NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) — The suspension of New York City's legal agreement guaranteeing a "right to shelter" could lead to an increase in street encampments, experts warned after the city asked a court last week to suspend the requirement.
Experts are examining cities like Los Angeles and Washington that lack a shelter mandate, leading to a visible increase in street homelessness.
Advocates have noted a surge in street tents in cities without shelter rights. “The homeless people will not disappear,” Christine Quinn, the Democratic former City Council speaker, told the Daily News. “Look at Los Angeles.”
Currently, over 100,000 people are homeless in New York City, according to the NYC Homeless Outreach Population Estimate.
“The majority of New York’s are sheltered,” Eric Tars, senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the Daily News. “The majority of Los Angeles’ are unsheltered. If you weaken or remove that right to shelter altogether then what we can expect to see is encampments on the scale of Skid Row in Los Angeles emerging in New York.”
In 1990, Washington, D.C., echoing New York City's current stance, withdrew a program aimed at sheltering its 5,000 homeless due to budgetary constraints.
Despite earlier broad support, the City Council reduced this provision. The policy was opposed by Mayor Marion Barry, and eventually, D.C. residents voted against the shelter rule.
After this decision, the city continued to grapple with its homeless crisis. “Life for homeless Washingtonians worsened,” Maria Foscarinis, a Columbia University Law School lecturer who founded the National Homelessness Law Center in Washington in 1989, told the Daily News. “There were more people on the street. The city almost immediately began closing shelters.”
The change in D.C.’s policy didn't lower its homeless numbers. While its homeless rate remains lower than New York City's, D.C.'s homelessness is more visible with tent camps evident throughout the city.
New York City officials are now seeking a change to the 40-year-old Callahan decree amidst a rising migrant count and filed the change last week on Oct. 4.
“With more than 122,700 asylum seekers having come through our intake system since the spring of 2022, and projected costs of over $12 billion for three years, it is abundantly clear that the status quo cannot continue,” Adams said last week.
It also wants to be exempt from offering shelter to single adults when the governor has “declared a state of emergency” and when “the daily number of single adults seeking shelter is at least 50% greater than the daily number of single adults seeking shelter before the declared state of emergency.”
Introduced in 1981, the decree allowed shelter rights for New York City's homeless, later extending to women and families. The new legal proposal seeks to impact all homeless single adults, not just newly arrived migrants, pending a judge's approval.
“If successful, the City would have the ability to declare an emergency, and effectively end the Right to Shelter for thousands of New Yorkers – including working poor individuals who rely on the shelter system and, alarmingly, individuals who rely on disability benefits,” the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said.
To manage the crisis, New York City has opened over 210 emergency facilities, allocating more than $2 billion in the past year.
Approximately 10,000 asylum seekers continue to pour into the city every month.