Mayor de Blasio broke the law by rushing homeless, disabled New Yorkers out of hotel rooms for shelters without notice, a lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court Thursday alleges.
More than 650 disabled people were moved out of single-occupancy hotel rooms in Manhattan on June 23, 24, and 25, with no time to prepare, the Legal Aid Society claims in a suit against the city.
“The city’s rushed decision to arbitrarily move thousands of homeless New Yorkers from safe accommodations back to local, crowded shelters is both illegal and inhumane,” said Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society.
On June 23, a man identified in the suit as PM, who uses a wheelchair and needs a joint replacement in his right knee, was transferred from an accessible hotel to a city shelter without accessible bathrooms, the lawsuit details.
“These hotel evictions are cruel, dangerous, illegal and racist,” said Helen Strom, a legal advocate at the Urban Justice Center, who is representing several homeless people included in the lawsuit.
“It is overwhelmingly Black and brown New Yorkers that are being haphazardly thrown out of hotels, typically located in white neighborhoods and tourist centers, and sent into unsafe shelter spaces with more than a dozen people to a room,” Strom said.
Thursday’s filing asks a judge to force the city to follow a 2015 court ruling, which would stop the transfers of anyone whose case was not individually evaluated.
Under the 2015 decision, Goldfein said, the city must conduct a thorough assessment of every homeless New Yorker who requests a reasonable accommodation and those whom the city knows to have a disability or other health issues.
A spokesman for the city Law Department did not immediately respond to a Daily News request for comment.
The Department of Homeless Services moved the roughly 10,000 homeless New Yorkers from shelters to hotels at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to stop the spread of the deadly virus.
With a decline in coronavirus cases, Mayor de Blasio decided on June 16, to pull the homeless out hotels and send them back to shelters.
The mayor has been criticized on all sides for his handling of the homeless during the pandemic.
People who live in the communities where the homeless were relocated complained about the impact on their neighborhoods. On the Upper West Side, there were two other hotels housing the homeless near the once-luxurious Lucerne.
The city evicted 34 homeless people from the Harmonia Hotel on E. 31st St Midtown Manhattan in early September without notice to make room for the Lucerne men, the Daily News exclusively reported.
Facing intense backlash, the mayor quickly backtracked stopped the transfers, blaming the move on a “communication glitch.”
The city then said DHS would move men at the Lucerne to a Financial District Radisson Hotel that would be permanently converted into a shelter.
A group of lower Manhattan residents sued to stop that from happening, resulting in a months-long court battle.
An Appellate Court ruling cleared the way last month to send the men who stayed at the Lucerne to the Radisson on Wall St.
With Stephen Rex Brown
