As a big surge of migrants overwhelms the city’s shelter system, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is backing the city’s attempt to suspend a special legal arrangement that mandates it to provide emergency accommodation to the homeless.
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Hochul supported the New York City’s opposition to the requirement in a court filing this week, and on Thursday he told reporters that the provision was never intended to apply to a global humanitarian catastrophe.
The alleged right-to-shelter rule has been a target of the city’s months-long efforts to reverse it in light of the more than 120,000 migrants who have arrived since last year.
Many of the migrants have no home or employment when they arrive, so the city must build emergency shelters and offer other government services, which will cost an estimated $12 billion over the following several years.
New York City has had a shelter requirement in effect for more than 40 years as a result of a court order requiring the city to provide temporary accommodation for every homeless individual.
There is no other major American city with such a requirement.
Hochul noted, “I don’t know how the right to shelter — dedicated to helping those people, which I believe in, help families — can or should be interpreted to be an open invitation to eight billion people who live on this planet, that if you show up in the streets of New York, that the city of New York has an obligation to provide you with a hotel room or shelter.”
Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, has requested that the rule be suspended in cases of emergency if the number of single people using shelters is increasing quickly.
New York State submitted a court brief endorsing the city’s motion and describing it as reasonable.
