In the mid-1970s the problem of homelessness achieved a new visibility on the New York City scene. Literally. Prior to the early 1970s the phenomenon of homelessness—that is, of people who, lacking other accommodations, lived and slept predominantly in public spaces such as the streets, transportation facilities, parks, and other situations not intended for human habitation—was confined mostly to the Bowery, the city’s skid row neighborhood. Some classic studies of this milieu began in the early 1960s and reported that the homeless—then often referred to as “derelicts” and “vagrants”—rarely ventured outside of the Bowery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.1 Increasingly throughout the seventies, however, the homeless came to be encountered across Manhattan and the city as a whole. Over the years, the New York Times and other media documented this spreading crisis.
A Times article from 1971, “Alone and Homeless, ‘Shutouts’ of Society Sleep in Doorways,” noted that
[t]he doorway of the Chase Manhattan Bank is one of half a dozen recessed entry ways on Lexington Avenue between 42nd and 44th Streets that serve as places to sleep for homeless and penniless vagrants drawn to the anonymity of the Grand Central Terminal area. . . .
There are numerous places for doorway sleepers around the city: Pennsylvania Station, the Port Authority bus terminal, Herald Square. Some sites, in Chinatown and along the Upper East Side, are new. All have seen an influx in recent years of derelicts, many of whom formerly slept along the Bowery but who have dispersed largely because of police “clean-up” drives.2
The article was illustrated with a photograph captioned “On Lexington Avenue: A person sleeping outside a shoe store north of 42nd Street.”
Whether police action was primarily the cause of the dispersion of the homeless is doubtful, but in any case the Times continued to document the phenomenon. The title of a 1973 article reported, probably inaccurately, that “The Derelict Population Is Declining” and more cogently added, “But the Whole City Is Its ‘Flophouse.’” The article continued:
For whatever reason, substantial numbers of derelicts are now visible far from the Bowery—in and around Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, near Gramercy Park, on Lexington Avenue in the 30’s, on Broadway from the 70’s through the 90’s and in construction sites anywhere, particularly those that have aluminum corridors for pedestrians.
There are also derelicts who regularly sleep in the darkened archways and alleys of city buildings in lower Manhattan. The police report an increase in the number of derelicts living under the Boardwalk at Coney Island, under the Brooklyn Bridge, near the old Police Headquarters at 100 Center Street, and on 125th Street in Harlem.3
The article also documented the presence of homeless people in the Bronx and Staten Island and included a photograph of “[a] woman in search of food poring over the contents of a trash receptacle at Third Avenue and 70th Street.”
Still on the story in 1976, the Times published an article entitled “Vagrants and Panhandlers Appearing in New Haunts,” which confirmed that
[t]he Bowery scene has spread. In the late hours vagrants can now be found singly and in twos and threes in the triangles on Broadway from Herald Square to 72nd Street, along the southern edge of Central Park, in the side streets of Times Square, around the fountained plazas of the Avenue of the Americas, along Lexington Avenue above 42nd Street, in the small parks of the Lower East Side and in Trinity Place. . . .
In a three-mile walk on the West Side one recent summer night, a reporter saw about 50 vagrants. Half a dozen were shopping-bag ladies, who bridled fiercely when approached. The rest were apathetic or asleep, several were dead drunk and many had bottles bulging from pockets.
On a stairway leading to the garage beneath the Coliseum, on Columbus Circle, a barelegged woman in her 30’s slept. On the floor of the men’s room below a young man sprawled unconscious among his ragged belongings.4
This article, too, was accompanied by photographs, one captioned, “In various places in Manhattan, particularly near bright lights, the vagrants may be found sleeping where they can.”
By the early 1980s social science research backed up the Times’ reportage: homeless people were visible all over the city, especially Manhattan. Anthropologist Kim Hopper’s ground-breaking ethnographic account of this reality deserves to be quoted at length:
In the summer of 1980. . . . [o]n the outside plaza of the Garden alone, it was not unusual to find 75 men and women sleeping there at dawn.
Another quick count, made between 5:30 and 6:00 on a summer morning in 1982, revealed 62 men and women sleeping along the southern perimeter of Central Park. The outreach team serving homeless people in the park reported that there were at least a hundred living there on a relatively permanent basis. The director of security for Amtrak at Penn Station estimated that at the time about 150 homeless people “consider[ed] the station home.” In a single month, mid-January to mid-February 1984, the outreach team serving the Port Authority Bus Terminal made 2,400 contacts (including, no doubt, many duplications) with homeless people in the station.
In many areas of Manhattan (the region I explored most intensively), men could be found sleeping wherever haven, however tentative, presented itself: in the steam tunnels that ran under Park Avenue, alongside railroad tracks and service yards; in vest-pocket parks, recessed doorways, and storefronts along major thoroughfares; in abandoned buildings and deserted subway stations; in the loading bays of manufacturing firms; in storage bunkers below the entrance ramps to highways; in the lower stairwells and basements of unlocked tenements; under bridges and in parking lots; and in makeshift camps along unused rail lines, closed highways, and derelict freight yards. In the early morning hours, some public places resembled nomadic encampments, with linked cardboard boxes serving as individual sleeping quarters. . . .
Things had changed on the street since the days of skid row, and the changes were apparent to anyone who had spent time there.5
Eventually, various groups began to respond to this situation. One of the groups that was most active in the cause of the homeless in the early eighties was Coalition for the Homeless (CFTH). CFTH was born when two streams of social activism that had started independently of each other came together. One stream was that of legal activism, headed by Robert Hayes, a New York lawyer. Another stream was one of advocacy research sponsored by an independent research center, the Community Service Society of New York (CSS) and conducted by Kim Hopper and Ellen Baxter, Columbia University graduate students in medical anthropology and public health, respectively.
Robert Hayes began investigating the condition of the New York City homeless in 1978. Even then the city ran a shelter system, which at the time was a system of lodging houses and auxiliary services for those who had nowhere else to go. Hayes investigated the various kinds of lodging to which the city directed homeless people: the Men’s Shelter at 8 East Third Street, which was the principal intake point for the rest of the men’s shelter system; the Bowery hotels—or flophouses—to which the Men’s Shelter issued vouchers; and later the Keener building (an abandoned mental institution on Wards Island opened in 1979 to accommodate the growing demand for shelter). At the time Hayes began his work, the city sent men applying for shelter to the Bowery hotels, or to Camp LaGuardia, a shelter sixty miles from the city designed to accommodate older clients. If both these places were filled, men slept in the “big room,” the largest room of the Men’s Shelter. Once the big room was filled, other applicants were simply denied shelter.
Back in the late seventies and early eighties, the Men’s Shelter at 8 East Third Street, located in the heart of Manhattan’s Bowery, was a frightening place for anyone not inured to life on the streets. On my visits around 1983, there were always many ragged, unclean men loitering on the sidewalk for half a block on either side of the entrance. Even before one entered, a strong unpleasant odor was very noticeable. Inside, scores of men waited in no apparent order to be seen by the “5 x 8 staff,” so called because their perfunctory interview produced an index card with some basic information about the applicant. Security was not evident, and on one occasion I was unpleasantly approached by one of the men. Such security as there was focused on protecting the front office from break-ins. The New York Times remembered, “Chaos reigned as men checked in for meals and vouchers that purchased beds in nearby flophouses. Between meals, homeless men milled constantly on the street, dealing drugs and panhandling.”6 A staff member once told me that the Men’s Shelter sometimes offered internships to students from a nearby university who were getting their degree in social work. Many of those students would take one look, or perhaps sniff, at the Men’s Shelter, and that was the end of their aspirations to do social work.
Bonnie Stone, the first assistant deputy administrator at the Human Resources Administration (HRA), which was in charge of services for single homeless men in the late seventies and early eighties, also remembered the old Men’s Shelter:
But the place was frightening. . . . [I]t was a huge building, with huge cavernous spaces and there were echoes everywhere. And you would see hundreds of people going around in very, very bad . . . physical shape. . . . You would drive past them on the Bowery and you’d see them bloody and incoherent on the street, well they would be the same way in the shelter. And there were hundreds of them. And the place was dark and loud and had bad smells and it was a little bit like entering Dante’s Inferno. . . . And it had been there for decades.7
This remained a fair description of the big room up until the Men’s Shelter was renovated in the early nineties.8
Hayes continued his interviews with many homeless men and learned, according to CFTH literature, that they “found the streets and subways less dangerous and degrading” than the shelter system. “Streets were [the] preferred option . . . because conditions at the city shelter were so abominable.” He therefore felt that “the demand for shelter beds was far lower than the true need since conditions at the municipal shelter effectively deterred many of the homeless from even seeking shelter.”9
At this point Hayes decided to do something—and what he did seems to have been determined by his belief that what was needed was “recognition with the force of law of a right to shelter.” The reasoning, apparently, was that if shelter were recognized as a right, rather than as a matter of social service, then no one could legitimately be deterred from claiming it. The conceptualization of the problem—as one of rights—also determined the avenue through which it would be settled: the courts. CFTH was aware of this implication, and of the problems it might raise. A CFTH report, “Litigation in Advocacy for the Homeless,” stated that “[i]t is rare that a ‘right to shelter’ will be forthrightly espoused in any jurisdiction. Instead, the more probable course would be one which would require creative interpretation of a more general statutory and constitutional language to arrive at an enforceable entitlement.”
Such creative work is what Hayes then began. He found entitlements to shelter implied in the New York State Constitution, the New York State Social Service Law, the New York Municipal Law, and even the equal protection provision of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, according to Hayes, the following lines of article 17 from the New York State Constitution imply an enforceable right to shelter: “The aid, care and support of the needy are public concerns and shall be provided by the state and by such of its subdivisions, and in such manner and by such means, as the legislature may from time to time determine.”
But whether the New York State Constitution implies a right to shelter is unclear. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, some state constitutions create so-called positive rights to social services such as education and assistance for mentally or physically challenged persons, as well as environmental rights. It has been noted that “[t]he social welfare provision of New York’s Constitution is among the strongest in the nation.”10 But the court interpretation of that provision has typically been, as one source says, “Recognition of a Duty, but with Extraordinary or Complete Deference to the Legislature.”11 That is, the court of appeals (New York State’s highest court) has found that article 17 makes provision for the needy mandatory but leaves the questions of who is needy and how they are to be provided for largely up to the legislature. Thus, in the 1977 case of Tucker v. Toya the court found that
[i]n New York State, the provision for assistance to the needy is not a matter of legislative grace; rather, it is specifically mandated by our constitution. . . . [T]he Constitution imposes upon the state an affirmative duty to aid the needy and though it provides the legislature with discretion in determining the amount of aid and in classifying recipients and defining the term “needy,” it unequivocally prevents the legislature from simply refusing to aid those whom it has classified as needy.12
But in another 1977 case, Bernstein v. Toya, a case addressing the sufficiency of state grants for housing, the court said of the social welfare provision that “[w]e do not read this declaration as . . . commanding that, in carrying out the constitutional duty to provide aid, care and support of the needy, the State must always meet in full measure all the legitimate needs of each recipient.”13 The court wrote further that “[w]e explicitly recognized in Tucker that the legislature is vested with discretion to determine the amount of aid; what we there held prohibited was the legislature’s ‘simply refusing to aid those whom it has classified as needy.’”14
Obviously homeless people are needy, but whether they had been classified by the state as such was not clear in the early eighties. A law review article from that period makes the case that the New York State Constitution should be interpreted to imply a right to shelter but nonetheless acknowledges that “the judiciary, while manifesting a deep concern for the plight of the homeless, has failed to decide the fundamental question of whether a right to shelter exists.”15
But Hayes believed the right to shelter was more definite than that. He was convinced that advocacy through the courts was crucial to solving the problems of the homeless, and with such arguments in mind, he gathered together several homeless men, including one Robert Callahan, to serve as co-litigants against the city and state.
On October 2, 1979, the Callahan suit went before the New York State Supreme Court. The plaintiffs alleged that on cold winter nights homeless men were turned away from the Men’s Shelter at 8 East Third Street if it was full to capacity and that men denied shelter suffered hypothermia, frostbite, and death. They sought a temporary mandatory injunction directing state and city officials to provide lodging and shelter to applicants at the Men’s Shelter. The plaintiffs presented affidavits from persons who worked with homeless men in the Bowery that some men would freeze to death in the streets that winter if more shelter were not available.16 George Gutwirth, assistant city corporation counsel, represented the city and argued that “we didn’t need a lawsuit to tell us we will have a problem this winter,” but state supreme court judge Justice Andrew R. Tyler refused to dismiss the case.17
Perhaps in response to the Callahan suit, on December 3, 1979, the city opened the Keener building on Wards Island in the East River as a shelter for men. The Keener building was located on the grounds of a former state psychiatric hospital, Manhattan State. To reach it, potential clients could take a city-run van service from the Men’s Shelter. Otherwise, they had to take a long trip on public transportation, or cross over a bridge connecting the island to Manhattan at 103rd Street. The Keener building represented a marginal improvement over conditions in the big room. One observer described the building at this time as follows:
Keener was a paragon of institutional thrift. It was run by a limited and overworked staff. Bedding was rudimentary: light mattresses on metal frames. Walls were bereft of any ornament but graffiti. One concession to relief of tedium was a new mess hall, open only during mealtimes. Few of the televisions in the common rooms worked reliably; newspapers were days, even weeks old; magazines were nowhere to be seen. . . . Men lounged around in various states of undress, in contact with an assortment of realities. Some of the ex-patients among these men had come full circle back to the institution that had originally discharged them—this time as shelter clients, not hospital patients. . . . A limited number of subway and bus tokens were made available to men wishing to go back to Manhattan. . . . But many men left the island only infrequently. In the main they languished in near unbroken torpor, confined to the building through the day but for an occasional supervised walk, inmates in all but name.18
Indeed, even Mayor Koch was moved to say no more of the Keener building than “[i]t’s not exactly a palace, but it’s nice.”19 However unappealing the Keener building then was, it did provide an extra 180 beds. This allowed the city to discontinue use of the big room at the Men’s Shelter for purposes of sleeping for the first time in twenty years.20
On December 5, 1979, Justice Tyler granted Hayes the temporary injunction he sought and ordered the city and state to open 750 new beds for the “helpless and hopeless men of the Bowery,” saying that “Bowery derelicts are entitled to board and lodging.”21 However, it is not correct to say that “Tyler held that the New York State constitution gave homeless men a right to ‘adequate shelter.’”22 City attorneys Doron Gopstein and George Gutwirth later pointed out that except for a footnote in which the plaintiffs’ legal authorities were merely cited, the decision did not discuss the legal claims of either party. They also noted that the state constitution claim was eventually rejected by three federal justices, two of whom noted that the decision was instead based on concern that many homeless men were likely to die of hypothermia if the extra beds were not provided. These judges further noted that the granting of a preliminary injunction is not a determination of merits under New York law.23
Plaintiffs then asked the court to take the next step and issue a preliminary injunction requiring the defendants to provide an adequate supply of shelter. On December 24, 1979, the court granted the preliminary injunction and “[o]rdered that the State Defendants and the City Defendants provide shelter (including clean bedding, wholesome board, and adequate security and supervision) to any person who applies for shelter at the Municipal Shelter Care Center for Men.”24 The court also ordered that the city provide the plaintiffs every day with a census of the men who had applied for and been given lodging, and that the city grant monitors chosen by the plaintiffs access to the shelter system. Hayes’s initial steps had thus been a success.
With this early victory came a challenge. Hayes needed recruits to serve as monitors, and more generally he needed partners to pursue other, nonjudicial courses of action. Thus a cadre of interested parties began to develop. According to Hayes, “During that first part of 1980, you know in pubs and in my studio apartment on Sixteenth Street . . . we brought in a crew of 15 and 20 people . . . the nuns, the saints, the really good people who knew what they were doing. It was not the charitable professional complex people.”25 A rallying point for organizing and publicity suggested itself. That year the Democratic National Convention was held in New York at Madison Square Garden near Penn Station. There were debates about how to take advantage of the situation. According to Hayes,
So we organized around that and it actually reflected, I thought, the goodness and naiveté and therefore the inadequacy of our little group. There were some people who wanted to do very visible things. Like in 1980 if you had a long bread line in broad daylight on national TV that would have been shocking . . . and there were people who supported that and then people closer to real folks who are homeless said it’s not fair to put people on political display because they are hungry. . . . And there was the suggestion to put lice on the floor of the convention. That didn’t last long but it was playful. So eventually we worked with one of the groups, the Franciscans, who had the early morning bread line since the Depression around a corner from here at Penn Station. And they had developed a Saint Francis residence which was probably the prototype of supported housing. . . . And . . . at Saint Francis of Assisi Church we just set up as a refuge for folks who would be moved away by the police from where they were sleeping then which was in Penn Station and around the [Madison Square] Garden.
The New York Times reported on the protest that was set up:
[A] wrought-iron gate . . . is always open to the courtyard of St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church. There, kneeling, is an iron St. Francis, and above him hangs a sheet lettered in red with the names of the homeless people who died on New York City’s streets in the past year.
Hunched in the darkened recesses of the tiny courtyard are some of the people who ordinarily sleep around Madison Square Garden and in Pennsylvania Station but who have been shooed away this convention week, unsightly men in tattered shirts, women clutching bags of junk.
Standing with them, in round-the-clock vigil each night of the Democratic National Convention, are members of the Community Services Society, the Catholic Worker, Covenant House and other groups that provide shelter for a few thousand of New York’s homeless people. The service groups hope their demonstration will attract the attention of political leaders here for the convention and they are calling upon the city to house the 30,000 others they say remain on the streets. One thousand of the wayfarers are believed to have died on sidewalks and in gutters in the last year.26
Participants at the vigil report that eventually a camera crew from NBC came around to document the event. One participant, Kim Hopper, was asked just what these various activists represented. On the spot Hopper responded that they were the Coalition for the Homeless. And thus an organization was born.27 Kim Hopper recalled those early days of CFTH:
It would have been great if somebody had ever filmed those early Coalition for the Homeless meetings. They were something out of Fellini. All kinds of folks would show up . . . wandering in off the street. . . . It was like running a three ring circus at times. We had lawyers, we had policy makers from Albany, we had city officials, we had people living on the streets, we had folks with active psychiatric problems. Everybody would show up and we would somehow have to hammer out an agenda and actually conduct a semi-orderly meeting. God knows somehow it happened with a kind of, I don’t know, folk magic of some sort.28
Hopper was then a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University. Together with Ellen Baxter, a public health graduate student also at Columbia, he had been hired by the Community Service Society (CSS) in December 1979 to conduct a study of the mentally ill homeless on the streets of New York. CSS produced two extensive studies of homelessness, Private Lives/Public Spaces: Homeless Adults on the Streets of New York City, by Hopper and Baxter29 and One Year Later: The Homeless Poor in New York City, 1982, in which Lawrence Klein and Stuart Cox joined Hopper and Baxter as coauthors.30 These works were the products of a research project that had been conceived by Frank G. Caro, director of the Institute for Social Research of CSS, and supported by a fifty thousand dollar grant from the Ittleson Foundation.31 The CSS reports dealt with the life of the homeless on the streets, and also with the quality of the shelter system. CSS advanced two claims that became especially influential.
First, CSS made an estimate of the number of homeless people in New York City. CSS held that there were thirty-six thousand, this figure being based on estimates made by the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH).32 In an internal memo dated October 12, 1979, OMH in turn based its figure of thirty thousand on estimates made by the Men’s Shelter that the approximately nine thousand different men they serviced represented 30 percent of the homeless men in the city. CSS then added to this the Manhattan Bowery Corporation’s estimate of six thousand to sixty-five hundred “periodically homeless” women to arrive at the thirty-six thousand figure.
CSS made this estimate public in February 1981. According to the New York City Human Resources Administration (HRA), for fiscal year 1980–1981 the overall daily average attendance in the shelters was 2,428.33 Again, since December 1979 the city had been required to provide shelter to any man who requested it. (In the case of Eldredge v. Koch, filed in February 1982, the advocates sought successfully to extend the coverage of the Callahan decree to homeless women.) How did CSS explain the fact that, while their estimate of the number of homeless people was thirty-six thousand, not even a tenth of that number had requested shelter from the city?
The answer lies in a second main contention of CSS, which concerned the nature of the shelter system. CSS held that conditions at these facilities were so bad that the homeless refused to use them and preferred to stay on the streets. According to CSS,
What public resources do exist, moreover, have their own deterrent power. The deplorable conditions of the flophouses and Keener Building, high incidence of violence, routine contempt meted out to applicants for shelter, and the historical association of the Bowery as the abode of “bums,” all make the Men’s Shelter the place of last resort for many homeless men. For different reasons—namely exclusionary policies, limited beds, and the militaristic regime—the Women’s Shelter can effectively service only a small proportion of homeless women. . . . Given the state of the public shelters—or perhaps more accurately, given the nature of the personal costs extracted when one submits to their regimes and conditions—the decision made by many homeless people to fend for themselves on the streets gains at least a measure of intelligibility.34
In short, CSS came to very much the same conclusions about the plight of New York’s homeless and about the condition of the shelter system that Hayes did: The problem was enormous and the shelter system was inadequate to help.
Private Lives/Public Spaces caught the attention of a wide audience right away. The monograph was published in February of 1981. On Sunday, March 8, the Times, which had been given exclusive access to the report by CSS,35 ran a front-page story about Baxter and Hopper’s research. The headline trumpeted what the journalist apparently thought was the most salient finding of the study: “Help Is Urged for 36,000 in City’s Streets.”36 Thus was born a figure that would be widely repeated in all sorts of media when the issue of homelessness in New York City was broached.
The authors of Private Lives/Public Spaces had not expected their work to achieve such wide notice. Baxter would say of the notoriety of the report that “we were totally unprepared . . . and were just . . . stunned.”37 What should not have been so surprising was how much that attention focused on the estimate of thirty-six thousand homeless New Yorkers. In a follow-up to Private Lives/Public Spaces, the authors said of the estimate that “its place in that report was less than central.”38 But the very first sentence of the preface to the report featured the thirty-six thousand figure and presented it as based on “official estimates.”39 Cynthia J. Bogard in her book, Seasons Such as These: How Homelessness Took Shape in America, offers a detailed, social constructionist account of this estimate that emphasizes the political nature of the process whereby homelessness came to be legitimated as a serious social problem.40 But her analysis underestimates the importance of one key feature of the estimate: its “official” nature.
In the early eighties there were no scientifically sophisticated estimates of the city homeless population available. Advocates for the homeless who were eager to increase the salience of the homelessness problem were thus faced with a dilemma: how to produce an estimate of the homeless that would be taken seriously by policy actors and the media when no figures derived from objectively collected data and sophisticated statistical methodology were available. If Baxter and Hopper had presented the thirty-six thousand number as simply their own guess, it could have been dismissed as a self-promoting maneuver undertaken by advocates with an interest in exaggerating the problem. But emphasizing the fact that the number was based on estimates made by the Men’s Shelter staff and the Manhattan Bowery Corporation imbued it with objectivity. The city had to, at least at first, take seriously an estimate that was generated by the city itself (and a credible nonprofit organization). Baxter and Hopper had pulled off, perhaps unintentionally, a neat piece of rhetorical judo: the city’s own credibility was used to validate a claim that placed the city in a very unflattering light. In any case, the estimate drew lots of attention but also lots of criticism. For example, I pointed out that during the winter of 1983 the city shelter system, which at that point was offering shelter to any homeless person who requested it, sheltered only around forty-nine hundred men.41
Prodded by the Callahan litigation, the city had quickly opened the Keener building as a shelter. Demand for shelter promptly shot up; Keener was filled to overflowing with more than 625 men by early 1980. Partly in response to this situation, the city eventually had a new building constructed on Wards Island—the Schwartz building—which has housed four hundred men almost since it opened in May 1982.
By the summer of 1981 the case of Callahan v. Carey, which had thus far resulted in a preliminary injunction, had come to trial. The issue was, What would the final decision of the court be? At this point a compromise was reached: Hayes and the plaintiffs had been demanding not merely recognition of a right to shelter but also that this shelter be “community based,” i.e., that shelters be scattered throughout the city and empowered to admit clients directly, to avoid the “deterrent effect” of having clients processed primarily in the Bowery. When the city pointed out that community opposition would make this plan nearly impossible, the requirement was dropped, with the city agreeing to supply all applicants with shelter of a quality to be mandated by the courts. This compromise was the basis for a consent decree, which was signed August 26, 1981, and which amounted to “recognition with the force of law of a right to shelter.”
The key provision of the decree, on which the right to shelter would depend, was as follows: “The city defendants shall provide shelter and board to each homeless man who applies for it provided that (a) the man meets the need standard to qualify for the home relief program established in New York State; or (b) the man by reason of physical, mental or social dysfunction is in need of temporary shelter.”42
As the above text shows, the Callahan consent decree did not create a right to shelter on demand for absolutely all homeless men. An applicant had to either meet the standard for home relief or be “by reason of physical, mental or social dysfunction” in need of shelter. But many very poor men qualified for Home Relief, which was the state’s welfare program for single men. And the criterion of suffering from physical, mental, or social dysfunction was left undefined and therefore could be interpreted very widely.
But there was more to the decree than the provision of a bare right to shelter. The quality of the shelter was also specified. Beds in city-operated shelters had to be at least “30 inches in width, substantially constructed, in good repair and equipped with clean springs.” Each bed had to have a “clean, comfortable, well-constructed mattress” and a “clean, comfortable pillow of average size.” Another provision held that “[e]ach resident shall receive two clean sheets, a clean blanket, a clean pillowcase, a clean towel, soap and toilet tissue. A complete change of bed linens and towels will be made for each new resident at least once a week and more often as needed on an individual basis.” Clients were to receive a “lockable storage unit” and “laundry services not less than twice a week.” Other provisions were as follows:
Client capacities for the Keener building and Camp LaGuardia were also specified. An appendix A provided further crucial requirements:
Similar provisions applied to the Bowery lodging houses to which some applicants were referred by the city. Appendix B provided for emergency situations, such as snow emergencies, during which time the capacity of the shelters could be temporarily enlarged.
As can be seen, the Callahan consent decree, while its provisions were reasonable, represented a challenging set of mandates for the city to execute. Why, then, did the city agree to sign the decree? According to Koch, one important reason why the city decided to sign was that such was the advice of the then corporation counsel, Allen Schwartz. By his own account Koch was reluctant to sign the decree. However, “in the early days [of the Koch administration] the corporation counsel . . . Allen Schwartz . . . said that, it’s better that we sign these decrees, because otherwise they’ll impose even heavier sanctions.”43 Others, such as George Gutwirth, former assistant city corporation counsel, deny this and claim that no one in the corporation counsel’s office ever thought the city would lose. In any case, eventually Koch would come to regret having signed the Callahan decree. As he would later say, “We made a mistake, and I am the first one to say it. The city made a mistake when it agreed to the consent decree and now everybody thinks they can tell the city what to do.”44
Further, at the time of the negotiations, the city was not unsympathetic to Hayes’s suit. One of the city officials who was involved in the Callahan negotiations was Robert Trobe, deputy commissioner of the Human Resources Administration (HRA) for Family and Adult Services (FAS), which then oversaw services to the single homeless. Trobe was deeply involved in the city’s defense from the beginning and was well known at the corporation counsel’s office for constantly calling to ask questions and offer advice. According to Trobe,
we really felt that . . . not signing the consent decree would put us in the position of denying homeless people the right to shelter. We felt we couldn’t take the position that if someone came to our doors who was genuinely homeless we could turn them away and they would freeze to death. We didn’t think that was right. We didn’t think it was acceptable from a political point of view.45
Of course the city had for years been turning away applicants once the big room in the Men’s Shelter was full. But apparently officially stipulating such a policy in court was more than the city could stomach.
Finally, the city was willing to sign the Callahan decree because it underestimated how much demand there would be for shelter. Trobe’s colleague at HRA FAS, Bonnie Stone, who was also involved in advising the city’s lawyers, remembers that
[w]e . . . certainly underestimated the size of the problem because we thought we could actually—I kind of smile at it—we thought, well, we’ll find a thousand beds. We estimated that if we could find a thousand beds for these men on the Bowery and some for the women we could probably take care of it. Well we couldn’t have been more wrong because the moment we agreed to do it the floodgates opened because the problem was much, much, much bigger than we had estimated.46
Even the advocates underestimated the size of the proposed task. Before signing the Callahan decree, the city opened, as has been mentioned, a former psychiatric hospital as the Keener building on Ward’s Island in the Hudson River, access to which was gained through a special bus service. Ellen Baxter, one of the founders of Coalition for the Homeless and coauthor of Private Lives/Public Spaces, doubted the facility would be much used. She remembered that
[w]e never thought that people would get on the bus, go over to the grounds of a psychiatric hospital where some of them have had negative histories . . . in a distant place and actually seek shelter. We were sure that selection of that site by the city was a move to sort of contain the issue. And when you looked at the trajectory of how quickly it became overcrowded and beyond capacity, it happened in a matter of about two weeks. So then we thought well I guess we were wrong, that the need is even greater than we had figured.47
Hayes has a different perspective on why the city signed the consent decree. He is skeptical of former city actors who now say they never had any problem with the concept of a right to shelter. According to him, the case “was a contested, adversarial proceeding from the get-go.” About his own reasons for signing, Hayes said that
[t]here was no doubt we were the underdogs. A betting person would have been very nervous about us getting thrown out of court. A quirk . . . about New York state litigation against government entities is if you win in a lower court, all the city has to do is file a one-page document called a notice of appeal and the judgment would be stayed . . . through the next level of appeal, which would be a year, and through the next level of appeal, likely, which would be another year. That was a part of it because I did feel some urgency, obviously. . . . I wasn’t caring about anything besides having no shelter.48
CFTH forced the city to live up to its obligation, and to increase steadily the capacity of the system in order to eliminate the deterrent factor of limited beds. Usually after such an increase, demand for shelter shot up until the new capacity was filled and the city was obliged to find more beds. Thus, six weeks after the consent decree was signed, the city ran out of beds.49 CFTH then brought the city back into court, where the city was ordered to open another four hundred beds within twenty-four hours. The city complied by housing men at an abandoned Brooklyn school building. Within a month, the school’s capacity was reached. Again the city was brought back into court, and again a new shelter was opened, this one in an abandoned armory. But this action did not entirely satisfy the court, and in response to the court’s demand that the city meet the growing demand for shelter, the city opened yet another armory to homeless men. After the December injunction, the city made a steady effort to provide for the homeless, and so no longer turned any applicants away.
One must be careful in asserting that the outcome of Callahan v. Carey was recognition of a right to shelter. The suit ended with the signing of a consent decree, and left all points of law—including the determination of a right to shelter—legally unsettled. However, it is true that since the December 1979 injunction, the city has been obliged to follow a de facto policy that assumes such a right.
Callahan v. Carey and the publicity brought on by the advocates’ work had a large impact on the shelter system, especially in regard to increasing the supply of beds, improving conditions, and generally removing deterrent factors. By the early eighties, the system was already quite different from what it was when Hayes first began his investigations back in 1978. (The emphasis here will be on the facilities for men, since they were the focus of the Callahan v. Carey suit, and since the overwhelming majority of the shelter clients were male.)
The intake point to the shelter system for men was the Men’s Shelter at Third Street. Very few men actually slept at the Men’s Shelter; it contained only a few beds in its infirmary. Rather, clients were generally sent to one of several principal types of lodging. The majority were given housing vouchers, which entitled them to spend the night in one of the Bowery hotels: These were the Union, the Kenton, the Palace, the Sunshine, the Delevan, and the Stevenson. These were among the least comfortable lodgings in the shelter system. Some of the men slept in small cubby-like rooms covered on the top with chicken wire; other accommodations were dormitory style. About 1,150 men slept in the hotels.
After processing at the Men’s Shelter, some men were sent to a city-run shelter for lodging. The exact assignment depended on the vacancy rate at the various shelters. The principal city-run shelters were the Charles H. Gay Shelter Center on Wards Island, the East New York Shelter in Brooklyn, and the Harlem Shelter. Men who were assigned to these shelters received free transportation there and back to the Men’s Shelter in the morning.
Of these shelters, the Gay Center was by far the largest, lodging 816 men in its two buildings. (East New York housed 350 and the Harlem Shelter held 200.)50 The Gay Center consisted of the Keener building and the Schwartz building, which was then newly built and which opened in May of 1982. The entire center was run by the private charitable organization, the Volunteers of America, under contract to the city.
Men in the Keener building were assigned to fair-sized “semi-private” rooms, which slept two or three people. Accommodations in the Schwartz building were dormitory style, but still fairly spacious. The Schwartz building, since it was brand new, had a clean and modern look to it. The Schwartz building was dedicated on the same day that CSS released One Year Later,51 which acknowledged that the facility was “clean, spacious, and well appointed.” The Times described the Schwartz building as a “low, brick dormitory . . . with . . . pine-beamed ceilings and skylights” and quoted the facility’s operator as saying, “I didn’t think it would be this beautiful. . . . It’s like you’re going into a student union of some college or university. You wouldn’t think these homeless would have such a place.”52 Both buildings had a TV room. The Schwartz building also had kitchen and dining facilities. The center had a medical clinic and mental health services on site.
When the shelters and Bowery hotels were filled, the city sent people to one of the armories it had opened for the homeless with the cooperation of the state. The Flushing Armory and the Lexington Avenue Armory were for women; the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx, the Fort Washington Armory in Manhattan, and the Park Avenue Armory were for men. The Fort Washington Armory, which held six hundred people, was the largest of these sites. All the armories were open on a twenty-four-hour basis, which meant that clients could be admitted there directly, without having to go first through the East Third Street site.
The city would continue to rely on low-quality armory shelters up through the late 1990s. But the beginnings of better solutions were made in the early eighties. In 1983 the State Division of Housing and Community Renewal would fund several projects meant to develop SRO (single room occupancy) housing with various supportive services for the mentally ill homeless. One of these grantees, the Committee for the Heights Inwood Homeless, was headed by Ellen Baxter and would by 1986 open a residence that would become a model for future efforts to develop a permanent housing alternative to shelters like Fort Washington.
Some sixty miles outside the city, in the upstate town of Chester in Orange County, Camp LaGuardia slept approximately 950 men. This shelter was primarily intended for use by older clients. In 1983 it was undergoing extensive renovation. New dormitories were being built that would eventually house six hundred men.
There were also three main shelters for women. The Women’s Shelter, which was also the principal intake center for women, was in the Lower East Side. It provided meals, showers, and social services for the women in the shelter system, and had fifty-one beds. Other sites were the Women’s Shelter Annex, which held 150 women, and the Bushwick Center.
Bonnie Stone remembered what it was like then to work on homeless issues at HRA:
It didn’t take up every minute, but little by little it started to. There was a little competition for our time from some of the other programs, mostly for the home care programs. But . . . we were kind of running . . . we were flat out running all the time, 24/7. And it was great, it was exhilarating. Because we could see the product of what we were doing, we were actually housing people. Now, there was a lot of subsequent criticism about, well, they were opening these big awful places. Well yeah, we couldn’t open them fast enough.
And our mode was emergency. Okay, we had consented to do this, it is running us like crazy but we have to do it. So it was a little bit like, I hate to say this, but it’s a little bit like war, you know . . . it was logistics, logistics, logistics. It was buying thousands of sheets and thousands of beds and hiring staff and opening up places . . . the biggest places. . . . We opened up anything we could find and any building we could get control of. So we actually got control of a couple of school buildings. The state . . . ended up giving us . . . half a dozen armories and we were just running to keep up. I think we probably opened up ten thousand beds in three years. And you can imagine. . . . I mean . . . we had a good time doing it because it was so urgent and you were doing something really, really solid.53
Plenty of unusual administrative challenges presented themselves as HRA struggled to abide by court orders and comply with the consent decree. One was the mystery of the short-lived sheets. The consent decree required that each client receive two clean sheets at least every week and thus HRA needed lots of sheets. Stone’s procurement director found it extremely difficult to keep the shelter system in sheets. Meanwhile, her operations director never had enough. To resolve the problem, Stone found herself sitting them both down together and “having this kind of Kafkaesque discussion about the life cycle of a sheet in the New York City shelter system. And I’m just trying to keep these guys from killing each other. They only wanted to do their jobs and they were being thwarted.” It was determined that the average life of a sheet was six to eight weeks, and the question now became why sheets didn’t last any longer. Weeks later the mystery began to resolve itself. To achieve the necessary high-volume laundry capacity, the city at first contracted out with hotels. But once word got out that guests’ laundry was being mixed with that of homeless people, the hotel would stop offering the service. After running through in this way every hotel with sufficient capacity, HRA had to use city-owned laundry facilities—those operated by the Department of Corrections at Rikers Island. Freshly cleaned sheets came out of the Rikers laundry in large bales. Guards inspected the bales to check for escaping prisoners. Their method of inspection? Running the bales through with bayonets. Once the guards’ dangerous efforts were curbed, sheets started lasting longer.54
Clearly, the city had developed a large system and made great efforts to recognize the de facto right to shelter, and to eliminate any deterrent factors from the shelter system. The advocacy groups largely got their way, but at a high price. In early 1978, when Robert Hayes began his work, the city’s operating budget for the homeless was $6.8 million; for fiscal year 1983 it was $38 million.55
One of the first indications of what had been wrought came with the release in May 1982 of a study conducted by HRA, “Chronic and Situational Dependency: Long Term Residents in a Shelter for Men,” usually referred to as the “Keener study.” This was followed up in November 1982 by “New Arrivals: First-Time Shelter Clients” (which would be revised in May 1983). These studies were conducted by the HRA Bureau of Management Systems, Planning, Research, and Evaluation under the direction of Stephen Crystal, then a newly minted sociologist who trained at Harvard. The Keener study was a study of 173 men who had been living in the Keener building for two months or more. “New Arrivals” presented the results of 687 interviews conducted with first-time clients either at the Men’s Shelter or at the East New York Shelter. Both reports asked a variety of questions regarding the men’s background and their reasons for coming to the shelter. The Keener study’s purpose was to determine in detail who longtime users of the shelter were and why they came to need the shelters’ emergency services. “New Arrivals” was principally concerned with determining where the clients were immediately before they came to the shelter.
Source: Stephen Crystal et al., “Chronic and Situational Dependency: Long Term Residents in a Shelter for Men” (New York: Human Resources Administration, May 1982), p. iv (also known as the Keener study).
The Keener study documented the heterogeneous nature of the shelter population (see table 1.1). The largest category was “psychiatric only,” which accounted for 34 percent of these men. The third-largest category of the Keener study was “alcoholic only,” which consisted of 6 percent of its subjects. The study also classified 2 percent of its subjects as “drug only.”
This brings us to the second-largest category identified in the Keener study, and also in some respects the most interesting: those men classified as “economic only,” who made up 19 percent of the subjects. The report said of such “discouraged workers” that they “had in the past been able to function at quite high levels, both occupationally and socially.”
Like the Keener study, the “New Arrivals” study found that “there are substantial numbers of men seeking services at the shelters who have significant job skills and histories, and . . . many have previously been able to support themselves through employment. This further supports the need to develop employment referrals, supported work, and other means of fostering economic self-sufficiency.” “New Arrivals” also found that
the shelters are drawing from a potentially very large population pool, most of whom are not “homeless” in the sense of being undomiciled at the time of coming to the shelter. Thus future demand may be very large. It will be important to carefully assess client needs and resources, to impose appropriate structure and make appropriate demands on clients’ own efforts.
The subjects had been asked where they spent the night before they came to the shelter (see table 1.2).
| Table 1.2: Place of Previous Night’s Stay of Shelter Clients | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type of Place | Number of Men | Percent of Total |
|
Street or Subway |
256 |
37.6 |
|
Friends |
105 |
15.4 |
|
Family |
96 |
14.1 |
|
Own Apartment |
80 |
11.7 |
|
Other Institution |
57 |
8.4 |
|
Hospital |
38 |
5.6 |
|
SRO |
29 |
4.3 |
|
Jail |
13 |
1.9 |
|
CLH (Bowery Hotel) |
7 |
1.0 |
|
Totals |
681 |
100.0 |
Source: Stephen Crystal et al., “New Arrivals: First-Time Shelter Clients” (New York: Human Resources Administration, November 1982, Revised May 1983), p. 13, table 6.
The report found that
[t]he majority of men had not spent the previous night in the streets or subways, although this was the largest single category. Thirty-eight percent of the men had done so, while friends (15 percent), family (14 percent), and own apartment (12 percent) accounted together for slightly more. The fact that one of seven new men had spent the previous night with family is particularly striking. It is also significant that 12 percent had spent the previous night in their own apartment. Institutions of various sorts, including jail, account for almost all the rest, while hotels accounted for a smaller proportion than expected, only 4 percent. Just over sixty percent of the men had not been in the streets or subways in any of their last three sleeping arrangements. (italics in the original)
Together, the Keener study and “New Arrivals” gave the city and other observers the first clear picture of what the population of the newly developed shelter system looked like. Several features stood out. The Keener study broached the possibility that limitations on the right to shelter, like work requirements or a stricter intake process, might be necessary to prevent inappropriate use of the shelters by relatively high-functioning clients. “New Arrivals” made it clear that the shelter system was being used not only by streets dwellers but also by a potentially very large population of people in a wide range of marginal housing situations. Thus was seriously broached for the first time in this context the possibility that city policy might be creating “perverse incentives” that encouraged some people to leave bad housing and enter the shelter system. At the time, I made much of this possibility and attracted a certain amount of attention in media and policy circles for doing so.56 The theme of perverse incentives was to come up repeatedly in policy discourse and the private thinking of city policymakers even after later research—in particular Cragg and O’Flaherty’s 1999 article on homeless policy under Dinkins—suggested that the concern was overblown.57
The early eighties was a time of very rapid expansion of the city’s shelter system. Between calendar years 1980 and 1983 the single adult sheltered population more than doubled, from 2,155 to 5,061 persons, a 134 percent increase.58 This sudden expansion of the shelter system brought about by the Callahan litigation had the unintended consequence of forcing the city to develop a city-operated system that relied on large public buildings such as armories rather than on smaller shelters operated by private not-for-profit organizations. Placement of new shelters required approval of the Board of Estimate, which in those days functioned as the de facto upper house of the city’s legislature (the City Council functioned at that time as the lower house). The board consisted of three city-wide officials—the mayor, the comptroller, and the City Council president—each with two votes—and the five borough presidents, with one vote each. The locality-based borough presidents were very sensitive to the concerns of their neighborhoods about the placement of unwanted facilities and would typically support each other on such matters. That meant that placement of a new shelter could be blocked by the borough presidents if they could win the support of just one city-wide official, something generally not hard to do. Placement of new, private shelters under this governance system required a long negotiation process and was therefore not a practical way to expand the shelter system quickly, as the Callahan litigation required. The only alternative was to rely on large buildings that were already publicly owned and therefore did not need board approval, which in practice meant unused hospitals, schools, and especially armories. Smaller, private, not-for-profit-operated shelters became easier to place when the Board of Estimate was abolished in 1989 and the City Council became the city’s unicameral legislature.59 The borough presidents then lost their role in the legislative process and were no longer able to block placement of small shelters in their jurisdictions. But for the nonce, the city had to rely on armories and similar city-owned buildings.
Such available buildings often did not meet the quality standards that were laid out in appendix A of the Callahan consent decree. Particularly tricky was the requirement that “[t]here shall be a minimum one toilet and one lavatory for each six residents and a minimum of one tub or shower for each ten residents.” These ratios were chosen because at the time they matched State Department of Social Service regulations for adult homes. Bringing a building up to that specification was expensive. For example, installing required toilets and showers (and emergency lighting) in the original Keener building in 1982 cost $700, 000.60 The city estimated that plumbing renovations at two sites it was considering would exceed $400,000 and that bringing the Fort Washington Armory up to Callahan specifications would cost about $435,000.61
The city also found burdensome the provision in the Callahan decree that “[e]very facility shall have space for dining and leisure activities.” Complete social services were provided at the Men’s Shelter, the Charles Gay Shelter Center on Wards Island, and the Brooklyn Shelter.62 These sites contained, the city argued, overabundant capacity for feeding clients, with the Men’s Shelter being able to feed nineteen hundred men at each meal, the Wards Island complex capable of feeding four hundred men at a sitting, and the Brooklyn Shelter able to feed over one hundred men at a time.63 Why not, the city argued, allow men to be fed and provided other services at these sites and then transported to sleeping and bathroom facilities elsewhere?
The city filed a request in New York State Supreme Court on October 8, 1982, that the specific plumbing ratios be dropped and that, instead, the city be required to provide fixtures “adequate” for all men to shower once a day and to otherwise “meet client needs.”64 The city also requested that the requirement to provide dining and leisure activities at “every facility” be construed to allow men to be fed at the large-capacity sites and then bused to other shelters for sleeping. The New York Times reported, without citing a source, that the requested modifications in the decree would save the city “at least $1 million on toilets and cooking facilities.”65 Besides the expense involved, the city also argued that there simply weren’t enough compliant facilities available to shelter the anticipated need and that therefore “to apply these kind of unrealistic and unnecessary provisions to buildings, armories, when we need facilities to house men, would make sure that we cannot use these facilities, and that would simply exacerbate the wrong sought to be corrected.”66
Hayes’s public response to the city’s request was vitriolic: “For the city to come in on the eve of winter and say ‘we don’t want to obey the consent decree’ is not only shameless but heartless.” According to him, “This is a way of keeping shelters so dangerous, dehumanizing and degrading that people will be forced to stay on the streets.”67 In court, Hayes was more measured. At issue, for him, was not so much the plumbing ratios in themselves, but the quality of life in the shelters. Regarding the matter of the ratios, Hayes told Judge Wallach in colloquy, “It’s not a major point. It’s a red herring. I think it may be an intentional red herring to divert the Court’s and public attention from the real issue, which is the bussing plan, the centralization and consequential injuries that the homeless suffer because of this centralization.” Further, “we are opposing this massive centralization of the shelter program to the extent that it brings so many people to one location that it keeps people away from that location. It keeps them out of the system and in the street.”68 In his deposition to the court Hayes explained further:
Of particular importance was finding means to limit the size of shelters to a humane scope. Defendant Blum, then head of the state regulatory agency for shelters, had promulgated a regulation in early 1981 prohibiting the licensing of new shelters with a capacity of more than 200 persons. The City refused to incorporate that regulation into the decree so I settled for standards for toilets, showers and lavatories which would, as a practical matter, limit the size, concentration and hence inhumanity of new shelters.69
Surprisingly, the New York Times, whose coverage of the homeless issue was followed by all parties and whose editorials had always been favorable to Hayes and the advocates, came out very emphatically on the city’s side. Regarding Hayes’s charges of shamelessness and heartlessness the Times editorialized,
As a dedicated advocate whose tireless efforts forced the city to agree to provide shelter for any homeless person requesting it, Mr. Hayes may be forgiven a proprietary interest in the shelters. But the city’s request is not heartless. It is sensible and economically prudent. . . . To oppose a sensible change in the court mandate for toilets and showers is to waste reformist energies.70
But the court wouldn’t buy the city’s arguments. On November 4, 1982, regarding the city’s practice of transporting men to several facilities for needed services, Judge Wallach wrote,
The trans-shipment by bus to and from HRA’s Bowery intake facility or elsewhere of up to 1,000 destitute men on a daily basis cannot be viewed by this court as consistent with the basic structure and fundamental objectives of the decree. . . . To say these and like proposals are an honest substitute for the integrated shelter facilities originally contemplated by this decree would be to play a cruel and unacceptable hoax upon the plaintiffs and the class they represent.71
However, the court did take note of the fact that the State Department of Social Services, whose regulations for adult homes were the source of the decree’s plumbing ratios, had, since the decree was signed, changed those regulations to require one toilet and lavatory for each ten residents and one shower or tub for each fifteen. Previously, the regulations and the decree had required one toilet and lavatory for every six clients and one shower or tub for each ten. Wallach therefore amended the decree to embody the new regulations. The city was unhappy with this small modification and had specifically urged the court against this result. In its memorandum to the court, the city wrote that “the defendants do not urge this Court to apply this new ratio since experience indicates that rigid formulas in this area cannot present predictably achievable goals, and could serve to needlessly restrict occupancy or proper use of suitable buildings.”72 Judge Wallach concluded his decision by illustrating the court’s responsibility with a biblical flourish:
The judge, engaged in separating the good people from the bad, thanks the first group for providing him with meat when he was hungry, drink when he was thirsty, clothing when he was naked and shelter when he was sick. These favored litigants seem not to understand, so the judge explains: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matthew XXV, 40).73
The city, apparently failing to be suitably uplifted, simply reported through an HRA spokesperson that it was “disappointed” with Wallach’s decision.74
As can be seen, the city had developed an extensive system to comply with the first requirement of the Callahan v. Carey consent decree—that all applicants be given shelter. The city also made efforts to comply with the other aspect of the consent decree—the quality standards. In 1982, according to CFTH, “the shelters remain dangerous and forbidding, continuing to deter many homeless men from coming off the streets.”75 But the city disagreed. It held that it was in substantial compliance with all aspects of the quality requirements.76 In fact, shelter conditions, with some exceptions, would continue to be bad for quite some time. Especially bad were conditions in the large armory shelters. The overnight imposition of the Callahan decree meant that at first the main thrust of city efforts was devoted to expanding capacity on a catch-as-catch-can basis, which made for poor-quality service. But the working principle of a right to shelter for single homeless people had been established. The entitlement phase of homeless policy had started. The city would have to learn how to manage the system better, but the learning process had begun.