A little thread on why homelessness in California is so much more visible than in New York. NY has a legal "right to shelter" because of the Callahan v. Carey consent decree in 1981. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/nyregion/pact-requires-city-to-shelter-homeless-men.html …https://twitter.com/samueldodge/status/1070475888620298240 …
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It was filed by a 26-year-old lawyer who was working on the side of his corporate legal job at Sullivan & Cromwell. He had never tried a case before.https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/02/nyregion/robert-hayes-anatomy-of-a-crusader.html …
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He had befriended an elderly homeless man named Robert Callahan, the self-styled "Mayor of the Bowery."https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/30/nyregion/attorney-for-homeless-worked-in-two-worlds.html …
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What Hayes wanted was to enforce a specific provision in the New York state Constitution. That the word "shall" in this section, really meant "shall." https://www.dos.ny.gov/info/constitution/article_17_social_welfare.html …pic.twitter.com/EEUj5mNGP2
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This language came through former mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who successfully convinced voters to add it during the Great Depression. He had been a fan of Jacob Riis, the turn-of-the-century muckraker who documented living conditions in tenements.
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Hayes won, but unfortunately, Callahan had passed away on the city's streets before that happened. And that's in part why the unsheltered homelessness rates in NYC are so much lower than in CA. (Our overall per capita numbers aren't that different.) https://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2017-10-23/homelessness-bay-area …pic.twitter.com/CFjxxyADOM
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That said, Bay Area homelessness advocates have some hesitations about "right to shelter." They worry it will divert resources away from permanent housing. The ~77K people experiencing homelessness in NYC can get shuffled around in shelters for years.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/nyregion/homelessness-step-by-step.html …
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End of conversation
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Glad right to shelter is not some orwellian anti- union phrase
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