Have you heard of New York City's Special One-Time Assistance program (SOTA)? If you have, it’s probably been only this past week, as stories have begun to come out that the SOTA program relocates New York City’s homeless out of New York City. The city began the program a couple of years ago, offering families one year’s fully paid rent to relocate elsewhere, with travel costs included. Charlotte NBC affiliate WCNC reports that North Carolina is one of the many destinations to which New York officials have sent their homeless, and the true intentions of the program are being called into question.
According to WCNC, New York has relocated 12,000 people at a cost of $90 million over the past two years, and while that sounds meaningful, the practice is being questioned. Reported the station, "’It's troubling,’ Mecklenburg County Commissioner Pat Cotham said. ‘There's a difference between getting rid of a problem and dumping people or really being thoughtful and sensitive and trying to help them.’"
New Jersey is one of many destinations in the SOTA program, and the state says that not only is the program problematic, but it’s also neglectful and inhumanely managed. NJ.com reports that Newark officials filed a complaint to stop the program on Monday. They say that the program frequently puts families into terrible conditions and lacks real oversight, alleging that inspections of rental sites have not taken place, and individuals placed have little or no other support once their rent is paid upfront for the year. In essence, New Jersey argues that the SOTA program delays dealing with the root problems of homelessness, namely a lack of affordable housing and of social safety net support, and then leaves those problems for another jurisdiction to handle.
The filing details a lack of communication between officials in New York City and New Jersey, something that echoes complaints made in New York state by other elected officials, who say they have experienced the same lack of communication regarding the program.
Newark’s lawsuit is meaningful due to the city’s status as the largest city in New Jersey, and the argument is not simply, “We don’t want homeless people.” The filing, which names New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Department of Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks, says that the program pressures New Yorkers to move out of the state by offering them no other alternative than a potentially decrepit home in the Garden State. As New York’s NBC affiliate reported,
In another example provided in the complaint, a mother of three in a shelter said she wanted to stay in New York City but was told the vouchers weren’t sufficient to cover rent. She was then allegedly taken to tour New Jersey homes -- her first time in the state. She also felt pressured to choose one of the apartments, according to the complaint.
After moving in, the mother alleges she experienced a number of power and heat-related problems including that the lights stopped working. Even though she called DHS headquarters, according to the complaint, her calls were never answered.
This echoes reports that rental conditions for those in the program are frequently terrible, and that, lacking any support, an already vulnerable population of people is handed off into the same no-win situation they were trying to escape. Mayor de Blasio’s deputy press secretary, Avery Cohen, responded to the court filing by saying that it was “nothing short of income-based discrimination,” arguing that homeless people have every right to live wherever they please—just not in New York City, it seems.
New York passed new rent control laws this past summer with the hope of providing the millions of tenants who are being priced out by ballooning rents with some stability. Landlords and hedge funds have been writing a lot of op-eds and doing a lot of crying. The rent control laws come as a very direct reaction to decades of abuse by landlords and the companies that are now landlords throughout the country’s major cities. And many advocates for rent stabilization regulations also believe that there is a need for the city to work on offering more affordable housing.
Unhoused people in the United States are frequently disenfranchised, and their political power is weakened. Getting the political will to create a real structural change that would truly tackle our housing issues will take a larger set of programs that don’t include simply buying someone a bus ticket to somewhere else. More Americans will have to see that the inequalities in our society are what lead to a “homeless problem,” and not simply an individual’s bad luck.
Until then, relocation programs such as SOTA will appeal to wealthy cities like New York because it is cheaper to send the problem away, and it’s more lucrative for the corrupt free marketeers of our society to incarcerate it, as Rudy Giuliani did in the 1990s and 2000s, than it is to face it and fix it.