Decree of doubt
Today, lawyers for the city will go before Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Erika Edwards to plead their case that the Callahan consent decree — the legal agreement, first reached in 1981, that mandates the city offer shelter space to any unhoused person in need, under which it is currently caring for more than 60,000 asylum seekers — be fundamentally modified or suspended altogether.
Months of negotiations between the city, the state and the Legal Aid Society have thus far been fruitless, and don’t seem imminent given Mayor Adams’ only-hardening position on the matter. Edwards may ultimately have to step in and make some decisions, and the decades-old document that has guided the city’s approach through the administrations of more than one executive who’s vowed to fight it may ultimately be on the chopping block.
What’s imperative is that any changes made reflect the reality that this isn’t the situation that the Callahan deal contemplated, and in the face of a largely unforeseeable dynamic — that tens of thousands of people from around the world would be seeking out NYC specifically as a result of this mandate — the specifics of the policy can be reexamined. It makes sense to reexamine what constitutes an abnormal situation and how this affects the city’s responsibilities. That should be narrowly tailored and closely monitored.
The city must avoid taking aim at the fundamentals of what Callahan was meant to achieve: the assurance that street homeless individuals in New York City would, at minimum, be offered some services and a place to stay. Throughout this whole circumstance, the fact hasn’t changed that, as the mayor readily acknowledges, the street is not an appropriate or humane place to leave people in need, and that should remain the principle at the heart of whatever reengineered order might emerge from the legal back-and-forth.
Any modifications that ease the pressure on the city also cannot be read as a throw-migrants-to-thewolves card. Reasonable people can and do agree that a shelter mandate is not an ideal or sustainable way to provide assistance in the long term, but this remains a welcoming and compassionate city and state.
If the support must shift, it shouldn’t cease, with more going towards, for example, legal services that can help them process asylum, Temporary Protected Status and work permit applications faster, and social services to assist with finding more permanent housing, learning English and other tools to help them get on their feet.
In fact, the modifications to the current understanding of the law and the consent decree don’t necessarily have to take the form of fully absolving the city of this type of responsibility, but shifting that responsibility around. Since the right is derived from the state’s Constitution, then why not clarify that its provisions apply across the state and that counties and cities around New York have a coequal mandate to provide shelter for those who need it, as we’ve long called for?
Certainly no one expects Poughkeepsie or Rochester to accommodate 60,000 people themselves (that would triple the former’s population), but we also shouldn’t have to wait for localities to volunteer to take part in what is a statewide constitutional principle. This is all given the failures of the one authority the judge can’t touch: the federal government.