To better and more quickly respond to the street homelessness problem, the City will create HOME-STAT – Homeless Outreach & Mobile Engagement Street Action Teams. The initiative will partner existing homeless response and prevention programs with a series of new initiatives designed to better identify, engage, and transition homeless New Yorkers from Harlem to Hollis to appropriate services and, ultimately, permanent housing.
HOME-STAT will be the most comprehensive street homelessness outreach effort ever deployed in a major American city. HOME-STAT is funded from within existing resources at DHS, so no new dollars are necessary. HOME-STAT adds three new elements to the City’s homelessprevention and response policy:
Proactive Canvassing
• The Mayor’s Office of Operations is launching an effort that will, for the first time ever, conduct a proactive daily canvass of every block from Canal Street to 145th Street, focusing on hot spots and improving the City’s ability to quickly identify issues and deploy resources to the people and places they are needed most. In addition to the dailycanvass, HOME-STAT survey teams will conduct a daily identification of hot spots of persistent homeless presence throughout the five boroughs. This new mobile proactivecanvass will involve 60 field and analytic staff responsible for gathering and reporting real-time information used to deploy resources and track initiative outcomes.
• The Mayor’s Office of Operations will create a suite of HOME-STAT dashboards including a daily public dashboard that maps service requests and data from HOME-STATsurvey and outreach teams, and the police department. A monthly dashboard will report on aggregate outcomes, conditions and performance beginning in early 2016.
• In addition to the daily information generated by the canvassing operation, the City willconduct comprehensive quarterly nighttime counts to provide a more complete and real-time understanding of homelessness in New York City.
Immediate Response
• HOME-STAT will increase contracted Street Outreach Team staff and build a rapid-response capacity to respond to 311 calls and information received from HOME-STAT field staff in all five boroughs and throughout the subway system. HOME-STAToutreach teams will set an average response time of one hour when the program isfully operational in March 2016. With HOME-STAT, New York City’s homeless outreach staff will grow from 175 to approximately 312.
• The New York City Police Department will redeploy 40 officers to its 70-officerHomeless Outreach Unit to respond to calls regarding encampments, large hot spots, and those experiencing emotional disturbance or exhibiting erratic behavior. The NYPD will set a non-emergency average response time of one hour. Emergencies will continue to be handled via 911.
Citywide Case-by-Case Integration and Management
• HOME-STAT will create a citywide case management system that provides case managers for the street outreach services to ensure City service integration, continuous monitoring and outreach, and rapid response to individual problems. All HOME-STATagencies – including DHS, NYPD, and other human services agencies – will play anoperational and case management staffing role in this effort. The NYC SAFE Hub, a central command for tracking mentally ill individuals with a history of erratic or violent behavior, will partner in this effort. The Mayor’s Office of Operations will ensure multi-agency integration and accountability.
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