Half of the people in the city's Homebase program who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted are being denied assistance from the program for two years as part of a study by the city's Department of Homeless Services, according to a front page article in today's edition of The New York Times by Cara Buckley.

The article said that researchers will track the test subjects "to see if they end up homeless."

Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer said that the city "should immediately stop this experiment," adding that "the city shouldn't be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable," the article said.

"As controversial as the experiment has become," the article continued, 'New York City is among a number of governments, philanthropies and research groups turning to so-called randomized controlled trials to evaluate social welfare programs."

The New York study, the article said, "involves monitoring 400 households that sought Homebase help between June and August" and "two hundred were given the program's services, and 200 were not." "Those denied help by Homebase were given the names of other agencies - among them H.R.A. Job Centers, Housing Court Answers and Eviction Intervention Services - from which they could seek assistance," the article said.

"Advocates for the homeless said they were puzzled about why the trial was necessary, the article noted, "since the city proclaimed the Homebase program as 'highly successful' in the September 2010 Mayor's Management Report, saying that over 90 percent of families that receive help from Homebase did not end up in homeless shelters."

City Councilwoman Annabel Palma, who is holding a General Welfare Committee hearing today on the program, told The Times she does not "think homeless people in our time, or at any time, should be treated like lab rats."

Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Homeless Services Department, said that the department "had to cut $20 million from its budget in November, and federal stimulus money for Homebase will end in July 2012," the article said. He said that "when you're making decisions about millions of dollars and thousands of people's lives, you have to do this on data, and that is what this is about."

The department is paying $577,00 for the study, which is being administered by the City University of New York and Abt Associates, a research firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the article said that "the firm's institutional review board concluded that the study was ethical for several reasons...because it was not an entitlement, meaning it was not available to everyone; because it could not serve all of the people who applied for it; and because the control group had access to other services. Furthermore, an Abt spokespersons said that such tests offered the "most compelling evidence" about how well a program worked.

In a separate article in the same edition by Javier C. Hernandez, advocates of the homeless say that the city has exaggerated its success with a program called Advantage and ignored data showing that more than a third of the families who enroll in the program end up applying for shelter.