A New York City shelter provider plans to give 100 homeless families monthly cash payments for two years to help them move out of shelters faster.
The pilot program will launch on Monday at nonprofit Win’s central Brooklyn shelters, and its impact will be studied by Vanderbilt University over five years. It comes as the city’s shelters reach unprecedented numbers of residents and as stays among children surge to their highest level in a decade.
Researchers say that while universal basic income and cash transfer programs have become more popular across the U.S. in recent years, the Win initiative will specifically target families with young children. Families can participate as long as they have a child younger than two and are eligible for shelter. One hundred families will receive $17,000 a year, or about $1,400 a month, through debit cards that they can use without restrictions.
“That’s really kind of like the secret sauce — you’re getting this money with no strings attached, but what is attached to it is a statement of belief in you, a statement that we know you’re the quarterback of your family, and you’re going to use this to help your family,” said Christine Quinn, CEO of Win, which is the largest family shelter and supportive housing provider in the nation. “That type of commitment, that type of sincerity is rarely bestowed upon homeless mothers.”
The average length of stay for families at Win shelters is 454 days, or about 15 months, according to the organization, and mothers make up about 90% of its shelter population. Quinn predicted that giving families the autonomy to decide how to spend the cash — whether on child care, furniture, housing or education — would help them get out of shelter more quickly.
Beth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt in Nashville who will examine the program’s outcomes as part of a research project, said other government benefits tend to restrict who is eligible and deemed “worthy” of assistance. “We want to say folks should be in charge of their lives and good things will happen when they are,” she said of the new initiative.
“We expect homelessness to essentially end for these families,” Shinn added. She said the researchers expect to produce a study in five years, after interviewing the 100 families who will participate in the pilot and comparing them to another 100 families in Win shelters as well as other data. She noted that the program puts an emphasis on young children, who are at particular risk for living in shelters.
“Infancy is the age at which you are most likely to find yourself in a homeless shelter in the United States and also in New York City,” Shinn said. “That’s because of the costs associated with having a baby, and the fact that a child takes a parent out of the workforce or requires the parent to pay for costly child care.”
Experts say about 80% of New York City families can’t afford child care. It’s estimated that the 80th percentile of families pay between $14,000 and $20,000 per year for care for a child age 5 or younger, according to the nonprofit Citizens’ Committee for Children.
Families participating in the privately funded pilot program will have access to peer counselors every week, but the counseling will be voluntary, according to Win. Quinn said she’s optimistic that the cash transfers will help lead to better public policy and break the intergenerational cycle of homelessness. She pointed out that there are more children in city shelters than there are seats in Madison Square Garden, as nearly 30,000 children were living in shelters last year.
“Most of the programs that homeless people participate in are ones that treat them as if they are trying to rob the public purse,” Quinn said. “This program says ‘we believe in you. We have faith in you.'”
“And then when we see a program like that work,” she added, “it’s incredibly powerful data to use to get funding but also to change the mindset.”