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Article snippet: Under pressure to shelter close to 58,000 homeless people on a daily basis, New York City has been paying widely varying rates to shelter providers and, until recently, had no set procedure for determining how much to pay, according to a new audit. The state comptroller’s office could not determine whether the city is paying reasonable rates for nearly 750 shelters that have cost the city more than $1.1 billion annually, according to the audit, which looked at a sampling of contracts over a four-year period. Examining 23 new contracts for shelters, auditors concluded that shelter providers named their own prices with little pushback from the Department of Homeless Services. The rates charged by two comparable shelters might differ by as much as $225 per person per day, according to the audit. The city’s shelter system is a patchwork fashioned out of emergency and necessity, and it has failed to keep up with new demands that emerged, particularly after a rental assistance program was cut in 2011. The city must house every eligible person who seeks help, and there is a daily scramble to shelter thousands. As people flooded into shelters in recent years, the city did not increase the shelter system’s physical capacity, relying instead on renting hotel rooms and so-called cluster apartments as a short-term solution. That might have seemed cheaper than building and maintaining new shelters, but it now appears shortsighted. The city also did not adequately modernize th... Link to the full article to read more