Does New York Have to ‘House the World’?

By Daniel Greenfield October 03, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog  

In 1938, New York State held its eighth and penultimate constitutional convention. Little did the various power brokers attending the event know that what they had really accomplished was to fire a bullet that would destroy the City of New York some 85 years in the future.

The state constitutional convention was dominated by New Dealers who were busy inserting their socialist agenda everywhere. The ideal of the American Constitution, that freedom comes from government non-interference, was considered laughably outmoded in a ‘modern’ age..

Instead, Senator Robert F. Wagner, a key New Deal figure, argued that, “the threat to freedom… comes from another source — from poverty and insecurity, from sickness and the slum, from social and economic conditions in which human beings cannot be free.”

The 1938 Constitution threw in a Labor Bill of Rights and Article XVII on Social Welfare. The wording was more aspirational and idealistic than legalistic. “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.”

And no one thought very much about it until 1979 when a 26-year-old leftist lawyer named Robert Hayes sued Gov. Carey and the state on behalf of a wino. The wino, Robert Callahan, a far gone alcoholic who died before the case was settled, became the titular name on Callahan v. Carey which established a ‘right to shelter’ for, in the words of Justice Andrew Tyler (a Harlem civic leader later convicted of perjury for his relationships with gamblers), “homeless alcoholics, addicts, mentally impaired derelicts, flotsam and jetsam”.

Hayes’ argument hinged on the Constitution saying “shall be provided”. The State of New York (meaning the city’s taxpayers) were obligated to fund housing for every single addict and bum.

And that was horribly expensive and difficult until the whole world showed up 44 years later.

Now New York’s liberal elites are arguing over whether the “right to shelter” only applies to New York’s mentally impaired derelicts and addicts or those of the entire world who have been arriving in endless numbers as part of the Biden administration’s open borders policy.

“Never was it envisioned that this would be an unlimited universal right or obligation on the city to have to house literally entire world,” Gov. Hochul protested.

Mayor Eric Adams has claimed that the mass invasion of illegal aliens will “destroy” New York and has begun warning that the city will start expelling single young men from shelters after two months. He has gone to court to suspend the disastrous 1979 ‘Right to Shelter’ consent decree

Legally speaking he’s likely to lose because the city’s radical courts have repeatedly held that everyone has the right to be housed even if it’s a right that has no actual legal basis.

The 1938 constitution simply stated that the legislature can provide for the needy, but each successive progressive constitutional misinterpretation is a deliberate effort to warp it further. New York voters, now long dead, allowed New Dealers to open the gates of hell. Seventies activist lawyers pried it open further and their successors want it to be open all the way.

While Callahan, the bum at the head of the case died, Robert Hayes, the lawyer who brought the case, now heads the Community Healthcare Network which provides health and social services and receives an annual salary of $414,671 with another $42,784 in benefits.

In the face of a mass invasion, Hayes still insists that, “If the governor doesn’t think there’s a statewide right-to-shelter, she’s very, either very ill-informed or frankly derelict in her obligation.”

New York voters and legislators could fix this with a constitutional convention that throws out the New Deal nonsense that the legal requirement of housing everyone in the world hinges on. But then the Democrats would have to admit that their leftist ideology is at the heart of the problem.

An op-ed in the New York Daily News by Dave Giffen, the Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless ($248,841 + $77,967 annual salary) and Adriene Holder of the Legal Aid Society ($228,530 + $31,367) once again invoked the memory of Robert Callahan, the long dead wino in whose name the city and must be burned to the ground to accommodate every last migrant.

After two generations of exploiting an alcoholic’s death for power and profit, the homeless industrial complex isn’t done. Its position is literally that New York City must house everyone in the world. New Yorkers, from political leaders down to local residents, have a simple choice: they can either accept the madness of its proposition or wipe out this insane legal theory.

“New York City cannot single-handedly provide care to everyone crossing our border,” Mayor Adams has argued. “For more than a year, New York City has — largely on its own — provided shelter, food, clothing, and more to over 70,000 migrants who have arrived in our city. We now have more asylum seekers in our care than New Yorkers experiencing homelessness when we came into office. When the original Callahan consent decree came down almost 40 years ago, no one could have contemplated, foresaw, or even remotely imagined a mass influx of individuals entering our system — more than doubling our census count in slightly over a year.”

Socialism never foresees anything. That’s why it’s socialism. Leftists never address their own extremist tendency to adopt ever more dogmatic versions of their ideology detached from any kind of pragmatic considerations. The Callahan decree was unsupportable. It’s taken a mass invasion of illegals to get to the point where the mayor and governor will only critique the original decision for having failed to anticipate the entire world showing up in New York City.

That’s timid and pathetic.

Activists for the so-called homeless have been destroying New York City and other major cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, by turning them into massive dumps filled with junkies and crazies, human waste and violent crime. But this is the real moment of truth.

How much destruction will urban residents accept? Will they agree to ‘house the world’? 

 Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.