City to train 18,000 NYC employees how to get homeless off the streets using 311 app Posted Nov 14, 2019 Homeless Shelters Staten Island Advance A person who appears to be homeless camps out just inside the entrance to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal in St. George. (Staten Island Advance/Bill Lyons) By Sydney Kashiwagi | skashiwagi@siadvance.com CITY HALL -- The de Blasio administration will train 18,000 city employees in using a 311 app to request help from social services workers when they see homeless individuals across the five boroughs in an effort to get them off the streets. The new initiative, known as Outreach NYC, comes after a homeless man bludgeoned four other homeless individuals to death in Chinatown in October. As part of the new effort, the city will train city employees from the Department of Sanitation, Health Department, Fire Department, Department of Buildings and the Parks Department in how to use the app to submit service requests when they see street homeless individuals. Those service requests will then be routed to the city’s newly created Joint Command Center, which was announced earlier this year and managed by the Department of Homeless Services and the NYPD. Staff from those agencies will then look at trends and send multi-agency responses when needed to provide assistance to high-need individuals. The new initiative comes as a 200-family homeless shelter is set to open across the street from Tompkinsville Park next year. The shelter is slated to bring as many as 500 mostly women and children tenants. “We’ve made significant progress in addressing our city’s homelessness crisis under Turning the Tide—and with Outreach NYC, we’re announcing new steps to take that progress even further,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “We cannot attempt to address this issue in a vacuum. It’s time we all wear one uniform. Outreach NYC is our all-hands-on-deck approach to bring even more people in off the streets.” The city is also in the process of hiring 180 more outreach workers, which will increase the number of outreach workers to more than 550 -- triple the number of staff that conducted outreach at the start of the de Blasio administration. Outreach staff canvass the city’s streets daily and have regular contact with homeless New Yorkers and encourage them to accept services and get off the streets. FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER.