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New York City Giving the Heave-Ho to Homeless Families
New York City is giving families free airline tickets! The catch? You have to be homeless and the tickets…they are one-way. Mayor Bloomberg’s administration is giving the old heave-ho to hundreds of homeless families who have plagued the city’s shelter system. According to the AP, it costs $36,000 a year per family to house them in New York City. After the past two years over 550 families have left New York via the program.
But they can’t be flown just anywhere. The families must have a relative -anywhere in the world – to take them in. Families have been sent all over the place like Florida, Georgia and Puerto Rico. The city uses a travel agency to book the flights and for international travel, the tickets are arranged by the Department of Homeless Services.
The good news, none of the families that have been shipped out of dodge have returned to city run shelters in their new towns.
Do you think New York is just passing the buck and making other cities responsible for their homeless? Or do you think giving these families a new start in a new place is a charitable act?
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3 Comments
Cali Mom commented on Jul 29 09 at 2:04 pmAt first glance, this seems like a good thing. It is terrible for a family to have to live on the streets.
I wonder about the details, though. If they already had family somewhere else they could go to, wouldn’t that family already try and get them home?
It seems like this is one of those things that is more complicated than it seems.
patricia commented on Jul 29 09 at 2:13 pmMaybe the family didn’t know how to reach them, or are too poor themselves to get the homeless family to them? I don’t know. I can think of lots of waysthis might not be benevolent, but it seems like the fact that the families haven’t returned to shelters in their new places might be a good sign. I agree, Cali Mom, more complicated than it seems at first.
mommyK commented on Jul 29 09 at 6:04 pmA while ago there was a scuttlebutt that Milwaukee (I think) was putting its homeless population on buses to Denver. If cities are in fact doing this it makes the average taxpayer hesistant to support its own city’s shelters, etc.
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