News that the Bloomberg administration has commissioned a study of the economic impact of homeless shelters and single-room-occupancy hotels, reported at Page 1 of today’s New York Sun, is encouraging. While the mayor’s previous homelessness battles have revolved around the ability to kick shelter seekers out of government buildings if they fail to follow regulations or accept housing offered to them, the data from this study could be useful in the fight to phase out the neighborhood-blighting practice of moving homeless people into hotels. At a broader level, it could point up the folly of the Callahan consent that requires it to provide shelter to anyone who shows up and declares himself or herself “homeless.”

“Welfare hotels have had a tremendous negative impact on areas where they were,” the president of the Doe Fund, George McDonald, told the Sun. The Aladdin Hotel on 45th Street, featured in our news story, is one such troubled shelter. A doorman interviewed by our reporter told of neighborhood residents who walk on the opposite side of the street from the hotel to avoid objects thrown from windows. He also told of an increase in drugs and fights and prostitution. None of this is surprising to those who have followed the progress of these hotels. A recent New York Times article described the plight of neighbors of the Royal York, a single-room occupancy hotel near 97th Street. A resident listed off to the Times items found recently near the hotel: hypodermic needles, crack vials, razor blades, and dirty toilet paper. The Malibu Hotel on West 103rd Street, where the city has taken over about 100 rooms for homeless adults with AIDS, has become a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes, according to the Times and the Village Voice.

These are great burdens for New York’s neighborhoods. These burdens exist because judges have decided that all New Yorkers have the right to shelter. However, quite a number of them aren’t even New Yorkers. As our Benj. Smith reported earlier this year, one out of six families in New York’s shelter system has been in the city for a month or less. If the new study proves the extent to which the courts have burdened our communities and thus provides ammunition to overturn the court order that has so long tied the city’s hands, it will have had a positive impact.