The city’s ‘right to shelter’ provides a basic safety net not seen anywhere else in the country, allowing anyone who wants a shelter bed to get one (at least temporarily). But that right appears to be under siege as the city struggles to meet shelter demand amid a surge in homelessness.
If your city’s most iconic landmark bears the inscription, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” you kind of have to live up to that.
And New York City, for all its flawed interventions, inaccessible housing and deepening inequality, has one unique policy that nods to the poem at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, at least when it comes to opening the door to the “huddled masses” and “tempest-tost” homeless: The city’s “right to shelter” provides a basic safety net not seen anywhere else in the country, allowing anyone who wants a shelter bed to get one (at least temporarily, in the case of families found ineligible following an investigation.)
Now that right appears to be under siege.
A steep rise in the number of newly arrived immigrants entering the Department of Homeless Services’ (DHS) shelter system—alongside more and more New Yorkers facing eviction, displacement and domestic abuse—has sent city officials scrambling to increase shelter capacity, considering cruise ships and summer camp facilities as possible shelter sites.
Mayor Eric Adams issued a cryptic statement about the right to shelter Sept. 14.
“The city’s prior practices, which never contemplated the bussing of thousands of people into New York City, must be reassessed,” he said, following reports that the city had violated its right to shelter policy when officials failed to find beds for about 60 men at the 30th Street intake center the night before.
All told, 11,000 newly arrived immigrants have entered DHS shelters this year, though not all have stayed, city officials say. Their presence has coincided with a number of other economic and social factors fueling homelessness, including the end of statewide eviction protections, pathetic affordable housing production figures, a miniscule number of new city-financed apartments set aside for homeless New Yorkers, weakening efforts to curtail discrimination against people with rent subsidies and the ongoing transfer of families from domestic violence shelters into the strained DHS system.
After first saying that every policy, including “right to shelter,” was on the table, Adams’ team backtracked. The next day, Sept. 15, the mayor and his chief counsel Brendan McGuire told reporters they did not mean to suggest challenging the consent decrees that established the right to shelter for adults following a landmark 1979 court order in a lawsuit filed by a homeless man named Robert Callahan, and for families in the wake of a 1983 legal challenge (that case, initiated by attorney Steve Banks, who later oversaw DHS as commissioner of the Department of Social Services, was finally settled in 2008).
Instead, McGuire described in vague terms a desire to contest policies related to the right to shelter that have been codified or implemented to make life a little better for homeless New Yorkers—but more challenging for city government—since the 1979 ruling.
“We are not reassessing the right to shelter. We are reassessing the city’s practices that have developed around the right to shelter,” McGuire said, though he did not provide specifics about just what practices may need tinkering.
Adams has since given multiple interviews asserting his support for the right to shelter. And anyway, he cannot overturn it unilaterally, as past mayors have come to understand. Rudy Giuliani campaigned on capping shelter stays and ending the right to shelter ahead of his 1993 election. Michael Bloomberg tried to lock out single adults by making them…
Read More: What Would NYC Look Like Without Right to Shelter? Bleak, Say the People Who Needed It