The College Perspective by Lindsey

In New York, the homeless situation is becoming more and more of a crisis, and recently the mayor decided to put Steven Banks in charge of fixing it, a man who has long been an advocate for changing the homeless policies and procedures currently in place. For years, officials have been putting homeless people in hotel rooms when they can, without leaving the family any way to cook for themselves. In fact, cooking isn’t deemed essential by many of these officials for these families to thrive.  Meanwhile, children of these homeless families are missing large amounts of school so that their parents can show proof of having kids for these housing committees to accept them.

Besides these problems, community members are pushing back against housing homeless people in nearby hotels as it raises the crime rates and makes people feel unsafe, while hotel owners often consider selling their buildings for the conversion of entire hotels into homeless shelters as a simple way to make money, but often back out after community backlash. Banks, who has long been against the process of converting these hotels, saying they aren’t a permanent solution for the homeless, is stuck doing the same things officials before him have done. Homeless people are still being put in hotels, and he says that there have been more problems than he anticipated, so conditions have remained the same as of yet.

I believe this story is newsworthy because the homeless situation has been growing for years in New York as well as many other large cities across the country, and help has been slow to help this demographic. This story brings to light the many struggles that face administrators as they try to come up with solutions to help everybody. I think the lead itself is very vague, the author could have included something about how Banks has failed to fix anything so far, but they go on to explain more in the following two paragraphs.

The audience seems to be the general public, especially those who live in New York who might live in the area discussed in the article. I think the article isn’t really biased, it’s just pointing out how Banks got to be in this situation where people who once supported him are angry at him. Overall, I think the article was very well written and gave a lot of background information about the homeless situation that might not have been obvious to the general public. They could have included more about what others in the administration plan to do about the homeless situation or what solutions they are looking into as well, however.

The link to the original story can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/nyregion/steven-banks-was-hired-to-stem-new-yorks-homelessness-crisis-it-didnt-happen.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0