Councilor calls for youth homelessness commission

City Councilor Annissa Essaibi-George is proposing a commission to take on youth and family homelessness, which she says is on the rise.

Essaibi-George, an at-large councilor who chairs the body’s committee on homelessness, said the number of homeless children in Boston has risen from about 3,500 a couple of years ago to 5,000 now.

“There are more and more people as part of a family experiencing homelessness,” she told the Herald.

Essaibi-George plans on introducing a ordinance at Wednesday’s city council meeting that would create a commission of city and state officials, including the homelessness chair, the mayor, the governor, the city and state chiefs of health and housing, the school district superintendent, several people involved with service providers and three people who actually have been homeless.

The ordinance would charge the commission with creating a plan for addressing these youth homelessness issues and producing a twice-annual report about what’s going on.

“The power that it has is the people at the table,” Essaibi-George said.

She said it should move forward with the work of what the “homelessness roundtable” including various officials that she put together has focused on, including improving data collection, focusing on affordable housing, cordinanting services and figuring out what any potential solutions will cost.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2BUpuYZ