Housing Boss Earns $1 Million to Run Shelters Despite a Troubled Past

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

56% : Last month, as The Times asked questions about CORE, the Department of Social Services instructed the nonprofit to close the for-profit companies and fold the services into the charity.
51% : Mr. McGinn, the spokesman for the Department of Social Services, said the agency was unaware of Mr. Finkelstein's ownership of the buildings, which he said appeared to be a conflict of interest.
51% : In response to questions from The Times about Mr. Brown's history, officials with the city Department of Social Services said the agency was unaware of some aspects of his background when he applied to run shelters, blaming a "haphazard" contracting system that the de Blasio administration had inherited.
51% : Mr. McGinn, with the Department of Social Services, said that the agency had not been aware that Mr. Brown's family members were working for the nonprofit group.
50% : For more than a year, the Department of Social Services has refused to release the locations of shelters and the names of the groups that operate them.
49% : But when problems do arise, the city prefers to work "collaboratively" with troubled nonprofits, rather than cut off funding and disrupt services, said Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the Department of Social Services, which oversees city shelters.
42% : In interviews, five current and former officials with the city Department of Social Services, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters, said the city is loath to closely scrutinize the finances of nonprofit groups because it is so reliant on them to deal with the explosion in the homeless population.
41% : A former board member of another homelessness organization is under criminal investigation after the city said the group paid millions of dollars to a web of for-profit entities he secretly oversaw.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.