A federal judge ruled that the city was transferring homeless people to group shelters without adequate consideration for their health.
In a boutique hotel near the Empire State Building that has served as a shelter for disabled women during the pandemic, Michelle Ward braced for the order to send her to a barracks-style shelter in the Bronx where 10 people share a single room.
Ms. Ward, 49, is one of 8,000 homeless people whom the city has housed in hotels for the past 16 months under a program that is ending. She uses a walker and said she has severe sciatica, asthma, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. She had applied for a waiver that would allow her to stay in the hotel but was told she would be moved anyway.
“I can’t take this no more,” she said last Friday.
On Tuesday, Ms. Ward and potentially thousands of others got a reprieve when a federal judge ruled against the city. According to the Legal Aid Society, which challenged the transfers in court, the ruling effectively blocks the city from moving anyone out of hotels for at least a week, though the city did not immediately comment on whether it agreed with that interpretation.
The ruling on Tuesday was the latest turn in a back-and forth that has unfolded in recent weeks, with converted school buses pulling up outside hotels in Times Square and Chelsea, on the Upper West Side and elsewhere in New York City, and shuttling the homeless people living in them to group shelters far from the center of the city.
Hours before the judge’s decision, six people were arrested at a demonstration in the lobby of 4 World Trade Center, where the city’s Department of Homeless Services has offices, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which patrols the building.
The hotel transfers are key to an all-fronts effort by the city to get homeless people out of hotels and off the streets and subway in Manhattan, the core of both business and tourism, as it struggles back from the economic devastation caused by the pandemic.
The measures also include frequent removals of encampments where homeless people stay and an expansion of the 311 system to let subway riders call in complaints about panhandlers and report the presence of homeless people so that outreach workers can come to them.
City officials say the moves out of hotels are necessary to lure workers and visitors back to Manhattan and are in the best interests of homeless people. Some City Council members and other local leaders have asked Mayor Bill de Blasio to help address what they say are threats to public safety posed by homeless people, several of whom have been charged this year in high-profile, vicious, random attacks in the streets and on the subway.
But advocates for homeless people see the push as a public-relations campaign that seeks simply to make thousands of people disappear. They charge that it is reckless to move people back to group, or congregate, shelters even as contagious coronavirus variants are circulating and an unknown number of homeless people remain unvaccinated.
In its filing, the Legal Aid Society accused the city of violating the rights, and endangering the lives, of homeless New Yorkers with serious health problems and disabilities — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable — by refusing to grant legally required waivers that would let them stay in hotels. Ms. Ward and the others at her hotel were in the process of being moved last Friday when the city halted the program abruptly in the face of the legal challenge.
The judge, Gregory Howard Woods, ruled that the city could not transfer people who might qualify for waivers for extended hotel stays for at least 14 days, unless it gives them at least seven days’ notice and meets with them at least five days before a transfer and determines whether or not they qualify for the waiver, Mr. Goldfein said.
Because the city effectively has no way of knowing whether someone might qualify for a waiver, Mr. Goldfein said, the entire transfer program must pause until the city figures out who it is allowed to transfer.
New York’s effort comes as other cities around the country grapple with worsening homelessness crises. In Los Angeles, the City Council voted last month to prohibit homeless people from camping near in or near parks, schools and libraries. In Sacramento, officials are considering a measure that would guarantee housing for every homeless person but would also require homeless people to accept housing when it is offered.
In New York, which is unique in offering shelter to anyone who is eligible, the pandemic has been a remarkably contradictory chapter in a decadeslong, and mostly losing, battle against homelessness.
The coronavirus both laid bare and worsened inequalities of health and income, as the poorest New Yorkers experienced the highest death tolls, the steepest job losses and the most ravaged support networks. More than 120 homeless people have died of Covid-19 and more than 4,100 have been infected.
But the decision to shift thousands of homeless people from group shelters to furnished hotel rooms in the early days of lockdown to stem the spread of the virus gave many people a measure of privacy, comfort, stability and dignity. The hotel accommodations contrasted sharply with life in a congregate shelter, which many homeless people say is a lot like spending every night in jail.
There is now an opportunity for the city to move large numbers of people from the hotels directly into permanent housing, advocates for homeless people say. The City Council voted in May to sharply increase a housing subsidy available to homeless people, thousands of federal Section 8 vouchers are newly available and federal emergency officials are willing to continue paying the $120 nightly hotel bills through September.
But Mr. de Blasio says that moving people to congregate shelters is essential to getting them the help they need, a position that is contested by some shelter operators who said they were able to deliver needed services at the hotels.
Advocates for homeless people disagree with the mayor’s whole plan.
“Congregate shelters are NOT in fact better for homeless folks,” Josiah Haken, an officer of the homeless-aid nonprofit organization New York City Relief, wrote on Twitter. “But it really looks bad to say out loud that you care more about helping tourists, hotel owners, nonprofit contractors, & wealthy folks than you do homeless people.”
The mayor’s claim that hotels need to free up rooms for tourists is disputed by the industry itself.
“Absolutely it is imperative for many hotels that this program continue,” Vijay Dandapani, the president of the Hotel Association of New York City, said last week. Even counting homeless people, occupancy rates are low, he said, and a lack of demand has driven down room prices at hotels that are open to the public.
But the hotels, many of them concentrated in the Manhattan neighborhoods of Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea, have been magnets for community opposition since the program started. Neighbors complain that hotel residents use drugs, loiter, steal from stores and harass passers-by.
One hotel, the Lucerne on the Upper West Side, blocks from Central Park, became the subject of a monthslong political battle in a bastion of liberalism after nearly 200 men, many of them struggling with substance abuse problems, were moved there.
Some residents welcomed the men. Many did not and loudly lobbied the city, which tried to shift them to a hotel in another affluent neighborhood downtown, only to face a lawsuit there.
By last week, the men had been moved out of the hotel and back to shelters.
One of them, Mike Roberts, 36, offered a dispatch on Sunday from his new lodgings in the East Village.
He sleeps in a room with seven or eight cubicles that each house three or four men. If he reaches over from his bed, he can touch the next one.
Unlike his room at the Lucerne, the one at the shelter has no air conditioning. Mr. Roberts often awakens in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, and he cannot go for a walk because if he leaves the shelter between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., he loses his bed. Needless to say, his room also does not have a private shower or a television.
“Here, when I wake up I’m in a cubicle,” he said. “It’ll be three people around me sleeping, one snoring, one probably getting high or a guy pacing the floor. Who wants that?”
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