City Limits

“'People deserve privacy and safety,' advocates from the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project tweeted Tuesday. 'There are thousands of empty hotel rooms,' they added, furthering a call to provide more desirable accommodations for people coming off the streets.”

Wall Street Journal

“'Sweeps really only chase people from place to place, resulting in destabilization and criminalization,' said Helen Strom, benefits and homeless advocacy director at the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, in a statement Tuesday. 'If Mayor Adams were serious about resolving street homelessness, he would stop repeating the same inhumane, failed policing strategies of the past.'”

World Socialist Website

“The latest sweeps against the homeless are not a new tactic. According to the advocacy group the Urban Justice Center, there were a total of 9,600 such actions between 2016 and 2021, more than 6,000 of them in the last year of the de Blasio administration.”

Gothamist

“The city conducted 6,604 sweeps during the last year of the de Blasio administration, according to data obtained through Freedom of Information requests from the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center.”

New York Times

“Craig Hughes, a supervising social worker at the [Safety Net Project of the] Urban Justice Center, said the mayor’s plan was an escalation of a longstanding city approach that 'has always been an effort to hide homelessness rather than to get people housed' and that invariably 'leaves people more precarious than they were beforehand.'"

NY Post

“A “bureaucratic nightmare” has left 2,500 city-funded apartments for homeless New Yorkers who need mental health care and other social services open — enough units to house every person living on the streets or in the subways, The Post has learned...Getting an applicant into supportive housing is a bureaucratic nightmare,” added Kathleen Cash, an advocate at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project.”

NY1

Watch this short video to hear a response from our Safety Net Project.

The Real Deal

“Marika Dias, an attorney at the Urban Justice Center, said the city should cut the requirement that tenants must prove their ability to pay rent later down the line and increase available funding."