Advocates For Homeless March On Gracie Mansion

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Three weeks after confronting New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio at the gym, a coalition of advocates for the city's homeless took their fight to his home.

Hundreds of homeless New Yorkers and advocates for the homeless marched through the Upper East Side on Wednesday and held a rally at Gracie Mansion calling on de Blasio to commit to the creation of 30,000 units of affordable housing — 24,000 through new construction — dedicated for the homeless. The march and rally was organized by advocacy groups such as Coalition for the Homeless, VOCAL-NY and Housing Works.

The mayor's Housing 2.0 plan currently calls for 5 percent (15,000) of 300,000 units of affordable housing created by 2026 to be dedicated to homeless New Yorkers.

Nathylin Flowers Adesegun, the 72-year-old homeless woman that was brushed off by de Blasio at the Park Slope YMCA, led the march and spoke at the rally.

"He dismissed me that day, his office didn’t give us an answer when we met with them, so today I marched to Gracie Mansion because we will not stop fighting until we have homes," Adesegun, a community leader with VOCAL-NY said. "Mayor de Blasio's plan for homeless people is clear: stay homeless for the rest of his term and let the next administration deal with the crisis."

Adesegun made headlines earlier this month when she tried to ask the mayor to help her and 62,000 other New Yorkers who are homeless. Video shows de Blasio telling the 72-year-old woman "I'm doing my workout" before standing up and walking away.

The city Department of Social Services announced Wednesday that 100,000 New Yorkers experiencing or on the verge of homelessness have been able to exit or avoid the city shelter system since de Blasio took office in 2014. The announcement, which made no mention of Wednesday's rally at Gracie Mansion, attributed the successes to the administration's decision to reinstate rental assistance and rehousing programs.

"Homelessness is a decades-old challenge that wasn’t created and won’t be solved overnight," de Blasio said in a statement. "Our prevention and rental assistance efforts have helped more than 100,000 New Yorkers either avoid shelter or transition out of shelter to permanent housing."

Advocacy groups involved in Wednesday's march agreed that helping 100,000 New Yorkers avoid the shelter system is a positive achievement, but said the administration's plan to address homelessness fails when it comes to creating new housing.

Rental assistance vouchers and rehousing programs are just one part of the solution to the city's homeless crisis, advocates said.

"Fewer than 5,000 people exited shelters to housing built or preserved specifically for homeless individuals and families in the 'Housing New York' program — not nearly sufficient to fulfill the mayor’s objective of “turning the tide” against homelessness," Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement. "The depth of this crisis requires that we use all the tools available."

Photos courtesy Nicole Edine/Coalition for the Homeless