Subsidizing Homelessness in New York

New York City’s Department of Homeless Services “has a budget larger than that of the city of Atlanta, but it has barely made a dent in decreasing the number of homeless people in our city.” So says the City Council’s minority leader, David Carr, in remarks to The New York Sun. Yet even as New York City faces billions of dollars in deficits, and left-wing demands to raise taxes, Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to lavish more money subsidizing homelessness.Hizzoner’s budget for 2027 proposes an eye-watering $4.2 billion for the Department of Homeless Services. That would mark a 20 percent jump over this year’s spending. It is almost double the level of a decade ago. This squandering of taxpayer dollars stems from a flawed legal notion that in New York there’s a “right to shelter.” Mr. Carr describes the rationale for the city’s spending on the homeless as a “reckless legal interpretation of the state constitution.”Mr. Mamdani’s proposed profligacy promises to break the budget at a time when the city already spends some $81,000 per vagrant, the New York Post reports. The envisioned outlay is even less comprehensible insofar as it would exceed the amount spent by the city during the height of the Biden-era migrant crisis. That’s when red-state governors upended the debate over open borders by busing illegals to liberal enclaves like New York City. Yet at the height of that debacle, with some 230,000 migrants flooding the city, the homeless budget stood at $2.3 billion, the Post reports. Now that the migration crisis has ebbed, thanks largely to President Trump having reestablished control over the border, it’s hard to see the logic for the surging spending on homeless services. Part of the problem is a legal requirement that stems from a legal settlement inked in 1981, the Callahan Decree. The 45-year-old court order decrees at New York City an open-ended “right to shelter,” unique in America, for almost any reason. The Koch-era policy is ripe for a second look, in part because it relies on a misreading of the state constitution. Article XVII of the state charter ordains that “the aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions.”Article XVII adds that this assistance shall be provided “in such manner and by such means, as the legislature may from time to time determine.” One can search in vain in this provision, ratified in 1938, for any mention of a right on demand to shelter at the taxpayers’ expense. This so-called right was instead concocted by liberal activists who sought to use the courts as a cudgel to impose a policy that in effect underwrites homelessness across the city. No one suggests that New York turn its back on the neediest. Prior to the decree, the city relied on a mix of shelters, plus what the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern called “voluntary agencies like the Salvation Army,” plus vouchers for housing on a short-term basis at districts like the Bowery, long a haven for the down-and-out. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg tried to reform the shelter system using workfare principles, to no avail. Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg, too, sought in vain to screen for, say, drug use or to require addiction treatment as a condition for access to shelters. The Callahan Decree thwarted these improvements. Now, Mr. Mamdani looks poised to throw more money at the problem. “The out-of-control spending on shelters,” Mr. Carr tells us, reflects the perspective of “a socialist mayor who, at his core, believes government is the solution for every societal ill.”

Subsidizing Homelessness in New York

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