You may have caught headlines that New York City’s right-to-shelter policy is under threat. If it’s worth fighting for in New York, you might wonder, why aren’t we fighting for the same right here?
I’ll try to disentangle what are distinctly different paths.
Four decades of right-to-shelter in NYC
New York City’s right-to-shelter policy is four decades old, launched by a consent decree resulting from a 1979 lawsuit. On behalf of Bob Callahan, a man struggling with homelessness on the streets of New York, a law student named Robert Hayes sued the city of New York. Unfortunately, Callahan died on the streets, never witnessing the consent decree.
That initial lawsuit covered men who were homeless; two more lawsuits extended the right to women in 1981 and then families in 1983.
These lawsuits demanded the city provide shelter because the state constitution declared “the aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns.”
The standards a shelter must adhere to have been challenged in the courts, but at its core, it’s a temporary place to sleep protected from the elements. Too often, though, people languish in shelters for months or even years.
New York City recently had about half the rate of homelessness as Los Angeles. In the 2022 Point-in-Time Count, always an undercount, New York City reported 61,840 homeless while Los Angeles, about half the size of NYC, counted 65,111. That same year, Multnomah County counted 5,228, which was about the same rate of homelessness as Los Angeles.
During those same years, the vast majority of New Yorkers were homeless in shelters.
About 70% of homeless Angelenos slept outside, and 58% of homeless Multnomah County residents slept outside, but only about 6% of homeless New Yorkers did.
New York City is now seeing its number of people experiencing homelessness skyrocket, in part because people have migrated from perilous conditions elsewhere. Claiming it’s impossible at this point to provide shelter to everyone, Mayor Eric Adams is seeking an exemption to the right to shelter.
If he gains this exemption, New York could lose its foothold in this four-decade-old policy.
Why aren’t West Coast cities fighting for an NYC-style right-to-shelter policy?
So why don’t Multnomah County — or most West Coast cities — adopt New York’s right-to-shelter policy?
New York City spent four decades building this imperfect shelter system, pushed in the court battles to do so. Its best next move is to continue to improve on what it already has. Rolling it back — rather than pushing it to be better — would prove to be disastrous.
Hayes, the attorney who litigated Callahan v. Carey, put it this way last year to last year to Curbed: “Shelter is no solution. It’s a Band-Aid. We brought the right to shelter because I could not find a legal basis to bring a right to housing.”
He went on to explain that “without the complementary commitment to sufficient affordable and sometimes supportive housing, shelter becomes a long-term place to live. It was imperfect by definition, frankly. So we kept going upstream, trying to find ways to create something better than shelter. That was the vision, to build from the right to shelter.”
But this trajectory — building a shelter system and then a housing system — is not a developmental path. Given the choice, it makes more sense to aim for permanent support housing from the get-go.
There’s a dollars-and-cents case to be made about why starting with housing rather than shelter makes sense. The city of New York’s comptroller office argues that providing shelter is, in fact, more than twice the cost of supportive housing, which is housing that includes services.
“The perennial debate is — does the right to shelter actually help subvert what people really need? Does it kick the housing can down the road? Does it hide a problem? Yeah, it does,” Hayes said. “But what’s the cost of not doing that?”
Steven Banks, who sued the city to improve shelter and service conditions as a legal aid attorney and is now challenging Adams’ effort to get an exception to the right to shelter, directed homelessness strategy under NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio from 2016 until 2020.
At the end of his tenure, he told the New York Times what he’d like to do is get a right to housing assistance established. A right to shelter was easier to argue, but a right to housing is what people need, according to Banks.
That’s a lesson cities on the West Coast can learn: Housing with support for those who need it makes sense both in terms of a solution for people on the streets and from an economic standpoint.
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