Inn fighting
COREY SEZ GIVE HOMELESS HOTEL ROOMS, BUT BLAZ BALKS
Council Speaker Corey Johnson is trying to ram through a bill requiring the city to provide a hotel room for all single adults in the shelter system but is facing stiff resistance from Mayor de Blasio and a number of other lawmakers.
Johnson is planning to call an “emergency” Council meeting to vote on the legislation as soon as Tuesday, said sources with knowledge of the matter. He is aiming to secure support from at least 35 total lawmakers — the threshold for a veto-proof majority, which means the mayor can’t cancel the legislation — according to the Council sources, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the talks.
But not so fast, say members of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus.
They’re worried that the bill would worsen the decades-long trend of cramming homeless people into low-income communities of color.
“We’re very much concerned that our communities are disproportionately impacted,” Councilman Daneek Miller (D-Queens), co-chairman of the caucus, told the Daily News.
Legislation from Councilman Stephen Levin (DBrooklyn) would require the city to move all 17,000 single homeless adults in the shelter system into individual hotel rooms, the idea being to protect them from the spread of the highly infectious coronavirus. Since the start of the outbreak, the city has moved about 9,000 homeless individuals into double-occupancy hotel rooms, according to the Homeless Services Department.
The bill is one of several high-profile initiatives that Johnson — who is expected to run for mayor next year — has championed as de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo dominate the crisis response.
But the speaker’s priorities, which include a successful push to close more streets to vehicular traffic, haven’t aligned with those of his caucus, Miller said.
“We haven’t seen a policy that would make the top 10 or 25 [priorities] in the black, Latino and Asian community that is being moved,” he said.
Johnson declined an interview request.
Miller and fellow caucus members are pushing for guarantees that homeless people won’t be disproportionately relocated to communities of color, among other possible concessions in exchange for a “yes” vote.
Levin said largely vacant hotels in Manhattan’s business district would be a prime location to house the homeless, but acknowledged his bill doesn’t state exactly where to relocate people.
Conservative pols are hard “nos” on the bill, with Councilman Joseph Borelli (R-S.I.) saying, “This is a drastic new cost at a moment when our budget is hurting.”
Still, if Johnson locks up 35 “yeas,” that would mark the first instance in his time so far as speaker that he tries to override the mayor, who insists the bill is too expensive.
For weeks, his office said it was unsure whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency would reimburse the costs of hotel rooms, transportation, security and food, which the administration placed at about $500 million over the course of six months.
Levin cited a March letter from FEMA stating it would pay for 75% of those costs, but not for health and behavioral services. Johnson’s office placed the costs to the city for hotel rooms alone at about $2.5 million per month.
While sources said de Blasio staffers have been directly contacting members, urging them to vote against the bill, Hizzoner sounded a diplomatic note Sunday.
“We’re working with the Council. We’re in constant dialogue with them. We’re all trying to get to the same place in the end,” he said when asked at a news conference whether he was considering vetoing the bill.
With the bill coming under discussion at the height of budget season, de Blasio has plenty of leverage to get members on his side. While huge tax revenue losses forced him to slash his proposed budget by $6 billion, he can still dangle support for Council members’ pet projects, one lawmaker noted.
“The mayor can come up and say, ‘That special project you wanted to do?’ The mayor can just say, ‘Done,’ ” the source said.
The legislation has received mixed reviews from advocates and service providers.
The Bowery Residents’
Committee, which does homeless outreach for the city, criticized the bill as taking a “one-size-fits-all approach.”
“Homelessness is not simply about physical space,” the group’s president and CEO, Muzzy Rosenblatt, wrote in a Saturday letter to Johnson and Levin. “Human interactions, and the quality of these interactions, are a critical factor in how individuals become and overcome homelessness.”
Other advocates say with a majority of shelters reporting cases of COVID-19, the bill is a must-pass.
“It is cruel, inhumane and negligent to … give people no good option other than to go to shelters and to go to hospitals,” Paulette Soltani of VocalNY recently told The News.