Posted on 09/13/2011 6:57:53 PM PDT by SmithL
The city can stop paying rent subsidies for more than 16,000 formerly homeless families after losing state backing for the initiative, a judge ruled Tuesday in a case that advocates have said could make thousands of people homeless again.
While the Advantage program has valuable aims, the city was within its rights to cancel it, Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Judith J. Gische said.
New York City officials "have no ongoing obligation, contractual or otherwise, to continue the Advantage program," she wrote.
An appeals court had ordered the city to keep paying the assistance while the legal fight played out. Steven Banks, chief attorney for the Legal Aid Society, which sued the city on behalf of Advantage recipients, noted that the order still stands, at least for now. The city could take further legal action to get the order voided.
The city's chief lawyer, Michael A. Cardozo, and City Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond praised Gische's decision. It came after a five-day civil trial this summer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
This is not right. Once on the program, always on the program.
Simply, “WOW!”
You mean the government is not OBLIGATED to pay peoples rent and utilities? I am going to forward this to Presidebt Obama; maybe, not likely, but maybe he will get a clue!!!
And each and every homeless family seems to live on my block - an eastside middle-class neighborhood that has been brought low by the variety of lunatic asylums (Bellevue) and methadone clinics (how very 1970s!) that line First and York Avenues.
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I think Thomas Sowell describes them best: parasites ... with rights of course!
This is exactly why the government i.e. taxpayers should be slow to incur public expenditures. Once it goes into law, somehow it becomes carved in stone with good-for-nothing special interests ready to squeeze every last dollar out of the taxpayers to fund the programs. Sheltering the homeless is a laudable goal, but it is also true that the taxpayers are not obligated to do so. If this is more important than other expenditures, it gets funded; and if not, it does not, plain and simple.
We do this with our personal budgets all the time, why can’t the elected officials do it with our tax dollars?
This is exactly why the government i.e. taxpayers should be slow to incur public expenditures.
Once it goes into law, somehow it becomes carved in stone as an absolute entitlement which cannot be done away with. And are entrenched groups fighting the taxpayers to perpetuate these programs, thus creating a class of people forever dependent on handouts from the productive citizenry. Sheltering the homeless is a laudable goal, but it is also true that the taxpayers are not obligated to do so. The highest priority ideas ought to be funded, and the rest left for private citizens to do out of their own volition using private charities.
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