Protests, Lawsuits Stall Giuliani’s Homeless Crackdown
by Steven Wishnia

For years, an elderly black woman panhandled on the corner of Second Avenue and East 11th Street, sitting by the wrought-iron fence surrounding St. Mark’s Church, thanking passers-by whether or not they dropped quarters into her paper coffee cup.

On the night before Thanksgiving, a young policewoman escorted her away from her spot.

“I guess it’s illegal to be homeless now,” an observer commented.

“I guess it is,” she replied.

She hasn’t been back since.

The Thanksgiving street sweeps represented the most visible part of the Giuliani administration’s latest crackdown on the homeless. More far-reaching are its efforts to deny shelter to people who violate public-assistance regulations. Its new rules were supposed to go into effect Jan. 1, but have been held up by three separate lawsuits. Hearings on the lawsuits were held early this month, and decisions are expected soon.

The Giuliani administration issued its new regulations last October, requiring all shelter residents to do workfare, kicking out residents who don’t, and putting children of families who got thrown out into foster care. Streets are not “bedrooms,” the Mayor declared, and his policies were actually an act of “love” for the homeless, teaching them “personal responsibility.”

“Personal responsibility” was the mantra of all Giuliani’s rhetoric. If poor people don’t have the personal responsibility to follow every single welfare regulation, then they don’t have enough personal responsibility to deserve shelter. And if they don’t have enough personal responsibility to ensure that they have shelter, then they don’t have enough personal responsibility to be allowed to keep their children.

“The work requirement is only a fragment,” says Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless. “If someone is denied public assistance, they will also be denied shelter. The city’s court papers make this abundantly clear.”

The move set off a storm of protest. Homeless advocates immediately filed three separate lawsuits to block the new rules. Virtually all of the city’s “Tier II” shelters, apartment-like dwellings for homeless families, announced that they would not cooperate with throwing people out. And on Dec. 5, over 1,000 people gathered in Union Square to hear Biblical denunciations of Giuliani’s heartlessness.

“If Giuliani had been mayor of Bethlehem,” the Rev. Al Sharpton thundered, “they would have put the baby Jesus into foster care.” And Harlem pastor Father Bob Castle proclaimed that the Mayor’s destination in the afterlife would be somewhere far below heaven.

The number of people in the city’s homeless shelters averaged 23,000 a night last year, up 8% from 1998, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. They included an average of 5,000 families and almost 9,000 children.

The new rules actually go back to 1995, when Giuliani and Gov. George Pataki issued new shelter regulations. Homeless people would be thrown out of shelters for 30 days or more if they failed to cooperate with an assessment, violated shelter rules, failed to comply with a service plan, or failed to comply with any public-assistance requirement, from attending recertification hearings to obeying all workfare rules. Homeless advocates challenged them.

Early last year, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, refused to review a lower-court ruling that those regulations were constitutional—but could not be enforced in and arbitrary and capricious manner, and that children could not be put into foster care because their families were evicted from shelters.

The three lawsuits against the new Giuliani rules are based on three separate court rulings on the right to shelter: the 1981 consent decree in Callahan, in which the city agreed that homeless men had a right to shelter; the Appellate Division’s 1986 ruling in McCain, extending that right to families; and its 1989 Cosentino decision, which held that children could not be put into foster care just because their parents lacked housing.

The Callahan suit is before Justice Stanley Sklar, the McCain suit before Justice Helen Freedman, and the Cosentino suit before Justice Elliott Wilk.