New York City has had a homelessness crisis for decades, but you wouldn’t know it.
Despite the New York Post bravely bearing witness every time a homeless guy pees in public, you can’t see the scale of the problem from walking around the city. Hear me out: yes, there are visibly homeless people on the street, many of whom are lovely and some of whom are unpleasant because of mental illness or just assholes (or understandably having a bad day! How would your day be going right now if you were homeless?). According to Coalition for the Homeless, 87,900 people slept in New York shelters this year, including 16,000 families.
But you don’t see crazy tent cities like you do in Los Angeles and San Francisco, because of New York state’s unique right-to-shelter law. Thanks to a 1979 lawsuit, Callahan v. Carey, the city and state are obligated to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it. Subsequent legislation ensured that families get placed in individual units.
Oh, of course the city makes the process barbarously cruel. Families have to apply at an intake center in the Bronx. They have to wait, sometimes for days, dragging their kids to the facility day in and day out and sit there for hours. They can’t bring in outside food. Imagine the DMV, but for a whole day with your three hungry, tired children, and also at stake is where you’ll all sleep at the end of the day. Near the kids’ school? Or a shelter in deep Brooklyn when your kids’ school is in the Bronx? Furthermore, the intake officers put them through and interrogation to make them prove they can’t stay anywhere else. I once talked to a woman with a newborn looking for shelter because a family member had slugged her in the face so hard she had to go to the hospital—she had to sue the fucking state to get shelter because they kept telling her to go back to her family home. The shelters, of course, are mostly disgusting: rats, filth, mold. During Covid, criminally, in some facilities, dozens of families had to share one microwave, etc. As for shelters for single men? “It’s like Rikers, but worse, because everyone has weapons,” one man told me, shivering outside on a winter day. So it’s terrible. But it could be worse.
As in many of his endeavors, Mayor Eric Adams is trying to make it worse. The city is suing to overturn right-to-shelter, citing the recent spike in asylum seekers from Latin America. They, too, are able to tap into right-to-shelter and Adams is convinced that this is why asylum seekers are flocking to New York.
“That is not why asylum speakers are coming to New York,” Joshua Goldfein, staff attorney with Legal Aid, told me. Goldfein is heading the legal opposition to Adams’ plan to have a judge end right-to-shelter. “Some, maybe. But others come because there’s just lots of opportunities to work in New York. Others have friends and family here.”
Adams could—and he will—make apocalyptic statements about how asylum seekers will lead to the ruination of New York. OR he could—and he won’t—ameliorate the so-called crisis with boring old governing that doesn’t involve Shock Doctrining the city. In addition to trying to overturn right-to-shelter, he recently announced deep cuts in the city budget.
Goldfein says the answer to the large number of asylum seekers is granting new arrivals the right to work (that’s on federal) and getting more case managers to help people get jobs and move out of shelters. Adams’ strategy won’t stop people from coming, he says. “There’d still be people coming. We need to take care of them. Otherwise, you’ll have a situation where thousands of people are sleeping on the street.”
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How we treat and react to migration is a challenge that is only going to dramatically increase in coming years. Either we find ways to take them in and make them part of our society, or we build walls scapegoat and persecute/exploit them. It's not even all foreigners. Even internal migration is going to be commonplace with climate change and extreme weather events, and we have so far completely failed to address our domestic homeless problem. It's clear what Eric Adams's strategy is, and that strategy only leads to more authoritarianism, policing and misery for average folks. And fewer libraries, apparently...