Q&A
Council member inquires about impact of street sweeps on homeless veterans
1:38:09
·
81 sec
Council Member Robert Holden inquires about the frequency and impact of street sweeps on homeless veterans, particularly regarding the loss of important documents. Eric Lee from VOA-GNY provides detailed information on the process and its consequences.
- Street sweeps occur regularly, conducted by various city departments, sometimes with or without advance notice.
- Important documents of homeless individuals can be lost during these sweeps, setting back the work of caseworkers.
- The process of recovering lost documents can take weeks or months, prolonging the experience of homelessness for affected individuals.
Robert Holden
1:38:09
Can I just ask you a question while I'm on this?
1:38:13
The street sweeps that you see, does that happen quite often where all the materials are thrown out?
1:38:19
Or or and what what
Eric Lee
1:38:21
It does it
Robert Holden
1:38:22
does happen.
1:38:22
What do you have to do then after that, to catch up?
Eric Lee
1:38:25
It it happens.
1:38:27
I I I wanna say it's a regular process which the city does either through NYPD, Parks Department, Sanitation, and in conjunction with the Department of Homeless Services outreach teams.
1:38:38
But they could also do them separately.
1:38:40
So they might not have DHS outreach there.
1:38:42
They may just have sanitation.
1:38:44
It can happen in a couple different ways where it could be an urgent cleanup if there's, like, a health and safety concern, or they could give more advanced notice where it's they post a sign and say that we will do a cleanup in the coming days weeks to try to give the people their time to gather their belongings and move on or find somewhere else to come inside.
1:39:03
But the challenge with that is is that when people start cleaning up things, important documents can be thrown out.
1:39:09
Even if the person is saying, please don't throw that out and the sanitation worker is not a caseworker, he's going to pick everything up and just put it in the garbage truck.
1:39:18
So it does lose ground then because then caseworkers working with the client need to either apply
Robert Holden
1:39:23
Start again.
1:39:24
And, yeah, it takes, it might take weeks or months even.
James Hendon
1:39:27
Yeah.
Robert Holden
1:39:28
Yeah.
1:39:29
Thank you.
1:39:29
Thank you so much.
Eric Lee
1:39:30
Yep.
1:39:30
Thank you.
