City Councilman Erik Bottcher plans to introduce a bill Thursday that would require the city to pay for mental health clinicians at homeless shelters that serve parents and children.
The bill — which was hammered out by Bottcher with the help of Win, the largest shelter provider for homeless families in the city — aims to give families on-site access to mental health workers, as opposed to referring them to clinicians who aren’t based in the shelter.
Bottcher, a Democrat who represents Chelsea and the West Village, said the primary rationale behind the bill is to eliminate barriers to mental health care for people who are already overburdened.
“Mothers in the shelter system must balance their family’s immediate needs — like getting their kids to school and putting food on the table — with longer-term priorities like obtaining mental health care,” Bottcher said. “Mental health clinics’ long wait times and operating hours that fail to accommodate their schedules further increase roadblocks to appropriate care. Our bill will reduce barriers to care, improve outcomes for families, and support families with children experiencing homelessness.”
The head of Win, Christine Quinn, once represented the same Council district that Bottcher now holds. She said that because there’s currently no requirement on the books to provide mental health workers at family shelters, mothers are forced to seek help outside of shelters after getting a referral from a social worker or case manager.
That’s a problem for several reasons, she said, and pointed to long waits, an inability to assess family dynamics off-site and the fact that families often don’t take advantage of services offered away from where they’re being housed.
“If we want to really end family homelessness, if we want to do that, we need to address the mental health crisis in family homelessness,” she said. “Otherwise, people will leave shelter, get an apartment and destabilize — or be overwhelmed by the new responsibilities that they have. And we don’t want that to happen.”
To drive home her point, Quinn pointed out that the primary indicator of whether a child will be homeless as an adult is if they were homeless as a child.
She estimated that funding the new requirement she and Bottcher are seeking would cost the city approximately $40 million annually. That, she added, would translate into about one mental health worker per 50 families currently being housed in homeless shelters.
