Homeless? City Will Buy You Plane Ticket to Anywhere

Benzadrine's Flickr

Because the cost of housing homeless families in shelters is so high, the Bloomberg administration has been quietly funding a $500,000-a-year program to buy one-way plane tickets for indigent individuals if they agree to stay away. Well, the program was quiet until it was featured in today's Times, so who knows how many New Yorkers will now start posing as transients for one-way tickets to Burning Man. So far the city has paid for more than 550 families to leave since 2007.

To get the free ticket, the recipients must prove they have a relative ready to take them in. According to a map of their destinations, most of them (136) have been bound for Puerto Rico, while Florida was the #2 destination (100). Taxpayers paid $6,332 to send at least one family to Paris, and other ports of call have included Antigua, India, Russia, Peru, and Barbados. One city official says, "We have paid for visas, we’ve gone down to the consulate, we’ve provided letters, we’ve paid for passports for people to go. Anyone who comes through our door." In some cases, the city even advances the family up to four months’ rent, a one-month security deposit, a furniture allowance and a broker’s fee!

Officials say none of the relocated families have returned to city shelters. And one family from North Carolina illustrates the fast turnaround now experienced by some poor newcomers: Justin Little and Eugenia Martin, both 20, owed back rent on their apartment in Fayetteville, so they moved here Saturday with their 5-month-old, Inez. They planned to stay in shelters while looking for jobs, "because there’s always work in New York." But by Monday they were on their way back home, courtesy of NYC and a relative who came up with money for the back rent.

Arnold Cohen from the Partnership for the Homeless thinks the whole thing stinks: "The city is engaged in cosmetics. What we’re doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We’re taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family."

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on July 29, 2009 2:02 PM

Comments [rss]

robingee

Someone is going to take advantage; that happens with every program designed to help the needy. We cannot turn our backs on people because of a few bad apples.

Guest

on the other hand the homeless bring the rents down

Guest

It's a tough choice. PR and florida have gentle weather but there are more free food programs here. hmmm

abcohen

sucks to be the guy next to them on the flight "home"

SeasTooFarToReach

Huhhh. Looks like most of these people have "hit hard times" for a moment there, have not been homeless for months or years.

One could see a positive side, if they have a shot at a better life somewhere else, why not help them out. But those people who got sent back after a couple of days, come on! They just wanted to vacation in NYC without paying for a hotel!

Better program administration, anyone?

felixthecat2

Gas the geese, rid the city of homelessness. Bloomberg is a tool

Gnomie

For reasons why there is nothing wrong with this plan see thread #27. If you really think there's something wrong with helping stranded, penniless New Yorkers reach family members willing to take them in your are cold and heartless.

dadoc

Damn, some guys in Brighton Beach just took my idea!

Bort

JDS, why'd you put Barbados in italics? Are you seriously jealous of homeless people?

NannyState

In the old days, if you were a public nuissance, ie; drunk, disorderly, or just flat out insane, you'd get a one-way bus ticket out of town. It only worked until the cities that got the new arrivals freaked out and reciprocated. If this is truly voluntary and the people involved are functional and could restart their lives elsewhere, why not? But if they are like many of the homeless, messed up with layers of addictions mental illness, and dysfunction, there will be blowback. Right now, Los Angeles has a nice bumper crop of bums in Skid Row they'd love to ship our way...

dadoc

Will take only moments before somebody sets up a virtual family member service in Paris and New York, undercuts Priceline, and Captain Kirk is looking for work again.

JacqueMehoff

the mayor says this will save money,

here's another money saver, those lawsuits against the NYPD, how bout saving the taxpayer dollars in those????

why no comment on that?

Bottomless Chips

“I didn’t expect the city to be the way it is,” said Hector Correa, who was in a homeless shelter last week and flew home to Puerto Rico on Tuesday. “I was expecting something different, something better.”

He was here for one fucking week??!!? What the fuck?

Can we please vote out these liberals with their cockamamie ideas.

keepdiscoevil

Methinks you did one of the following:

1) Mis-quoted or,

2) Mis-understood that when it says "last week" he was only in America for a week before he went to a shelter.

Work on your reading comprehension before you go chasing a straw-man, fella.

RevWaldo

Why the Burning Man crack? It's not an event for slackers. Anyone that showed up there without putting in a few month's advanced prep work would wind up either a) embarrassed b) dead c) both. And you sure as hell would want a *round-trip* ticket!

pants

I seem to recollect reading a book by Focault on madness and society years ago. In it he said that eurpoean towns in past centuries would load all the homeless and mentally ill on a boat and send them down the river to the next town, where they would be unloaded until the mayor could cough up money to get them to leave and go elsewhere. This is apprently where the phrase "ship of fools" came from.

rlb14

AHEM!

>>> To get the free ticket, the recipients must prove they have a relative ready to take them in.

mediclawyer

I spent a long time working with the homeless, and the fact is, if you are homeless it is because you are an addict or you're mentally ill. That IS our 99% of the shelter system. So this, unfortunately, probably will not help them much, which is a shame, since the best place for most mentally ill people to be is in a stable home.

OTOH- we have a lot of lazy slackers in this city of all stripes- off they go if they promise not to come back!

Trilby16

I just realized, I am homeless and family members in Paris are ready and willing to take me in.

Clarice City

Whoa. One of the families mentioned in the article who were granted tickets are a couple with 10 (!) kids on their way back to PR. Jeeze...condoms are a helluva lot cheaper than 12 plane tickets to PR.