According to new reporting from THE CITY‘s Gwynne Hogan and Katie Honan, the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) plans to pilot new rules that would evict city shelter residents who lack an active public assistance case or are accused of rejecting a housing offer. If implemented, this criteria for shelter eviction would apply to the roughly 22,000 single adults and 4,200 members of adult families staying in shelters overseen by DHS on any given night.
Deborah Berkman, Director of NYLAG’s Shelter and Economic Stability Project, spoke with THE CITY about some of our clients’ experiences with navigating the city shelter system on the path to stable, permanent housing:
Deborah Berkman, director of the Shelter and Economic Stability Project at the New York Legal Assistance Group, noted that many of her clients have had their public benefits cases canceled due to clerical errors that can take weeks to resolve.
All of them, she said, are eager to move into permanent housing and out of shelters, but many struggle to do so because of bureaucratic hurdles and difficulty finding housing they can afford. She said she couldn’t imagine how stricter shelter rules would speed up that process. “The truth is every single one of my clients who is in shelter wants to transition to permanent housing. If given the tools to do so, every one of them would move,” she said.
“To me it’s unfathomable that at this moment in time, we are, New York is taking steps to create more street homelessness.”
Read the full piece published in THE CITY on March 18, 2025.
