The Editorial Board: Shelters help, but affordable housing is the real answer to homelessness

Prefer us on Google A single mother and her family had to live in a filthy motel after they became homeless. Joed Viera, Buffalo News Hundreds of Erie County families without a permanent place to live are being housed in hotels and motels, not because anyone considers them suitable shelters, but because there is nowhere else for them to go. That is what Western New York's worsening housing crisis has come to. As News reporters Sandra Tan and Deidre Williams have documented, rapidly rising rents, a shortage of affordable apartments and high eviction levels have pushed more families into homelessness. With too few shelter beds available, Erie County has been forced to use hotels as de facto family shelters. In Erie County, residents without a permanent place to live have quadrupled over the past decade. We examined how we got here, who is affected and why solutions remain elusive. The reporting laid out the numbers: Erie County relies on nine homeless shelters in Buffalo, but those shelters cannot accommodate the rising number of residents without a place to live. The county therefore has contracts or room-availability agreements with 18 hotels and motels in Erie County and placement agreements with four more in Niagara Falls. Only one of the Erie County hotels is in Buffalo. The consequences are felt across urban and suburban communities alike. Evictions are common in Buffalo, Amherst, Cheektowaga, the Town of Tonawanda and Hamburg. Families lose their housing; neighborhoods and businesses contend with the effects of emergency hotel placements; and elected officials hear complaints from all sides. There is no cheap or easy fix. Erie County is seeing record cases of homelessness. The reasons are complex. Here are five charts that offer an at-a-glance understanding of the crisis. Hotels are an emergency pressure-release valve, not a housing policy. Erie County has become dependent on them because Western New York hasn't built enough affordable housing or enough appropriate family shelter capacity – and communities cannot continue demanding that homelessness disappear while rejecting the facilities needed to house people.