On a very cold, sleety Wednesday in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams said migrants aren’t covered by the city's right to shelter laws. The law requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who seeks it and can prove they need it.
“We don’t believe asylum seekers fall into the whole right to shelter conversation,” the mayor said on a radio show. “This is a crisis that must be addressed based on what was created on this national platform.”
The “right to shelter isn’t” perfect. There’s an entire bureaucracy in place to prove that families do not, in fact, need shelter. Families with little kids get rejected and told to go stay with relatives, even if they claim abuse or say their relatives aren’t willing to take them in.
Still, it’s basically the reason you don’t see babies sleeping on the street like in some fucking Charles Dickens’ book. While there are plenty of unhoused individuals in the city who live on the streets, most unhoused families go into family shelters, which, unlike shelters for individuals, offer individual rooms. Nevertheless, the shelters are disgusting. I’ve interviewed dozens of parents and I guarantee only people with no realistic options besides the street would stay in them, unless they love cohabitating with rats.
Boy is Adams determined to make Bill de Blasio look like a genius Saint in comparison. Advocates for the homeless—that is, any who didn’t rage-die during the Bloomberg administration—blasted the Mayor.
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