49°
The controversial Special One Time Assistance program, known as SOTA, has already spurred legislation in Newark as well as a federal lawsuit. Newark officials have also found that SOTA clients ended up in decrepit housing, including in homes without heat.
"Newark is concerned about the living conditions of perhaps one thousand or more SOTA recipients," the lawsuit says. "From the small sample of SOTA recipients that Newark was able to identify, Newark has become aware of families, including those with infants, that are living in uninhabitable conditions. This includes issues with lack of heat, electricity, excessive vermin, and dangerous living conditions."
Other receiving communities in Essex County, including Irvington, Orange, and East Orange, have also reported similar problems with SOTA.
And officials in Union County -- where SOTA clients have also been located -- are also considering a number of avenues to end the program, including, like Newark, legal action.
"The SOTA program was designed to help New York families break the cycle of homelessness and set them on a path to achieve stable, affordable housing," Margaret Garnett, commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, told WABC.
Instead, because of a lack of proper oversight and poorly designed paperwork, our investigation showed some SOTA families placed in housing outside of New York City were living in squalor under the roofs of unscrupulous landlords, who collected tens of thousands of dollars in rental payments upfront from the city to provide these subpar conditions with little risk of accountability for their actions."
Click here to follow Daily Voice Newark and receive free news updates.
