2 Midtown Lawmakers Pledge $200K For Local Homeless Outreach

MIDTOWN, NY — As New York faces record-breaking levels of homelessness, two Midtown lawmakers are going all-in on local outreach.

City Council members Keith Powers and Erik Bottcher announced in Times Square Thursday that each will allocate $100,000 to homeless outreach programs with a "meet people where they're at" approach.

"New York City is in a housing crisis," Powers explained. "Rates of homelessness are the highest that they have been in decades."

Powers' office will send cash to Community First Initiative, a homeless outreach program founded in 2021 by the Times Square Alliance along with the Center for Justice Innovation, Breaking Ground and Fountain House.

The money will allow Community First to expand to an additional 24 midtown blocks, from Herald Square to 52nd Street and from Fifth to Ninth avenues with additional community navigators who meet with unhoused people in need of help.

"It's an outrage that in the greatest city in the world, we still have people that are facing these challenges and that are unhoused and unsheltered," Powers said.

"These are the people that we most urgently need to find, to support and to give provide outreach. And that's exactly what Community First does."

About 68,000 people currently spend the night in city shelters while an additional 3,700 New Yorkers sleep on the streets, Powers noted.

Community First has engaged over 880 people in Times Square and logged over 2,200 unique interactions, helping to connect people with a wide array of services. At least 40 people the group interacted with have secured transitional or permanent housing, Powers said at the press conference.

"Those are people in their lives that are getting help that are not sitting on the streets waiting for somebody to come along and often they're getting the help they need," Powers said. "Day after day, person by person, these connections make a meaningful difference."

Bottcher, whose district also shares part of Times Square, will direct $100,000 in Council funding to Urban Pathways, a group that also engages in outreach for unhoused New Yorkers, to create a new coordinator staff position.

“Achieving public safety requires investments in critical programs that serve our community," Bottcher said.

Bottcher pointed back 50 years to the deinstitutionalization of inpatient mental health services and said the promised replacement never appeared, leaving communities to hand the problem over to law enforcement.

"We sent people to jail and prison to the point where prisons and jails are the number one provider of mental health care in the United States," Bottcher said.

Tom Harris, a retired NYPD officer and president of the Times Square Alliance who came up with the idea for Community First, said that it is "a program that we are proud to be partners in and that makes me most proud as a person."

In a 2021 New York Times article, Harris cites his experience as an officer in Brooklyn to explain why he decided to approach underlying problems affecting unhoused people and those struggling with mental illness as opposed to simply asking for increased policing.

"As we started to recover from the pandemic, we wanted to be very deliberate about not leaving those most vulnerable behind," Harris said.

Even a former skeptic — according to the 2021 New York Times article — Barbara Blair, the president of the Garment District Alliance, said she was excited to with Community First, citing a walk last year with Powers, Bottcher and Harris to see what work the group was doing.

"I don't think there's anyone here that can imagine a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a child, falling down, for some reason, and they end up homeless, they're in mental distress," Blair said.

"It is critically important that this city and this nation create a continuum of care so that when you meet them in the place that they are in the street, they go from one step to the next to the next."

And members from Fountain House, an organization run by and for people with mental illness and one of the Community First partners, came to share how these groups helped impact their lives.

David Reims, a member of Fountain House since 2009, said the group helped him find a job, housing and educational opportunities.

"It's like my second family basically — home away from home," he said.

Just six months ago, he stated doing the morning shift at their Times Square kiosk, serving coffee and hot cocoa to at least 50 regulars.

"I love this job," he said. "I'm from Massachusetts, in a small town, and this is really cool. I'm working in Times Square. I love it."