# 'More then 50,000 New Yorkers slept in city homeless shelters and on the streets last night'



## editor (Jun 18, 2013)

This is shocking stuff. I didn't realise it had got that bad over there,



> More than 50,000 New Yorkers slept in city homeless shelters and on the streets last night. About 21,000 were children. These numbers are huge and appalling, higher than they were in 2002, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, higher than in the dismal days of the fiscal crisis, the Reagan ’80s and the surly administration of Rudolph Giuliani.
> 
> New Yorkers who have no permanent place to live form a small city unto themselves — an abandoned one. The shelter population has risen 61 percent while Mr. Bloomberg has been mayor, propelled by a 73 percent increase in homeless families, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, whose relentless advocacy has been provoking mayoral fury since the 1980s. These surging numbers — of families with children, especially — undercut claims that New York is steadily becoming a better place to live, and that its government has gotten better at helping its most vulnerable citizens meet their most basic needs.





> The city looks cleaner, safer and richer in gentrifying neighborhoods, many lined with luxury high-rises and new amenities, like rental bicycles. But it looks vastly different from the intake center for homeless families in the South Bronx, or the shelter for men on East 30th Street, or the other sites where tens of thousands of New Yorkers are languishing, out of sight and out of mind of the larger city.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/opinion/the-forgotten-50000.html


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## diond (Aug 17, 2013)

It is shocking - but not quite as much as confusing then for than.


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