No one claims to know how many of them there actually are, but for years a variety of estimates have put the number at about 3,000 to 4,400 in winter and 5,000 to 7,000 during the summer. The number of identifiably homeless who live on the street-in train tunnels, under expressways, in basements and crawl spaces, and on tenement roofs-is fairly stable. The Callahan decree is the reason that the vast majority of New York’s homeless are out of sight, more of a news story than a daily reality that might jolt us into a pressing awareness of the human suffering the crisis entails. Three years later Koch said of the signing, “We made a mistake, and I am the first one to say it.” No one at the time imagined the future extent of homelessness and the enormous municipal effort that would be required to deal with it. To establish this they pointed to an article in the New York State Constitution that implies public responsibility for “the aid, care and support of the needy.” The legal battle culminated in an enforceable consent decree to shelter the homeless-the Callahan decree-that Mayor Ed Koch’s administration voluntarily signed in 1981. This came about after advocates for the homeless argued, in a series of lawsuits in the 1970s, that shelter was a fundamental right, not just a social service. New York is the only city in the United States to have taken on the legal obligation of providing a bed for anybody who asks for one and has nowhere else to sleep. The administration’s most optimistic forecast sees no significant decrease in homelessness over the next five years the aim is merely to keep it from growing. And in 2015, though the city managed to move 38,000 people from shelters to more permanent housing, the number of homeless increased. Last year more than 127,000 different men, women, and children slept in the shelters. The case is indicative of what New York faces as it tries to cope with its housing emergency. Were the local residents “connected” to the homeless-those on the lowest social rung? When the city changed eligibility for the shelter to men sixty-two and older, residents opposing it were not assuaged: a neighborhood association filed a lawsuit that blocked the shelter from opening for nearly two months, until it was dismissed by a judge in late May. The de Blasio administration’s argument that the homeless should be placed in the neighborhoods they come from so they can renew connections and have a better chance of getting back on their feet only compounded the insult. There were already several shelters in the area. The revulsion against the homeless seemed linked to a deep suspicion of “the powers that be, whoever they may be,” as one attendee put it. The official seemed stunned, and police watched anxiously as the meeting broke up. “You dump your garbage on us because you think we’re garbage!” shouted a black woman to a city official. A packed meeting in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a proposed shelter for 104 men over the age of fifty that I attended this winter quickly devolved into a cacophony of ire. The 661 buildings in the municipal shelter system are filled to capacity nightly, and Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to open ninety new sites, many of which are already being ferociously resisted by neighborhood residents. There are at least 61,000 people whose shelter is provided, on any given day, by New York’s Department of Homeless Services. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom. What makes the crisis especially startling is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration. New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is what aid groups would characterize as a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes. Eighty percent of its 250 apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened. A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn.
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