A Better Future Is Worth Building for NYC’s 146,000+ Homeless Kids

As of this year, one in every eight children attending school in New York City can be presumed to be homeless. This includes children who live in shelters, half-way homes, or who informally bunk with other families, and amounts to a 2024 estimate of 146,000 homeless children currently present in NYC’s educational systems alone. And this statistic says nothing of the children who aren’t currently receiving any form of education, nor does it give a count of the adult population currently unhoused, yet surviving against the odds, across all the five boroughs. 

Every New Yorker should be furious. 

But where should that fury be directed? To Eric Adams, current mayor of the city? He is a valid target, but to solely blame him and those like him (individual actors of the local, state, and federal government) is to miss the forest for the trees, rotten and withered as those trees may be. The crimes of Eric Adams and his toadies in authorizing and implementing the new 60 day limitation on shelter occupancy for migrant families are crimes they must answer for. But these crimes against the people are not aberrations of an otherwise healthy system, they are as diseased and rotten in their nature as the system which spawned them; like fruit from the branch. 

And while some may regard the articles above and remark “Well, this is all about migrant families, really. The illegal ones especially!” those folks aren’t looking at the data. The Chief Financial Officer reports a 22% increase in the amount of homeless children in the education system between 2023 and 2024, an increase that does not correspond with an increase in migrant family populations present in shelters.¹ 

Furthermore, while the comptroller data does show an increase in Hispanic persons documented among the homeless beginning somewhere between summer 2022 and late winter 2023, it also shows a fascinating abnormality in the data: a great canyon that plummets as low as 10,914 families TOTAL present in the state shelters during the month of March, 2022 (See figure). Then, just one month later, it spikes back up and then climbs dramatically for Hispanic families, somewhat for Black Families, and more slightly for all other categories. 

How does this happen? It’s simple. The state does only as much as is necessary to ensure that business can continue as usual.

See here: Housing and Urban Development (HUD) waivers granted due to the pandemic, along with other programs initiated during the years from 2020 to 2022, ran their course and were ended or rendered inert. The HUD waivers specifically became invalid on March 1, 2022, which just so happens to be the point on the graph where shelter inhabitancy plummets. The graph above makes perfect sense then: The aid programs that had served as floodgates stemming the tide of a steadily growing homelessness crisis burst open, and so a flood of new families entered the formal shelter programs as pre-existing families who were once in those shelters scrambled to renew their occupancy. These early pandemic programs, including rent freezes and free emergency housing in commercial hotels, kept the most precarious families housed, until they didn’t.  Then, the suffering masses of workers — migrant or otherwise — were consigned to the streets not by accident, but by calculating and willing actors doing their part to keep business moving. 

They knew this would happen, if not explicitly, then implicitly. The logic is all too easy to follow, and many organizations warned of such consequences back when COVID-19 benefits were being cut. But it wasn’t just COVID-19. It’s been decades upon decades of capital accumulation, mismanagement, and decay. Not even the bourgeois corporate media can deny this fact, as illustrated by a CBS News report this October which relayed that New York City has only processed 65% of SNAP and 42% of financial assistance applications on time this year. 

This is why Eric Adams and his goons are merely playing a role, why they are “actors,” and not the sole perpetrators in this travesty. They are part of a greater schema, that of capitalism — particularly, that of an empire in its most advanced stage of growth, which is beginning to experience its inevitable and historical decline. This is not to excuse anyone for their actions, but to put the current problem of homeless children and families into a perspective informed by a type of analysis that grounds us in evidence and accounts for the clash of interest between classes of people: dialectical-historical materialism.  This is the science by which Marxists understand and act upon the present; a science that any person can understand, and may even be engaged with in a lay-person’s fashion, such is its ubiquity and validity. 

People know why they are suffering. We know why there are families left to rot in the streets. We know why one in eight NYC schoolchildren sleeps in a shelter or out in the cold. But the system, hegemonic and deeply rooted in our culture as it is, is skilled at obfuscating the truth; shifting the blame, or at the least misdirecting the concerned with incorrect ways of resolving the problem. This is not an issue that will be solved by Eric Adams suddenly finding the goodness in his heart and becoming a better man; it will not be solved by electing a more upright and righteous mayor to steer the decaying ship. It will not come because we merely want it to; as it stands, the bourgeoisie (see Blackrock), and in the case of housing, the petit bourgeoisie (individual landlords), gain much from the continued suffering of the hardest workers and the ever present threat of homelessness. By design, it is this shared class interest among the rich and powerful which dictates policy in a capitalist state, and it is this bourgeois-dictated policy that tears children from warm homes to fatten overstuffed wallets. This conflict of interests, this contradiction, can only be resolved through class struggle and class war. 

Currently, in NYC, there are over 120,000 active hotel rooms and anywhere between 33,000 and 67,000 housing units vacant of any occupants; a rough total range of 187,000 to 153,000 empty potential homes across the five boroughs.²

Then, based on the 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (NYCHVS), there is a general demand for 275,000 households/residents, a demand which supply “failed to meet.” And while it is true that the maximum range of empty housing units by our current measure still falls short of the 275,000 figure by at least 88,000 units, the fact that so many beds remain empty cannot be ignored. The price for these units, and the use of these units in the case of hotels, far exceeds or is irrelevant to the desperate masses struggling just to keep a roof over their head, and the reason is simple — profit is the chief motive which drives capital, and capital is what bourgeois and liberal society enshrines as the most important element above all else. Yet this notion would seem to be incorrect, one may think, because is it not pointless to keep units empty rather than have them filled while charging a lower rate? Would this not create at least some profit for the owner? It would! 

Indeed, something would be gained by all parties, and society at large, if even a fraction of the above housing units were given over to the homeless to be rented below the “market value.” The effects of homelessness can truly never be understated, especially for children, and it doesn’t take rigorous study to understand that a stable family is a productive family, both for their own sake, and for their communities. Jobs cannot be reliably attended to when you have no idea where you’ll be sleeping that night, or if you’ll be arrested for “vagrancy,” just as well as schoolwork cannot be adequately completed by children whose parents must rifle through trash in order to feed them. 

But none of this matters to the bourgeoisie or the petit-bourgeoisie beyond how they take base offense to the “unsightliness” of the homeless. To them, what matters is the accumulation and valorization of their own capital. In the case of landlords and hotel operators, this is done through commodifying shelter, the most basic element of survival, and uses the bourgeois and pre-bourgeois social structures to justify and legalize the constant parasitism of their class off the backs of their renters, the working class; the people at large.

“If accumulation, the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, necessarily creates a surplus laboring population, the latter becomes, in its turn, the most powerful lever of accumulation — even a condition of existence of fully developed capitalist production. This surplus- population forms an industrial reserve army belonging to capital just as absolutely, as if it had raised and disciplined it at its own expense. Independently of the natural increase of population, it provides capital, to meet its varying requirements, with a mass of human material always at its disposal for exploitation.” — Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 25.

While we may not be speaking of a very industrial working population with regards to NYC, the modern U.S. economy, being one which is exceedingly dominated by banking-related finance capital, the general rule still applies. The landlord class, and the bourgeoisie more broadly, do not suffer, but benefit from, and are always able to prey on, the desperation of the people in order to fleece greater and greater amounts from our already light purses. 

In this sense, capitalism is not concerned with the use value of even the most basic things, such as food, education, and shelter. The use values of these things only matter to corporations insofar as they can be marketed and sold, such that the bourgeois class grows richer. And by this logic the burden on the buyer, the large proletariat class, grows more and more, such that bourgeois profits may be infinitely expanded. Naturally, this leads to a crisis, as infinite growth is impossible, and we saw in 2008 what becomes of a country when it suffers an uncontrolled collapse of the housing market. In a way, that collapse never ended, and to this day, we, the people, are still suffering the harm caused to us by the arrogance, greed, and short sightedness of capital and the systems which support it. 

Thus we are left with the harrowing realities on the ground; a child from Santa Clara committed suicide due to the bullying he received from being homeless. This occurred just eight days before U.N. World Children’s Day, in the last remaining country on earth who has not ratified the U.N.’s Charter on the Rights of The Child, Somalia having done so back in 2015. This is the reality we have been forced to accept, under pain of death and imprisonment should we ever try to resist. 

But resist we must. 

A better world is possible, and we need not speculate how situations such as the one in NYC and the U.S. more broadly can not only be alleviated, but anticipated and avoided entirely. The People’s Republic of China, despite its large population and history of poverty, has effectively eliminated homelessness through measures including a household registration system, which ensures access to hometown social services, and laws requiring local governments arrange proper assistance to those who still lose housing, rather than punishing or expelling them. The great strides of the Chinese people, and the people of socialist countries overall (Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cuba, etc.), are possible only through complete control of the state belonging to the working class. With a dictatorship of the working and oppressed peoples — a rule of the people, by the people, and for the people, in truth and not just words — we will put homelessness and poverty in the dustbin of history where they belong. 

1. Current estimates suggest 50,000 migrant families with children lived in shelters over the summer of 2024. Doing some simple math, dividing the prior estimate of 146,000 homeless children currently enrolled in some form of schooling by the 50,000 families recorded by the city’s comptroller across all the summer months, then you would have to presume, on average, that each family has 2.9 children being cared for. And while that is not only dubious to claim from the perspective of mere probability and statistical chance, it is also a figure representing an incomplete population! The above estimate of 50,000 only accounted for migrant families who lived in shelters, and the 146,000 figure accounts for all unhoused children enrolled in schooling across the five boroughs. And of those 50,000 migrant families, only 13,500 of those families were housed in shelters during the month of September, 2024. Looking back on the readily available data reporting on the number of families present in September 2023, we can see the figures are practically the same. Therefore we can include that the homeless population is rising steadily, and that the source is not uniquely foreign in origin.  ↩︎
2. This figure was arrived at by taking the number of active hotel rooms and adding them to the upper and lower bound limits of vacant housing as documented by surveys from 2022 and 2023, the most immediate and relevant data the author could find on the subject. Specifically in The City’s article on the subject, the average amount of rent stabilized units vacant in the city yet not available to potential renters was compared with the figures they gave for vacant units of any available housing, not just rent frozen unitsy. By taking the low estimate of 33,000 and the high estimate of 67,000, and adding each to the estimate of 120,000 active hotel rooms, our range of available housing is made clear.  ↩︎