[Mayor Eric Adams has suggested that New York’s response to
Governor Greg Abbott’s busing of migrants into the city include
rethinking its “right to shelter” law. But the solution to the
homelessness crisis is in strengthening housing laws, not eroding
them.]
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ERIC ADAMS CAN’T BE ALLOWED TO SCRAP NEW YORK’S RIGHT TO SHELTER
 
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Craig Hughes
September 20, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Mayor Eric Adams has suggested that New York’s response to
Governor Greg Abbott’s busing of migrants into the city include
rethinking its “right to shelter” law. But the solution to the
homelessness crisis is in strengthening housing laws, not eroding
them. _

Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a news conference in New York on
August 3, 2022., Michael Nagle / Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

New York City mayor Eric Adams ignited a firestorm last week when, in
the wake of the arrival of thousands of migrants to the city bused in
by Republican governor Greg Abbott, he called for
[[link removed]] New
York’s shelter policies — including its “right to shelter”
that established a legal right for all New Yorkers to have a bed to
sleep in — to be “reassessed.” His statement followed a report
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that his officials failed to offer shelter beds to at least sixty
individuals on a single night.

What was meant by a “reassessment” remains unclear. At a press
conference on September 15, the city’s chief attorney stated that
the influx of migrants and refugees from Central and South America
required reassessing not the right to shelter, but the specific
policies and practices the city has in place to comply with that
right. And Adams himself seems to have backed
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off
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his initial call. Still, it appears the city’s legal right to
shelter may be in jeopardy.

Adams’s initial announcement marked the latest in his continuation
of right-leaning municipal policies, coming after months of vicious
sweeps
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targeting homeless people in public places
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of hotels offering private rooms to disabled homeless individuals, and
austerity measures
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that have left housing and homelessness agencies without adequate
staffing to find people stable housing.

Adams’s policies are rolling back critical wins established
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during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings. The aim is to narrow the
right to shelter, paired with increased enforcement of “broken
windows
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policing sweep operations, reestablishing the primacy of the police,
and policing in New Yorkers’ everyday life.

Adams’s first year in office is characterized by putting new spin on
old ideas. Former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio imposed broken
windows policing relentlessly
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prior to the 2020 uprisings, despite its widespread discrediting and
association with abusive policing. And there is nothing new about
denying shelter to homeless individuals and families: de Blasio
rejected
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families applying for shelter space at unprecedented rates. What we
are seeing is not fundamentally new — but there are some changes in
the direction of eroding fundamental housing rights that matter.

Creating a Crisis

The Adams administration’s initial comments about a right to shelter
were made as hundreds of people seeking asylum are now arriving each
week on buses
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from Texas at the direction of Governor Greg Abbott, a rabidly
right-wing politician seeking political opportunity in his shuttling
of migrants — without
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their informed consent — to blue states and cities in order to score
points with his base as he runs a November reelection. In the spring
of 2022
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he cruelly began transporting migrants from Texas to Washington, DC.

Abbott’s heartless actions have no doubt aided in stretching the
existing resources of New York’s shelter systems, though the
Homeless Services shelters are still far below their 2019 peak
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While Mayor Adams has coordinated some resources
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for newly arriving asylum seekers, many find themselves stuck in a
shelter maze, given moldy food
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and little direction or support. Or much worse: on Sunday a woman who
had been separated from her husband at the border committed suicide
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in a Queens shelter.

But rather than meet Abbott’s vicious stunt with adequate resources
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and prioritizing strategies
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focused on moving people into housing to help open capacity, Adams has
responded to the influx by targeting a key right for the homeless.

As officials with New York’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS)
sought to manage increasing numbers of people showing up for aid, in
late July, they tried to hide
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that multiple families were being left to sleep overnight on the floor
of a city intake center. Unexpectedly, on July 21, Mayor Adams held a
press conference
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condemning the inhumane practices of Texas’s and Arizona’s
governors (though to date there is no evidence Arizona’s government
sent people to New York). Homeless Services officials continued to
scramble for beds as the politically sensitive DHS shelter census
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rapidly rising.

Homeless advocates argued it was unlikely that migrants made up the
majority of new entrants to the city shelters. _Politico_ reported
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Sunday that even among the eleven thousand migrants that have entered
the New York City shelter system since May, only twenty-five hundred
of them have come from buses sent by Abbott.

A growing eviction crisis
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following the lifting of an eviction moratorium in January 2022 has
been looming, and there are routine increases in families applying for
shelter each summer. For months, the Adams administration had been
criticized for failing to rehouse homeless people with unnecessary
bureaucratic obstacles
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to housing aid and a lack of commitment to confronting pervasive
discrimination
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by landlords and brokers against those with rental vouchers. The
municipal “right to counsel,” which guarantees tenants have access
to an attorney during eviction proceedings, is faltering
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with the increased volume of cases in housing court.

Some argued that Adams’s choice in July to focus on asylum seekers
as the cause of the homelessness crisis functioned as a way to divert
attention from his administration’s failure to meet their legal
obligations, while amounting to a dare
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to Governor Abbott: send more migrants to New York. The decision had
the impact of catapulting Adams — who is currently courting
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the Democratic National Committee to hold their next convention in New
York City — into a political fight on the national stage with one of
the country’s most powerful right-wing governors.

Two months later, the Adams administration’s plans to tinker with
the right to shelter have raised questions about their strategic use
of a crisis for regressive policy objectives. Last week, they
announced a task force
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to examine flexibility in complying with the right to shelter.

Everything Old Is New Again

Most of what the Adams administration has done about homelessness
during its eight months in office is not new. Some things, however,
are different, including the rhetoric used by Adams and his officials
to discuss homelessness, the expanded role of police in sweeps, and
the renewed focus on tightening sheltering policy.

New York’s right to shelter dates back to a 1981 consent decree,
[[link removed]]
which affirmed that the New York State constitution required that the
government provide shelter for destitute individuals. Separate
litigation
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required that families deemed “eligible” be temporarily housed.
Both mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg moved to narrow or
eliminate
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the right.

While former mayor de Blasio did not move to end the right to shelter,
he did make it much harder for families to get approved after
assessments and sought to impose
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additional standards of “personal responsibility” on homeless
individuals. By the end of the de Blasio years, families with children
arriving at the Homeless Services intake center were being rejected
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at historically unprecedented rates, forcing three out of four
applicant families to reapply. Others exited the system entirely after
their applications were denied following months of invasive
investigative processes.

Police sweeps have also been a part of homeless policy in New York
dating back to at least Mayor Ed Koch in the early 1980s. But during
de Blasio’s years in office, sweeps increased
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every year, reaching more than six thousand in 2021. The Department of
Social Services arranged and coordinated sweeps, their outreach teams
conducted
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surveillance
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of “encampments” and homeless individuals for
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the city, and they flanked the New York Police Department (NYPD) and
Department of Sanitation teams who tossed homeless people’s
belongings during sweeps. As a result, some homeless people came to
refer to them simply as the “outreach police,” which decimated any
chance of a trusting relationship.

Early on, Mayor Adams said his plans for unsheltered homelessness
would mirror those of previous administrations’ but with renewed
emphasis on the role of the police. His “Subway Safety Plan
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called for heightened police enforcement of petty crimes, creating an
“omnipresence” of police in the city train system where many
unsheltered homeless people take refuge. Now, homeless people would
either accept shelter or find themselves evicted from the subway cars.
There would be zero tolerance for stretching out on the trains, and
people would be forced off at “end of line
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stops across the system.

In the future, there would be more specialized beds, according to the
plan. But for now, people needed to leave the trains. They could
accept a traditional shelter bed or they could disappear. Staying
wasn’t an option.

Meanwhile, in March 2022, Adams launched an above-ground
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encampment clearance initiative. Following the legacy of de Blasio’s
sweep blitz of 2021, teams of sanitation crews, homeless outreach
workers, and cops dismantled encampments and forced people to move.
Since then, more than fourteen hundred sweeps have been conducted;
less than one hundred people
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caught in the sweeps have accepted shelter.

In August, Mayor Adams formally put the NYPD in charge of his
encampment sweeps, while keeping municipal outreach teams as a key
part of the process of moving homeless people from sight. Adams’s
decision to place the NYPD in charge of sweeps is likely only to
increase the use of criminality to move people out of sight.

The impacts of the Subway Safety Initiative are also becoming clear.
According to an administration report, summonses for “quality of
life
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issues — the core of broken windows enforcement — are trending
upward toward where they were in pre-pandemic years under de Blasio,
increasing by nearly ten thousand since last fiscal year, and transit
summonses have increased by 68 percent since fiscal year 2021. In a
bewildering August 30 announcement, Mayor Adams declared he had won
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his battle to end homelessness in the subways, though many homeless
people, finding the municipal shelters too dangerous, still seek
shelter in the trains.

Fighting Back

Since his sweep initiative was announced, Mayor Adams has faced
significant resistance
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primarily led by homeless people working alongside mutual aid groups
in a number of high-profile defense efforts against the sweeps in
Lower Manhattan earlier this year. Similarly, mutual aid groups
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have been key in both supporting migrants and meeting their immediate
needs, as well as pushing back against the mayor’s response.

If Adams continues moving to loosen his obligations under the right to
shelter, it’s plausible that a purely legal strategy to defend that
right will meet its limits. This is particularly frightening because
there is not a grassroots effort to maintain the right to shelter —
an absence which the Adams administration is likely aware of. Up to
this point, only the political right
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has bluntly called for ending the right to shelter entirely, but
it’s conceivable that a wider range of New Yorkers will find
sympathy with the demand.

Many have, correctly, argued that we need a “right to housing.”
Such a right requires housing’s de-commodification and an end to
evictions entirely, which is a question of organizing a mass movement
and developing working-class power to those ends. The “right to
shelter,” however, is a technical legal right overseen by the courts
and upheld by lawyers
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without a recent history of grassroots organizing behind it.

The most serious indictments
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of New York’s shelter system are the testimonies of people who have
sought refuge in it. Municipal shelters are often brutal places that
function to warehouse poor people, treating them as disposable rather
than supporting them
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to quickly get out of homelessness and into housing. For decades,
homeless people have pointed out the harms they face
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in the shelters and have organized for New York City to provide
long-term housing. In New York City, anti-shelter efforts have
typically been the domain of “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) groups,
local tabloids, and right-wing politicians.

Still, given that the right to shelter lacks a grassroots base and the
specifics of the moment, it is vulnerable to attacks from the
political right, NIMBY groups, and others. While ending the right to
shelter would not produce the more generous right to housing, doing so
would achieve a long-sought neoliberal policy objective of reducing
the safety net. It would also throw tens of thousands of people onto
the streets.

Rather than bluntly fight to end the right to shelter entirely, at
least for now, it is more likely that the Adams administration will
move to introduce new limits, and use bureaucratic tools that make it
harder and more painful to enter or stay in shelter. Former
administrations have paved the way for this approach — from Mayor
Bloomberg’s punishing Next Step program
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to Mayor de Blasio’s efforts to mandate
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savings accounts.

It is clear that the Adams administration is moving the needle toward
cuts, shifting the conversation to legitimize and normalize providing
less support to those with the fewest resources. With an end to the
right to shelter, the responsibility of someone’s homelessness will
fall squarely on the individual or family with nowhere to go. That
would be a devastating loss, which would wreak devastation on tens of
thousands of people and weaken the floor from which left movements can
struggle. New York’s right to shelter must be defended.

======

Craig Hughes is a researcher and social service worker based in New
York City.

* Eric Adams; New York City; Right to Shelter; Homelessness;
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