Amid migrant crisis, Mayor Adams’ team insists NYC can reassess right-to-shelter practices

Mayor Adams sought Thursday to clear up confusion over controversial statements he made about reconsidering New York’s landmark right-to-shelter law amid growing concern that the shelter system remains on the cusp of collapse due to a recent influx of Latin American migrants.

The hubbub over right-to-shelter began Wednesday, when Adams declared that the ordinance “must be reassessed” after his administration had failed — in apparent violation of the law — to provide beds for dozens of homeless men due to overcrowding in the system.

During an at-times contentious press conference Thursday morning at a newly-opened migrant welcome center in Manhattan, Adams and his team made a somewhat hairsplitting case that they are not reconsidering the law itself, but rather the “operational practices” underpinning it.

“It’s important — because we don’t exist in a vacuum — to reconsider the practices that the city developed that flow from the right-to-shelter. So it’s those practices that we are reassessing,” Adams’ chief counsel, Brendan McGuire, said. “There are operational practices, there are communication practices.”

Asked to elaborate, McGuire told the Daily News that “trying to extend the timeline” for how quickly the city must locate beds for homeless people could be “one potential” right-to-shelter practice the administration is targeting for reform.

“What we’re talking about is the reality that this is completely unforeseen, this rate of influx of people into the system, and so it’s irresponsible not to reassess how the system works,” the lawyer said while on his way out from the welcome center, as Adams spokesman Fabien Levy shouted “chill out” at reporters and attempted to keep them back.

More than 55,000 people are now sleeping in the homeless shelter system on any given night — including some 8,000 asylum seekers — a nearly 25% increase compared to this spring, according to city data. More than 11,000 asylum seekers have arrived in the city since May after crossing the U.S. Southern border in hopes of applying for asylum.

In his Wednesday comments, Adams said the shelter system was “nearing its breaking point.”

Migrants arriving in New York are fleeing violence and economic devastation in their home countries. Many of them crossed into Texas from Mexico, and were sent to New York by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s refusing to shelter the desperate travelers in protest of President Biden’s border policies.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Republican, followed Abbott’s lead this week, claiming credit for sending migrants to Massachusetts via airplane instead of welcoming them to his state.

It’s unclear if Adams could on his own tweak any aspects of the right-to-shelter law, which is protected under the state Constitution and has required the city since 1981 to provide a shelter bed to anyone who needs one.

Brooklyn Council member Lincoln Restler, a Democrat who sits on the Council committee that oversees the shelter system, argued that watering down or adjusting the longtime shelter rule in any way would likely not be OK.

“That would not be consistent with the right-to-shelter law,” he said.

While the rules are more defined for families, there’s no set window of time by which the city must find beds for single homeless adults under the right-to-shelter law. However, advocates successfully sued the city in 2009 after then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration tried to only keep homeless adults sheltered for a few hours at a time.

After Adams’ welcome center event, the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless declined to comment directly on McGuire’s remarks about reconsidering the “timeline,” but said in a statement they are “always willing to work with the city on ways to improve services for anyone in need of shelter so long as any proposal complies with well-established court orders and New York State’s Constitution.”

Before their press conference, Adams, McGuire and other senior officials toured the Hell’s Kitchen welcome center, where services will be offered to the hundreds of South and Central American asylum-seekers who continue to arrive in the city weekly.

In a side conversation during the tour, Adams lamented that media coverage of the shelter crisis is giving the impression that “we don’t have this under control.”

“That’s disrespectful,” Adams told his entourage, which included Social Services Commissioner Gary Jenkins, before urging the officials to push back on that narrative.

The mayor continued to take aim at the perceived unfair criticism in the press conference.

“Anyone who states that this administration does not have a handle on this crisis, they must have been sleeping under a rock,” he said.

Hizzoner also held up the new welcome center — where migrants will be able to access job, immigration and education services — as a monument to the “dignity and respect that this city continues to show.”

Adams’ welcome center visit comes on the heels of at least 60 homeless men, some asylum-seekers, being forced to sleep on floors and benches at an intake center in Manhattan overnight Monday after the city failed to locate shelter beds for them.

The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless have alleged the intake center fiasco violated the right-to-shelter law.

Adams’ team has refused to say whether they agree that it was a legal violation, though McGuire suggested Thursday that the administration sees that issue as a footnote.

“Whether this was a violation or not we can discuss, but what I’m saying is that to keep the perspective here: We have got 11,000 people, and so in order to assess this the right way, you have to take that into account,” he said.

In contrast to his team’s messaging on the Monday night incident, Adams admitted in July that his administration had broken the right-to-shelter law after failing to shelter at least five Latin American migrant families. However, Jenkins, Adams’ social services chief, remains under a Department of Investigation probe over allegations that he initially sought to cover up the July violation.

Amid the deepening crisis, Adams has confirmed he is in talks with the Biden administration about needing federal assistance to accommodate more migrants in the city.

Echoing Biden, Adams argued at Thursday’s event that Republican officials in Southern states are fueling the city’s crisis by continuing to send migrants.

“The Republican Party, they have created a blueprint that all of them are starting to follow. It’s inhumane,” he said. “It’s just creating a real crisis.”