“I would like somebody to ask the mayor and the governor, for that matter, what are they planning to do?” said Robert Hayes, the lawyer who brought the case that led to the mandate, in a phone conversation with me. “Are they just going to close the shelter doors? Are they going to stop at 90,000 people, 100,000?”
Mr. Adams, through a spokeswoman, declined to answer these questions when I asked them. I also asked what the city planned to do about possible homeless encampments and whether the city had any idea how many people may be sleeping on city streets if the mandate is suspended, even in part. “We’re not going to get into hypotheticals,” the spokeswoman wrote in an email.
Actually, there is nothing hypothetical about the consequences of allowing tens of thousands of people to live unsheltered. The mandate, known as the Callahan decree, was enacted with the city’s consent. It is named for Robert Callahan, a homeless man who died on the streets of New York in 1980.
New York’s leaders, locked in crisis mode and fixated on the immediate political quagmire before them, are not being forthright with the public. Business leaders, too, have been quiet on the subject. It’s a bafflingly short-term kind of thinking, given that without the Callahan decree, New York City could come to look much more as it did in the early 1980s, when an estimated 36,000 people were living on the streets.
The tragedy ahead for New York if it follows this path is knowable. In 1981, The Times described it in vivid terms. “Settling on stoops and in vestibules, on park benches and in subway entrances, New York City’s tens of thousands of homeless men and women are too numerous and widespread to ignore,” a reporter wrote. “As a group they are unsightly, dirty and disheveled, given to unsocial if not aberrant behavior.”
