City seeks to suspend Right to Shelter rules amid migrant crisis
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The city and Mayor Eric Adams issued a court filing on Tuesday night looking to suspend the decades-old Right to Shelter mandate . File photo by Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
By Ryan Schwach
The city and Mayor Eric Adams issued a court filing on Tuesday night seeking to suspend the decades-long mandate which requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it.
The letter addressed to New York Supreme Court Civil Term Judge Erika Edwards comes amid the city’s continuing litigation against the Right to Shelter mandate and the Callahan decree that birthed it. The Right to Shelter challenge comes as the five boroughs face the task of sheltering the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have arrived in recent months.
The city’s court request immediately received heavy criticism from immigration and housing advocacy groups, as well as the Legal Aid Society, which is defending the Right to Shelter in the case.
“This is really shameful,” said Josh Goldfein, the staff attorney for Legal Aid who represents the Coalition for the Homeless in the court case to protect the Right to Shelter. “We've been hearing for weeks and months from the mayor that his concern was that the system was not designed to accommodate new arrivals in New York and that that was his concern. But in fact, what the city is now asking is that essentially all of the provisions of the order that established the Right to Shelter be suspended.”
On Tuesday night, Adams said in a statement that the “status quo cannot continue.”
“As we have said before, the Callahan decree — entered over 40 years ago, when the shelter population was a fraction of its current size — was never intended to apply to the extraordinary circumstances our city faces today,” the mayor said. “With more than 122,700 asylum seekers having come through our intake system since the spring of 2022, and projected costs of over $12 billion for three years, it is abundantly clear that the status quo cannot continue. We must be flexible to respond to this crisis effectively and continue to lead with the compassion and care we have consistently shown those arriving here.”
City Assistant Corporation Counsel Daniel Perez, who drafted the letter, itself a revised application of earlier complaints, said that the immigration crisis that New York is currently facing has rendered Right to Shelter “outmoded and cumbersome,” and has limited the city’s ability to respond to the crisis’ obstacles.
“As currently written, the Consent Judgment prevents the City and the State from deploying the regulatory flexibility needed to adapt to the evolving nature of this emergency,” Perez wrote.
At a virtual media availability on Wednesday, Goldfein said he isn’t quite sure what that “flexibility” includes.
“We have been asking them, negotiating with them, talking to them for over a year now about what specifically it is that they want to do that they think they can't do,” he said. “They did not put in their letter any explanation of what it is that they think they can't do, other than to turn people away into the streets, regardless of their need or the weather.”
“The city would change the rules so that they could turn essentially anybody away into the street where they would be at risk of harm or death,” Goldfein added. “It would be a fundamental repudiation of the guarantee of safety for all of us, not just new arrivals.”
In the city’s revised application, it rearticulates the their arguments that Right to Shelter shouldn’t pertain to the drastic influx of migrants.
“Certainly, [Right to Shelter] never intended the City to build and finance an endless supply of accommodations necessary to keep pace with the sudden influx of tens of thousands of migrants seeking shelter,” wrote Perez.
In the mayor’s own statement on the court filing on Tuesday, he argued the city isn't trying to scrap the Callahan decision, which created the Right to Shelter, all together.
“To be very clear, the city is not seeking to terminate Callahan; we are simply asking for the city’s obligations to be aligned with those of the rest of the state during states of emergency,” he said. “For more than a year now, New York City has shouldered the burden of this national crisis largely alone.”
However, Goldfein argues that based on the language in the letter, a judge’s granting of the city’s request could completely relinquish the city from abiding by the mandate, thus potentially leaving all single adults, including native New Yorkers, without shelter protections.
“If they're going to go so far as to say there should be no Right to Shelter for single adults, then I think it's pretty clear that as far as City Hall is concerned, everything is on the table,” said Goldfein.
Legal Aid said that they are confident in their legal position, but hoped it wouldn’t come to this level.
“You never want to be in a position where you have to stand up in court and say, the City of New York should not be permitted to put people into the streets where they could be injured or die from exposure to the elements,” said Goldfein.
Mayor Eric Adams and his administration is petitioning a judge to suspend the city’s Right to Shelter rules amid the asylum seeker crisis. File photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office
Suspending the Right to Shelter is another tactic the city has employed to try and dissuade migrants from coming to the city in the first place, which is one of the stated goals of Adams’ trip to several countries south of the border this week.
But Goldfein argues that the tactic won’t go as the city intends it to.
“[The migrants] have made it to the United States and where is the place that they think that they are going to feel safest? I think it's New York, and they are going to continue to come here, no matter what,” Goldfein said.
“What is the alternative?” Goldfein added. “If we do not have a Right to Shelter, if we are turning people away from the shelter system, and people are now living in the streets, in the subways, in the parks, is that the outcome that they want? That is something that we have not seen in decades. I don't think any New Yorker wants to see that. I don't think that city officials want to see that.”
Adams, in turn, has continued to defend his administration’s response to the crisis.
“We have opened more than 210 emergency sites, have spent more than $2 billion to date, and expect to spend $5 billion by the end of this fiscal year without significant and timely help from our state and federal partners,” he said. “And throughout this crisis, not a single family with children has been forced to sleep on the streets. But as we have said repeatedly, with upwards of 10,000 asylum seekers continuing to arrive every month, New York City cannot continue to do this alone.”
Along with the criticism from Legal Aid, the city also took flak from immigration nonprofits and other advocacy groups.
“New York City’s Right to Shelter laws are an essential component of how our city cares for our most vulnerable populations and ensures the health and safety of every unhoused family or individual,” said New York Immigration Coalition Executive Director Murad Awawdeh. “Mayor Adams’ callous disregard for the experiences and hardships of unhoused people is clear in his continued attacks on the Right to Shelter protections. It’s obvious that his disdain for these longstanding protections has a lot more to do with who is currently seeking shelter rather than how many people are in shelters.”
VOCAL-NY called the decision “abhorrent.”
“Now is not the time to roll back protections for people experiencing homelessness. If anything, our state's housing crisis shows we need the right to shelter in every city,” said the group’s housing director, Adolfo Abreu.
According to Legal Aid’s Goldfein, they now have a week to respond to the city’s letter, and the city and state can submit a statement in response if they choose to do so. The full exchange of arguments is due to the court by Oct. 18.
