De Blasio sets to return homeless to shelters

Mayor De Blasio has announced that the city of New York will eventually move homeless people out of hotels and back into their shelters.

The city will eventually move homeless people out of hotels and back into shelters, Mayor de Blasio said Monday, though he declined to provide a timeline.

The Mayor, who did not provide a specific time line, made the promise amid growing concerns of aggressive panhandling, public urination and other quality-of-life infringements blamed on homeless people housed in hotels in Hell’s Kitchen and nearby nabes.

The Mayor in a conference said, “As the … health situation continues to improve, we’re going to start the process of figuring out where we can get homeless individuals back into safe shelter facilities and reduce the reliance on hotels,”

De Blasio continued while mentioning NYPD, DHS and the Health and Sanitation departments “On the specific quality-of-life issues, it’s incumbent upon every city agency involved to get out there and solve them.”

“I’ve instructed all of them to address these issues as they come up and make sure that neighborhood residents see that these concerns are being addressed,” he added.

De Blasio continued that for the city to get homeless people out of hotels, it has to “identify space that will work in our existing shelters.”

“We’ll have more to say on that as the plans are more deeply developed and as we see what the health situation shows us, ” he concluded.

During the coronavirus surge, the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) moved about 10,000 homeless people into hotels from shelters.

Since then, residents of Hell’s Kitchen, where homeless people are living in eight hotels, and other areas have complained of close encounters with enraged or apparently drug-addled individuals.