Contours of post-right-to-shelter world in NYC take shape in Adams’ administration

NEW YORK — A day after Mayor Eric Adams’ administration proposed criteria for suspending the city’s right-to-shelter provisions, one of his top advisers spearheading the migrant crisis suggested Wednesday that the operational strategy around such a change would involve policies already in place to manage the migrant crisis.

Some of those policies could include already instituted measures such as limiting the time single adult migrants stay in shelters to 30 days and encouraging them to “move along,” according to Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom.

Williams-Isom was responding to a question about what the city would do if a court grants its request to suspend right-to-shelter provisions, which have essentially served as law in the wake of a landmark 1981 consent decree. The decree requires that the city provide shelter to anyone who requests it within a prescribed time frame.

“Part of our case management is to help people think about what that next step would be for them, help them with their paperwork and help them to move along,” Williams-Isom said. “I don’t think there’s anyone else in the country that’s giving 30 days, 60 days — as much as we are. Most of what you see on the border is people get 24 hours, 72 hours. So we’re really trying to use that time to get people safely on their feet.”

A day earlier, the city submitted a formal request in Manhattan Supreme Court to suspend the right-to-shelter law after a state of emergency declaration and when the number of single adults seeking shelter is 50% higher than the average number of single adults seeking it over the two years preceding the emergency declaration.

The city is seeking to suspend the 1981 Callahan decree in response to the more than 120,000 asylum seekers who’ve streamed into the five boroughs since last year.

More than 60,000 of the migrants who’ve come to the city remain in its care, and the mayor has projected the crisis will cost the city $12 billion by 2025. Aside from its right-to-shelter court challenge, to address the situation his administration has set up more than 200 facilities to house migrants and adopted a policy of forcing migrants out of shelter after 60 days, a window of time the city recently truncated to 30 days due to the continued flow of people into its borders.

Adams’ chief counsel Lisa Zornberg said Wednesday that when the right-to-shelter consent decree was put in place, it wasn’t intended to be applied the way it is now.

“I’m looking at an archive of newspaper reporting. It was reported that the immediate effect was for the city to find 125 beds right away. Where was it reported that the city would find those beds? Upstate in the Catskills,” she said. “It’s just a stunning contrast to the numbers of what New York City is dealing with on a daily basis now.”

Zornberg said the intention behind the city’s criteria and the initial request to the court is to be granted “sensible relief” and to have the right-to-shelter decree applied equally throughout the state — not just to the city itself.

But advocates have pushed back.

In a virtual briefing with reporters Wednesday morning, Legal Aid Society attorney Joshua Goldfein said the formula presented by the administration to suspend right to shelter is so “poorly drafted” that it’s tough to deduce how City Hall envisions it being implemented.

“I mean, what are we going to do? We’re going to set up a counter, and then when the right numbered person crosses the line suddenly there’s no more right to shelter? That seems like not the way to operate a system that is meant to protect human beings from injury and death,” said Goldfein, who has been leading the charge in court alongside the Coalition for the Homeless in fighting against the Adams administration’s request to roll back right to shelter.

“The formula that they proposed is confusing. I’m not sure it’s operable. I think there are many ways to interpret it, and I think that’s one piece of evidence to show how thoughtless this is,” he said.

As those arguments continue to unfold, the influx of migrants has increased, in part due to continued busing of migrants by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, according to Camille Joseph Varlack, Adams’ chief of staff.

“Over the past few months, we’ve seen approximately 300 to 400 people arriving every day, and with this new surge we’re seeing upwards of 600 people a day,” said Varlack. “Last week, Texas Gov. Abbott centralized the dispatch, command and control functions of the deployment of buses through the Texas Division of Emergency Management, and he has significantly ramped up the number of buses that are being sent.”

Varlack also said that communication between Texas and the city is minimal, and that when city officials reached out for information about the flow of migrants, they were referred to a telephone for the state’s “bus information line.”

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