Two new bills introduced to the City Council on Thursday would ensure the city’s large-scale shelters for asylum seekers be subject to the same city right-to-shelter standards as traditional shelters.
The right to shelter in New York City — a combination of court orders and local and state laws founded on a landmark 1979 court decision — guarantees homeless people in New York the ability to access shelter and sets minimum standards for those shelters. In January, the mayor questioned whether those standards should apply to migrants given the scale of the current crisis.
While traditional homeless shelters are operated by the Department of Homeless Services, the Adams administration has tasked Health & Hospitals and the Office of Emergency Management with operating the so-called “Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Centers” – a move homeless advocates said was deliberate in trying to bypass the right-to-shelter rules.
“It does appear that they’re trying to skirt the regulations by creating a different administrative structure to oversee the operation of these shelters designed specifically for people seeking asylum, and in that way, skirting the state regulations that would otherwise apply,” Shelly Nortz at the Coalition for the Homeless told Gothamist. “We don’t think that’s a good idea.”
When Mayor Eric Adams first announced the plan to open relief centers in the fall, the city said they would be a brief stop for “approximately 24 to 96 hours, but potentially longer depending on the situation,” before migrants move on to longer-term shelter or their final destination.
“I met that with suspicion…as we’ve seen over the last several months now, these have become facilities where families are living for weeks on end and months on end,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who introduced the bill challenging conditions at migrant shelters on Thursday.
The first bill that Hanif introduced would explicitly require all current and future…
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