Allison Wilkie testifies on shelter mistreatment and complaint gaps

Okay.

So my name is Allison Milkey.

I'm the Director of Government Affairs and Strategic Campaigns at the Coalition for the Homeless.

And thank you, Chair, for the opportunity to testify.

So as the court and city pointed monitors of the DHS shelter system, we receive and investigate complaints from shelter residents.

Our monitors are in shelters every day, and we provide services to folks in shelter.

And the experiences that we hear from residents is that shelters are chaotic, they are stressful,

and it's really a direct product of the mistreatment that they experience from staff, the lack of responsiveness from system actors to complaints, the physical conditions that folks endure, and the overall inability people have to get their needs met.

There's significant ways in which DHS is failing on all of these fronts, and I want to give you just like a quick list of some of these things and some color maybe to what we heard from DHS today.

So I think mistreatment and abuse by staff is prevalent.

We get twice as many complaints to our shelter monitoring hotline about that than we do about safety concerns.

On a daily basis, people have to interact with the lowest paid and lowest trained staff.

So in the majority of shelters, case managers and supervisors are behind locked doors.

And when people need to have their basic needs met, they're interacting with security guards and residential aides who are in.

not trained and often escalate conflict for people.

I think a second point that we see a lot is their responses to complaints and grievances being inadequate.

I think we just heard that in calendar year 25 or 26, there were over 31,000 complaints.

But under DHS's policy, if something is not considered an urgent building complaint or not considered a serious complaint, so if it falls into this other category,

It only goes to the ombudsman's office if the complaint is made from Monday through Friday from 9 to 5.

Everything happening in the evenings and weekends gets referred to 311, and DHS's policy says that 311 specifically does not tell the ombudsman's office about those complaints.

So I think 31,000, which should be a really concerning number to us, is actually a vast miscount of the complaints that people are calling about to various actors.

So just to clarify, sorry, that 31,000 number you're saying implies only complaints made to the ombudsman Monday through Friday, 9 to 5?

Yeah, for other complaints.

If they're not like urgent, serious complaints, anything that they categorize as other goes to 311 and doesn't go back to the ombudsman's office under their policy.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So I know my time is up.

I have 11 pages of written testimony that you all have in front of you.

We will read all 11 pages.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.