City Council Restores Millions in AIDS Funding
AIDS activists at a rally against Bloomberg’s proposed cuts—the hard work paid off!
For months, the Bloomberg Administration has argued that community-based case managers in HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) supportive housing serve the same role as the city’s HASA case workers in the lives of poor New Yorkers living with HIV. But after months of rallies, arrests, action alerts, budget hearings, and meetings between people with AIDS and their advocates, New York City Council Members were persuaded by ample evidence to the contrary. City Council is expected to vote today to restore $3.8 million in funding for community-based case managers in supportive housing.
These assurances were made to advocates by City Council members, although Council has not yet voted on the $15 billion budget deal reached by Bloomberg and Council Speaker Quinn. The budget is expected to pass, although it is based on the presumption that the State Senate will approve a new sales tax in New York City. See the full budget breakdown.
“A lot of [representatives from] supportive housing groups said, ‘The case manager was the person who came to me in the middle of the night, and we cannot keep these buildings going without them,’” said Council Member Gail Brewer, who fought for the restoration of funding. “Everyone on the Council wanted to put it back. I think everybody did really good advocacy.
In addition, the Council also will restore $491,000 to HIV Nutrition Services. This funding provides meals for 3,000 low-income individuals with HIV/AIDS every year, and serves as a gateway for Momentum AIDS Project to educate, counsel and link people to primary health care, mental health and substance abuse treatment, housing and other essential services.
Council members’ discretionary items for AIDS services and harm reduction, which took a huge hit last year have been maintained at last year’s funding levels.
A job well done
Advocates were thrilled that their hard work paid off. New York City AIDS Housing Network Executive Director Sean Barry said, “These cuts were sobering because we’d taken AIDS housing for granted in City Hall. We realized we really had to educate City Council about the importance of supportive housing.”
Matt Lesieur, Village Care of New York’s Director of Public Policy, agreed. “If we had stayed on the sidelines, the cuts were going to happen,” he said.
“Because of our meetings with Council Members, testimony at budget hearings and also remaining faithful on the steps throughout the budget process, it is clear that Council Members heard the advocates’ message: Cuts to supportive housing would have been incredibly detrimental to HASA clients,” said Kristin Goodwin, Housing Works Director of New York Policy and Organizing.
Council Members who emerged as leading supporters of restoring funding included Brewer, Bill deBlasio, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Rosie Mendez, Letitia James, Maria Baez, Robert Jackson, John Liu, Maria del Carmen Arroyo and Annabel Palma.
Now for the bad news…
Despite advocates’ case-management victory, there were was one clear defeat: Bloomberg’s $4 million cut to Scatter Site II (SSII) housing was not restored by City Council.
SSII offers housing to people in SROs as an intermediary step on the road to independent living. While SSII is widely seen as flawed—tenants are often assessed incorrectly and qualify for more substantial services—the cut is bad timing. New York City’s HOPWA funding has also been cut and the number of people with HIV/AIDS living in SROs is on the rise.
Scatter Site II providers place between 700 and 1,000 homeless people a year into supportive housing. Although no one will technically lose housing (HASA has said it will provide housing for all SSII residents), without SSII providers around to offer assistance, the number of people in SROs will almost certainly rise.
“Regardless of how people felt about Scatter Site II, every Scatter Site II had a waiting list,” said Barry. “From here on out there will be hundreds more people with HIV and AIDS in New York City who aren’t in permanent housing.”
The Mayor and City Council will likely call for more cuts after the elections in November. Bloomberg told advocates on the steps of City Hall last month that if they were upset now, “just wait until next year.”
Posted on June 18, 2009 at 5:05 pm
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