Nearly three years into his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio finally accepted responsibility for the city’s homeless crisis.
“I own it,” he said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer program on Wednesday. “I have to own everything — the things that work, the things that didn’t.”
A year ago, the administration was singing a different tune by continuing to point fingers at predecessors for the ever-increasing homeless population.
“It’s a problem that we inherited but we are putting in place the programs to address it,” homeless services czar Steven Banks told reporters in December 2015.
“Other mayors could have and should have done things they didn’t do.”
However, de Blasio still qualified his buck-stops-here claim by once again highlighting the 2011 dismantling of a rental subsidy program under Gov. Andrew Cuomo and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The shelter population spiked in the years following that move.
“This city never recovered from the cancellation of the Advantage program in 2011,” he told Lehrer.
A new rental subsidy program launched by de Blasio has had difficulty getting full buy-in from landlords, who are concerned it could be dissolved as easily as the prior one.
Despite saying his policies were beginning to take hold, the mayor promised another comprehensive vision for tackling homelessness would be unveiled in coming months.
He previously announced a “comprehensive homeless services plan” in April that merged the duties of two agencies — the Department of Homeless Services and the Human Resources Administration.
The homeless shelter population was at a record 60,686 as of Monday.