Cuomo Demands MTA Plan To Battle Subway Homelessness

NEW YORK — With the subway showing improvement, Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants transit officials to tackle the system's increased homelessness problem. The Democratic governor Friday demanded that the MTA create a "comprehensive outreach plan" plan to get homeless people off the trains and connected with help.

The transit agency should include steps to address homelessness in the sweeping state-mandated reorganization plan that officials are due to release this month, Cuomo said in a letter to the MTA Board.

"The MTA currently spends millions in funding social service providers to help the homeless in this system. What is that money going toward? What are they doing? What are 'we' doing?" Cuomo wrote. "The simple and plain truth is that too many mentally ill people are housed in our jails and left to our streets."

Cuomo's letter comes amid a city initiative to have police officers connect homeless people on the subways to shelter and other services instead of giving them tickets for low-level infractions.

The MTA worked with Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration to craft the initiative, which was announced a month ago following growth in the subway system's homeless population. The number of homeless people in the subways jumped 23 percent in the past year to 2,178 in January, and the number of service disruptions caused by them has reportedly more than tripled over the last decade.

Cuomo appeared to call on the MTA to go beyond the city's efforts with a plan to get homeless people out of the subways and into "safe, supportive environments," as his letter puts it. The plan should involve shelter and supportive housing providers, social service providers and MTA staffers, he said.

"I never met a homeless person who says, 'I love sleeping in the terminal, I love sleeping on the trains, constant noise, subject to harassment, et cetera,'" Cuomo told reporters on a conference call, according to a transcript. "It is shelter of last resort, is what it is. And we can be better than that — we must be better than that."

Cuomo said he wants to see homelessness discussed in the reorganization plan that the MTA Board must approve by July 30 under a state law the governor signed in June. The transit agency should ask for more social service providers or police in the plan if they're needed to address the problem, he said.

The preliminary reorganization plan that the MTA released Friday does not appear to mention homelessness. But agency Chair Patrick Foye said he agreed that it should be folded in.

"Homelessness is a serious societal problem and a critical matter in the subway system where it’s recently on the rise; we fully agree with the Governor that the MTA address this issue as part of its reorganization plan to become a more customer-centric organization focused on providing safe and dependable service to all of our customers," Foye said in a statement.

But the Coalition for the Homeless, an advocacy group for the city's homeless people, said more cops would not improve the situation.

Summonses and harassment only push homeless people "deeper into the shadows without helping them obtain the services and housing each one of them needs," said Jacquelyn Simone, a policy analyst at the coalition.

"If Gov. Cuomo wants to fix the problem, let him step up with more housing and services specifically targeted for homeless people, stop shifting the cost of shelters off to localities, and stop the prison-to-shelter pipeline from the State’s correctional facilities," Simone said in a statement.