The Homeless Residents of New York Are Getting Taxpayer Funded Flights

Apparently New York City has been distributing its homeless population across the United States without telling the cities receiving them that they’re coming; it’s part of a program launched in 2017 to help get the homeless back on their feet but has instead backfired as they return to the city they left.

Since August 2017, 373 cities around the United States have received homeless transplants from New York City—and none of those cities knew it was happening. The moves are part of a program in New York called the Special One-Time Assistance Program (SOTA). Each homeless family receives a full year of rent, a furnishings allowance, and free transportation to the city and state they’re being moved to. New York’s taxpayers have been covering the cost.

The plan seems to have backfired, though. After that year of paid rent is up, the residents have a tendency to move back to New York—and in some cases are suing the city for abandoning them in conditions that are considered barely livable.

“We were initially seeing a lot of complaints about conditions,” Jacquelyn Simone, policy analyst at Coalition for the Homeless, told the New York Post. “Now that the program has been in operation long enough that the SOTA subsidy is expiring, one of our main concerns is it might not be realistic for people to be entirely self-sufficient after that first year.”

Mayors across the country are routinely baffled when reporters call about this asking for interviews; no one knew the homeless families had been relocated to their towns.

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