Mayor Suspends Some ‘Right to Shelter’ Rules in Scramble to House Asylum Seekers
When Wanda, a 21-year-old Venezuelan, arrived at LaGuardia Airport by way of Brownsville, Texas, earlier this month, she approached a police officer and told him: “I’m looking for a shelter.”
She was eventually directed to the NYPD’s former police academy building in Manhattan, one of the most recent sites the city has tapped to house asylum seekers, and an apparent violation of longstanding “right to shelter” policies prohibiting the city from sheltering minors in congregate facilities. Last week, Mayor Adams issued an executive order to suspend some of those rules, citing the ongoing migrant crisis that's left officials scrambling to open emergency shelter sites.
“Our desire’s not to put children and families in dormitory settings—our desire is to manage a humanitarian crisis,” Adams said.
But housing and homelessness advocates say the change undermines the city’s social safety net and protections to ensure safe conditions in shelters, and could lead the city to “regularly placing homeless families with children in congregate settings, a dangerous and widely condemned practice of the distant past.”
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