The article makes the program sound reasonably humanitarian, while the initial description made it sound more like "dump the problem elsewhere". With the examples of homeless people who had relatives in France or Puerto Rico they could live with, but they just couldn't afford to get there, buying them plane tickets seems like an actual solution to the problem that's good for both the people in question and NYC. And it sounds like it's only done on request, not some kind of involuntary exile (compare: http://money.msn.com/now/post--columbia-sc-to-exile-its-home...).

I have no idea if the article is cherry-picking unrepresentative positive examples, though. To determine if it's solving or just shifting the problem, it'd be interesting if there were any statistics on what % of people NYC bought one-way tickets for were homeless again N months or years afterwards, vs. in a more stable situation. Admittedly it's probably quite difficult to collect reliable data on that.