When I was appointed by Michael Bloomberg as commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services in New York City in 2002, I was presented with a wish list from the court-appointed lawyers who had been governing the system for, at that point, 20 years. The wish list looked reasonable: add community intake centers to ease access for those we wanted off the streets; get kids placed to beds earlier so they could rest well for the next day of school. But the strong advice of Homeless Services staff was: Don’t do it. They said that not because they were heartless, but because the legal setup of right to shelter meant that there was no such thing as iterative learning, or testing and failing and trying again. Instead, any change we made would be codified in place, never to be retooled except with the express consent of the parties and the judge.
These were hard-won lessons: The right-to-shelter program had, over the years, been expanded in a series of compromises forced upon a litigation-wary city to prevent a potentially worse court-determined outcome. The size and shape of shelters, the time allowed to act on applications, the minutia of the rules governing how shelters operate are all either fixed in settlements or subject to court supervision.
The Bloomberg years at Homeless Services resulted in significant gains outside the shelter system that have been sustained here and replicated internationally — citywide street counts to measure progress in moving people into accommodation, a Safe Haven model that meets clients where they are in their journey and a big expansion of supportive housing in the city’s history. The right to shelter, however, has frozen the shelter system in the past.
The right to shelter is not good policy. It feels humane, a fundamentally decent thing to do for so many who have suffered a bad turn of events or a lifetime of crisis. But when governed as an absolute right, the dynamics get distorted, a condition worsened when the definition of the right is in the hands of the court. Any complex service organization is a constantly shifting environment of supports, incentives and conditions. Mediated through the eyes of the advocates and their attorneys, the city has been hamstrung in its efforts to adapt the shelter system to meet emerging needs.
Other cities and states faced with growing homeless populations are wondering if they, too, should institute a right to shelter. Again, I would say no. Even if all the terms of shelter were under the control of the local government, establishing a guarantee to anyone who presents a need changes the behaviors of all actors. I recall calls to our hotline coming in from family members asking for the address of a shelter intake so they could drop off their problematic family members, and from child welfare workers who would use the shelter system to achieve family reunification for a parent ready to resume caretaking but lacking housing that met regulatory standards for reunification. In other words, the policy lets people off the hook from doing what is needed to secure decent housing for people in their care.