February 22, 2006

DIRECTOR'S CORNER

by TIM HARRIS

On Valentine’s day, Women in Black and several others held a “die-in” at City Hall to protest cuts to shelter in the face of 56 deaths on the street last year. At the same time, the Mayor’s office says there will be no cutbacks, and that they will spend whatever it takes to see there is no net loss of beds. Go figure.

Smart people don’t just go and pretend to die because they’ve got nothing better to do. The problem revolves around what is turning into a downright lawyerly approach to counting beds. There have been cuts to shelter. St. Martin de Porre’s, for example, has had their budget slashed by 30 percent and is threatening to close two days a week to make up the difference. SHARE, as almost everyone knows, will be defunded in April, but as yet no one really knows exactly what that means.

Meanwhile, some have argued that if only existing shelters would fill each of their beds nightly, the gap would close. This overlooks a number of logistical issues that are clear to providers but apparently lost on the City.

And while this somewhat arcane argument about how many homeless people can sleep on the head of a pin proceeds, everyone agrees we are still roughly 2,000 shelter beds short of meeting demand, the occasional unused cot notwithstanding. And that’s why people are dying.