There’s a Way to Nearly Eliminate Homelessness

Mr. Hurwitz was a deputy commissioner at the New York City Department of Homeless Services during the Bloomberg administration.

New York City is enduring a brutal winter that has claimed at least 20 lives. Soon Mayor Zohran Mamdani will have to choose — between simply managing the homelessness crisis, and actually working to solve it.

Since 1981, New York City has had a “right to shelter” policy, which requires its government to provide a bed to anyone in need. This has become a hulking barrier to reform, creating a wildly expensive system that prioritizes emergency beds over permanent housing. Mr. Mamdani is well positioned to change course. His top lawyer, Steven Banks, helped create the right to shelter mandate and has the credibility to turn it into something new: a right to housing.

The right to shelter was born of moral urgency in the 1980s. With thousands of New Yorkers sleeping on the streets, it was the most humane and effective remedy. But I’ve seen its limits. In the early 1990s, I joined social workers reaching out to people in the squalor of the Amtrak tunnels under Riverside Park. Later, I responded to complaints from shelter residents and rode with teams coaxing people out of remote encampments.

The refrain was the same from most of the people I encountered: The shelters are impersonal and dangerous; there are too many rules; they are poorly staffed; the services don’t meet their needs. And most important, once you enter, there is nowhere to go.

Meanwhile, in City Hall, I watched the right to shelter policy give rise to an increasingly desperate search for shelter beds. Commissioners passed down stories of City Hall administrators being threatened with contempt when they failed to find beds; four officials were ordered to spend a night in a shelter’s intake center as punishment. (That order was overturned on appeal.) Desperate measures followed: Mayor Michael Bloomberg opened a family shelter in a repurposed Bronx jail, and even considered putting homeless New Yorkers on cruise ships. The Department of Homeless Services created a unit to broker deals with property owners so that supply stayed well ahead of demand.

Yet the shelter population kept swelling. When the migrant crisis hit in 2023, the number of people in shelters ballooned to more than 125,000. The Department of Homeless Services budget is now nearly $4 billion, which is about what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to spend for its largest program addressing homelessness across the United States. Scandals and a nearly $1 billion hotel-industry deal have only turbocharged claims that the system has become a shelter‑industrial complex.

Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.

© The New York Times