City Hall and Legal Aid Society settle right to shelter case
New York City and the Legal Aid Society announced on Friday that they have reached a temporary settlement over the city’s right to shelter. The settlement will preserve the city’s general “right to shelter” mandate – which requires that the city provide shelter to any person experiencing homelessness who seeks it – while allowing the city to limit newly arrived adult asylum-seekers’ shelter stays to 30 days, and to 60 days for younger adults.
City Hall characterized the settlement as one that will provide additional flexibility to manage the shelter population, while the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless characterized it as preserving the underlying right to shelter.
“When the original Callahan settlement was reached, no one could have foreseen the migrant crisis New York City has faced for the past two years,” City Hall Chief Counsel Lisa Zornberg said in a statement, referring to the Callahan v. Carey consent decree that established a right to shelter for homeless men in 1981. “This new agreement reflects the reality we’re currently in and allows New York City to appropriately manage this crisis.”
Under the terms of the settlement, newly arrived adult asylum-seekers will receive an initial 30-day shelter placement if they have nowhere else to stay and no resources to obtain housing. Adult asylum seekers under the age of 23 will receive a 60-day initial shelter placement. The city will extend those stays on a case-by-case basis, but only if asylum-seekers can demonstrate they have “some sort of extenuating circumstance necessitating a short additional amount of time in shelter, or have received a reasonable accommodation due to a disability,” according to City Hall.
“These are extraordinary circumstances, this is not business as usual. The status quo would not work in this situation,” Deputy Mayor of Health and Human
