The Case for Replacing Right-to-Shelter in NYC

Everyone on a barstool has a solution to the homeless crisis, it seems.

What we need is an expert — someone with experience on the ground and in City Hall.

Mark Hurwitz certainly qualifies. He was a deputy commissioner at the Department of Homeless Services during the Bloomberg administration and has done ride-alongs with social workers trying to coax the street homeless into shelters.

In a New York Times op-ed Friday, he pitched an idea we’ve all heard before: Fund permanent housing instead of emergency shelters.

Who isn’t for that? (Well, maybe shelter developers and operators.)

The rub, Hurwitz explained, is that this spending shift cannot happen under the city’s right-to-shelter policy, because it sucks up nearly $4 billion a year. I’m with him on that, too.

The timing to change the policy is right, he wrote, because Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s corporation counsel, Steven Banks, is uniquely positioned to do so. Banks was its chief architect, having won a consent decree in 1981 from the Koch administration in the Callahan v. Carey lawsuit.

The shelter mandate was originally just for homeless men but was later expanded. No other city has one like it.

Why would Banks roll back the most significant achievement of his career? Because he surely knows we can do better. His bona fides as an advocate for the homeless insulate him from progressive attacks — a luxury that billionaire Michael Bloomberg did not have. Think Nixon in China.

However, I am not sure Banks will do that. I know him a little because he ran for City Council in my neighborhood against Bill de Blasio in 2001, losing 32 percent to 22 percent in a six-way primary.

My guess is Banks prefers to keep right-to-shelter intact and increase funding for permanent housing, even though that hasn’t worked for 45 years and counting. It’s hard to let go of a dream.

The problem is math. Right-to-shelter is mandatory, so it always gets priority in the city budget. This has become clear to his boss, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who must close a $5.4 billion budget gap by July 1.

The two components of Hurwitz’s spending plan are supportive housing and rental vouchers.

Supportive housing comes with services. It is for people with problems beyond poverty. The city has a lot of these folks, but has only built 32,000 units of supportive housing since pioneering it in the 1980s.

A study found that just 1 in 6 qualified applicants was placed into one of these units in fiscal 2022 because of low supply. Things are probably not much better today.

Surprisingly, the “housing first” model, which puts people in housing first, then treats their addictions, mental illness and other issues, has not been proven to improve health more than the Trump administration’s new policy, which is to only subsidize housing for people who have conquered their addictions and behavioral problems.

But “housing first” does save money and has been proven to cure homelessness, especially for veterans. So if we want to get people off the streets, it is essential.

This, by itself, would not nearly eliminate homelessness in the city, because fewer than 1 in 10 homeless people is sleeping outside. To get the rest out of shelter and into permanent housing, Hurwitz calls for more rental vouchers.

I wrote recently that vouchers do not increase supply, but I forgot to mention that they actually do so indirectly — because developers can get financing to build housing for voucher holders. A reader reminded me that many buildings are going up in the Bronx based on this model.

Section 8, which is federally funded, has been a reliable funding stream for such projects, but CityFHEPS vouchers also contribute. If the city shifted $2 billion from the shelter budget to vouchers, more projects would happen. So I’m on board with the second leg of Hurwitz’s plan.

The devil, though, is in the details. Should the city replace right-to-shelter entirely with right-to-housing? Who would qualify? Once in that housing, would people ever leave? Probably not.

We’d have to keep building more so units would be available for everyone who gets evicted, flees an abuser or gets kicked out by his cousin. If a new system induced demand, which economists call a moral hazard, before long it would be larger than NYCHA.

Better to replace the $4 billion right-to-shelter policy with right-to-voucher. Set a switch-over date for three years out so developers could line up financing based on the expected city funding. Then build, baby, build. This would ease the housing crisis for everyone.

Mamdani should punch some proposals into AI and have it game out the results.