On Thursday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled an aggressive new plan to fight street homelessness. While speaking to the Association for a Better New York, de Blasio unveiled the new initiative: NYC Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement Street Action Team—or HOME-STAT. It will be heavily technology-based, and rely on shared data in order to dispatch aid workers to help members of the homeless population who are on the street.

The HOME-STAT plan is part of an overall $2.6 billion program being instituted by de Blasio’s administration. It will include hiring 137 full time staff, and 100 more police officers specifically dedicated to helping the homeless. Under the HOME-STAT plan, which should be fully operational by March 2016, workers will sweep the city’s hot spots for homeless people who live on the streets, and compile an electronic database to track the homeless population. Then, outreach workers will work with the identified individuals; de Blasio stated it will provide each “street- homeless individual a dedicated caseworker who will make it their mission to get their clients off the street and into a healthier place, permanently.”

Additionally, if someone reports a homeless individual on the streets through the city’s non-emergency line, 311, the goal will be for an outreach worker to reach that individual within an hour. According to de Blasio, the use of data is very similar to a program that the NYPD uses to track crime in the city.

This is a large undertaking–the homeless population in New York is thought to be about 58,000, but it’s estimated about 3,000 to 4,000 live on the streets. De Blasio has received significant criticism for what many see as his poor handling of the issue. A recent poll reported that 62 percent of New Yorkers don’t approve of how he has approached the issue of homelessness, and he was pretty heavily slammed after he downplayed the issue of street homelessness earlier this year.

The public response to de Blasio’s plan appears to be mixed. While many, including the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless have indicated support for initiative, others have brought up concerns that the focus on increased policing will vilify the homeless–they argue instead of advocating for compassion, de Blasio is just encouraging New Yorkers to call an officer to deal with the issue. Judith Goldiner, of the Legal Aid Society, told the Wall Street Journal: “I’m worried that it sends a message that we don’t want to send, which is that we target people who are homeless. That’s not who New Yorkers are.”

Overall, it appears as though de Blasio needed to do something to help deal with the street-homeless population in New York City. Whether or not this initiative–which puts a high premium on technology–works, it will be interesting, as it could be a model for other cities suffering with the same issue. I think we’ll all be keeping an eye on HOME-STAT as it is implemented early next year.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

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