New York City

From the end of World War II through the mid-1970s, the typical homeless individual in New York City was an older “derelict” man suffering from alcoholism and related problems. Such men typically lived in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels, flophouses, and missions in the city's Bowery district. Beginning in the middle of the 1970s and greatly accelerating in the 1980s, however, New York's homeless population underwent a substantial transformation.

Following the recession of the early 1980s, thousands of residents found themselves relying on the city for basic shelter. In 1980, New York City sheltered 2,000 people on any given night; a decade later, that number had risen more than tenfold. While the number of people relying on public shelter declined during the economic boom of the 1990s, the period following the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent downturn in the economy has seen record increases in the city's homeless population. Still, the official figures can be misleading. Since many people are sheltered only briefly, the number of homeless New Yorkers in any given year far exceeds the number on any single night. Moreover, with hundreds of thousands of city residents marginally housed or living “doubled up” with family and friends, a definition of homelessness that is limited to those living on the streets, in public spaces, and in publicly supported shelters and transitional housing understates the nature of the problem.

A homeless man on a Sunday morning in October 2003 in the Soho neighborhood of southern Manhattan

Karen Christensen; used with permission.

[Page 419]While New York City does not have the nation's highest rate of homelessness, it does have the greatest number of homeless people in a given metropolitan area. In 2003, nearly 40,000 were sheltered on any given night. Such figures, however, undercount the number of homeless. Seventy-five percent of shelter users are in families, while many singles do not use the shelter system at all.

Homeless New Yorkers are overwhelmingly African-American or Latino, and most have lived in New York for much, if not all, of their lives. Problems of substance abuse and mental illness are common among homeless singles, especially women and the long-term homeless; such problems are less prevalent among those in families.