City drops plan to charge rent to shelter residents, By Cara Buckley, June 4, 2010, New York Times: “The Bloomberg administration has abandoned a controversial decision to charge rent to working homeless families living at city shelters, officials announced on Friday. Instead, under a new agreement that could start in September, such families would be required to set aside a part of their monthly earnings in a savings account that they can have access to once they leave the shelter system. ‘This plan will make it easier for homeless families to move into permanent housing with savings in the bank,’ said State Senator Daniel L. Squadron, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and pushed for the new agreement, which had the support of city and state officials, as well as advocates for the homeless. Steven Banks, attorney in chief at the Legal Aid Society, which was poised to sue the city if it had continued charging rent to the working homeless families in shelters, described the new plan as a ‘huge step forward…'”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty