Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

by Andrea Elliott

These short-lived experiments drew ridicule. But the ships came to symbolize Bloomberg’s position: Shelters should be a temporary vessel on the way to self-sufficiency, not a destination. “Our own policies needlessly encourage entry and prolong dependence on shelters,” the mayor said in 2004, taking aim at one policy in particular. For decades, the city had helped homeless families jump the waitlist for public housing. Only a small fraction of those families returned to shelters. But from Bloomberg’s perspective, this policy gave families an incentive to enter the shelter system: They were becoming homeless to gain access to the projects or to Section-8 vouchers, the federal rent subsidy program. With the economy growing, Bloomberg adopted a new set of policies intended to make the homeless more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing. Instead, they would receive short-term help with the rent. Promising to make “chronic homelessness effectively extinct,” Bloomberg revamped the shelter system with a sophisticated database to track this population and a program offering job training, legal assistance, and other supports. He also created the Center for Economic Opportunity, a city-run “innovation lab” that would spend $662 million on poverty prevention programs emphasizing jobs and education. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor told his aides, and homelessness would decline.