2,500 city-funded apartments intended to house the homeless population in the Big Apple have been left empty. On Wednesday, Mayor Eric Adams promised to fix the bureaucratic nightmare. City Hall is now under pressure to find a solution to NYC’s homelessness problem and make progress on its high-profile plans to end the crisis.
Two days after The Post revealed the dysfunction at the city’s Human Resources Administration, the remarks were made. Essential portions of the application process are still done by hand and must be coordinated by a tiny office with fewer than a half-dozen workers.
“This is a dysfunctional city, we have to stop the dysfunctionality,” the mayor, who called the paper’s findings “unimaginable,” said in response to questions during an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn.
“How do you have a vacant apartment, when you need people to be in the apartment and you have so much paperwork that they can’t get in the apartment,” he added. “That is not how I’m going to run this city.”
Requests to bolster HRA’s budget to expand the office and clear the massive backlog was rejected by Adams. This has led to 10 percent of the city’s supportive housing units being left empty even as the average stay at a
