NEW YORK, NY March 24, 2004 — After two decades of housing homeless people in emergency hotel rooms with no formal contracts, the City's homeless commissioner says the agency is in active negotiations with hotel owners to end the system of "handshake hotels." WNYC's Andrea Bernstein reports.

The promise came last October.

Bloomberg: We reached the conclusion that it is time to regularize our relationship with these providers and bring order, transparency and accountability to a system that for too long has been defined by crisis.

The relationship Mayor Bloomberg was referring to is with providers of emergency hotel rooms and apartments for the homeless. When he spoke last fall, the Mayor offered few details of how the plan would be impleted.

But yesterday, homeless services commissioner Linda Gibbs filled in the blanks.

Gibbs: We are engaging in negotiations right now with three hotels to convert to a Tier 2 contracted facility. What I believe is once we are able to successfully do this that the remainder of the hotel operators will have a model that can follow suit.

Gibbs also said the department is phasing out the so called scatter-site apartment program, loudly criticized for providing shoddy apartments at a cost of up to $3000 a month. She said some 323 units were off line, and the department was moving some 500 other ones into a new program, with contracts. City Council member Bill De Blasio, who was conducting the budget hearings, hasn't always had an easy relationship with homeless services. So yesterday he struggledfor words.

De Blasio: Um Look I'm obviously very pleased by some of the progress you relate here some of it is particularly straightforward and numerical and you deserve a lot of praise for how much you've been able to get done.

De Blasio did express frustration earlier, when the Human Resources Commissioner, Verna Eggleston, testified. Eggleston's agency provides hotel rooms for people with AIDS. Although HRA provides housing independently of DHS, it works with many of the same providers, even using the same hotels. But Eggleston wouldn't discuss HER agency's efforts to negotiate contracts. And she said she was moving independently to lower prices. De Blasio asked Eggleston if that would hurt the department of Homeless services negotiations.

I'm saying constant and continuous meetings here at city hall.

De Blasio says the agencies will be pressed further in another round of hearings later this spring. For WNYC, I'm Andrea Bernstein.