City spending on the homeless in this fiscal year is poised to reach $2.3 billion — nearly double the $1.2 billion spent three years ago, Comptroller Scott Stringer said Wednesday.
The payouts anticipated for fiscal 2017 — which ends June 30 — include $1.4 billion for housing families and single adults in shelters, Stringer’s office found.
The city also expects to spend $400 million for homeless-prevention and anti-eviction services, along with $188 million on rental subsidies.
Additionally, the comptroller’s analysis showed that the city spent $102 million on rooms in commercial hotels for the homeless in calendar 2016 — a practice started under Mayor de Blasio.
“We have to pause and ask ourselves, are we seeing results?” Stringer asked in a review of the mayor’s fiscal-2018 preliminary budget.
“We’ve talked about the outrageous costs of commercial hotels and the human costs of placing families with children in those hotels with no services and no hope.”
City officials didn’t dispute the figures, but pointed to several successes on homelessness under de Blasio — including a 24 percent drop in evictions after funding for legal services to tenants was increased to $62 million.
The officials also said rental subsidies had helped 51,500 people move out of shelters and into permanent housing.
Still, the shelter count was 60,155 as of Tuesday, according to city records.
Stringer also bashed the mayor’s 10-year plan to create 100,000 jobs with city subsidies — the main focus of the de Blasio’s State of the City speech this week — arguing that many private-sector jobs are already created almost every year.
The comptroller’s analysis showed that the city has added a net 635,000 private-sector jobs since 2009 alone.
“I don’t think people truly understood what he was talking about because [there’s] no plan, no timetable for a plan,” said Stringer, a possible mayoral contender this year. “[It’s] just an empty promise, and it’s certainly not enough.”
City officials pointed to record employment in the city — currently 4.3 million jobs — and said more than 20,000 new well-paying jobs were already in the pipeline.
That includes 10,000 jobs slated for the Brooklyn Navy Yard and 9,000 jobs at a new life-sciences hub in Manhattan.
“The comptroller has criticized universal pre-K, equipping officers with body cameras, unprecedented highs in affordable housing and job creation, a balanced budget with record savings and sweeping investments in homelessness prevention,” said mayoral spokesman Eric Phillips.
“City Hall shares the public’s wonderment at what exactly the comptroller’s fighting for.”
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