‘Homelessness’, Contagious Destruction of Housing, and Municipal Service Cuts in New York City: 1. Demographics of a Housing Deficit

Approaches from community and population ecology are adapted to study ‘homelessness’ in New York City, where long-standing and continued reductions of critical housing-related municipal services, particularly fire extinguishment, to levels below those needed for maintaining urban population densities have triggered waves of coupled contagious destruction of low-income housing and forced migration of population. Massive destruction of housing, after a delay occasioned by the outmigration of some 1.3 million non-Hispanic whites from the city between 1970 and 1980 has contributed significantly to a serious housing deficit, by direct loss of low-income housing and possibly by creating economic forces which encourage the conversion of remaining low-income units to high-income units. This deficit, which by some analyses approaches a quarter million housing units affecting perhaps a million people, has created a large ‘precariously housed’ population which, after a delay, is becoming overtly homeless as the decline of low-income housing supply collides with increasing numbers of the poor. Elementary mathematical analysis suggests the demographics of those precariously housed, but not yet homeless, strongly determines the dynamics of demand for emergency shelter, implying, for example, that under some circumstances the probability of avoiding homelessness may decline exponentially with time spent precariously housed, and that the number requiring emergency shelter may increase as rapidly as the square of the number precariously housed, depending on exact mechanisms. This paper provides prerequisites to a subsequent fuller exploration of the complex time dynamics of synergistic couplings between contagious urban decay, population migration, precariously housed population, homelessness, and public health deterioration in New York City.