On an app, pins on a New York City map chart sightings of homelessness, accompanied by photos of people lying on sidewalks, slumped in doorways, sitting on curbs with shopping carts piled high with bags. Hashtags frame the scenes: “NeedsMedical-Aid”, “Encampment”, “'AggressiveBegging”, “'Violent”.
On a similar Facebook page, residents of a Manhattan neighborhood share pictures and complaints about people living on the streets, some half-naked. A website created by a police union posts pictures of the homeless and vows, -"We are watching you!-"
In a year of anxiety and frustration about homelessness in the nation's biggest city, advocates for the homeless see the social media chronicling as more harassment than help. Organizers say they are only illustrating a pressing social problem to urge the city to solve it.
-"People thought I was picking on the homeless,-" says Ed Mullins, who heads the police sergeants' union that maintains Peek-a-booNYC, an online photo gallery of people on the streets. “My question is, ‘Well, what can you do better ’”
New York has the biggest homeless population of any US city, according to federal statistics. As of Tuesday night, there were over 57,700 homeless people in shelters, a 13 per cent increase from the same night two years ago, with possibly thousands of others on the streets.
While homelessness has declined nationwide in recent years, it has swelled in some places as rents climbed and incomes lagged, among other likely factors. Los Angeles and Hawaii both declared this fall the problem had reached a state of emergency.
New York's street-homelessness census in February found nearly 3,200 people, down 5 per cent in a year. But advocates question the count's accuracy, and other statistics suggest street homelessness is at least increasingly visible.
The city's 311 complaint system has fielded more than twice as many reports about homeless people in the first 10 months of this year as during the same period last year, and police have tallied about twice as many encounters with people unwilling to go shelters. And a recent Quinnipiac University poll found 61 percent of city voters disapprove of how Mayor de Blasio is handling poverty and homelessness.
Meanwhile, an app called WeShelter has its own approach. Tapping a button sends a small donation, averaging about 5 cents, to homeless-service agencies from corporate sponsors. It counts over 30,000 taps in roughly nine months.
“The goal here,-" co-founder Ilya Lyashevsky said, -"is to really allow people who are residents of the city to be able to act on the compassionate impulse to help.”
