will alleviate a lot of the instability and the trauma that Shams was discussing within the shelter system.

Brian: Jacquelyn Simone, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless. Thank you so much.

Jacquelyn: Thank you so much for having me.

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