By Lee A. Daniels

A two-year-long program just begun by New York City’s agency for the homeless to test how good its services are has provoked harsh criticism because it appears to arbitrarily deny help to some needy families.

The effort is part of the city Department of Homeless Services’ “Homebase” program whose specific purpose is to help homeless families. The experiment involves 400 families whose financial situation has deteriorated so badly they are nearly destitute and had applied to the agency this summer for help.

City officials split the group in half: 200 of the families, chosen randomly, are getting help in paying their rent, and receiving job training and other forms of assistance. The other 200 got no help from department officials, just a list of 11 nonprofit private agencies that help the homeless which they can contact on their own.

According to the New York Daily News, which broke the story, department officials will track the activities of both groups of families through their Social Security numbers to gauge how well each group and individual families cope with their situations.

City officials defended the experiment’s value as an important way to determine how well the $23-million Homebase program was fulfilling its mission and how it matched up against private relief efforts. The Homebase program as a whole served 7,700 families last year. According to the Department of Homeless Services’ “daily census” of the homeless population it serves in all its programs, on September 28 there were a total of 35,490 individuals being sheltered by the city. That included 8,024 families with children in its shelter across the city, 1,321 families without children and 8,205 individuals.

Friday an agency spokeswoman released a statement to TheDefendersOnline.com from Seth Diamond, the department’s commissioner.

It stated: “Homeless Services firmly believes that New Yorkers who are in a housing crisis are best served by prevention efforts which allow them to remain in their own homes and communities. Evaluating Homebase will allow the City to build upon aspects of the program that are working and improve upon services which are not. This study represents the gold standard of research and the highest form of government accountability. It is outrageous and misinformed to suggest that individuals who cannot access Homebase at this time are being denied existing government and community prevention services.”

But city council members and advocates for the homeless sharply criticized the agency’s approach. Patrick Markee, a senior analyst with the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless, said “These are real parents and children, not rats in a lab experiment.” Several elected city officials called it cruel and heartless.

The always contentious issue of how best to help individuals and families who are homeless and prevent more from becoming homeless has intensified as federal and private studies have shown homelessness increasing in the wake of the Great Recession. As the economic crisis raged from 2007 to 2009, the number of families seeking respite in homeless shelters soared from 131,000 to 170,000, according to a recent report of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The report, which laid out the Obama administration’s plans to reduce homelessness, determined that on any given night in 2009, 643,067 people were homeless in the U.S. – more than one-third of them were families — and that over the course of the year 1.5 million people used emergency shelters or transitional housing programs. African Americans account for a disproportionate share of the homeless in America. They are little more than 12 percent of the total U.S. population, but account for 39 percent of the homeless shelter population.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.