6sqft

“Early on, the administration committed to ‘streamlining’ placements into supportive housing,” the Safety Net Project [of UJC] tweeted. “Instead, it’s been the same old: layers of bureaucracy & refusal to change the discriminatory, opaque and unaccountable ‘matching’ & ‘interview’ processes.”

NY Times

"The city, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, said that there were “2,585 vacant (online) units.”

Local Today

"On Monday, the city responded to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project that there were “2,585 free (online) units.”

Gothamist

"Craig Hughes, a social worker with the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, criticized the Adams’ administration for relying on the National Guard to deal with a humanitarian crisis. 'Adding an arm of the military to the municipal shelters is yet another frightening move by the Adams administration, which has spent the past 10 months putting police front-and-center in response to the City's homelessness crisis,' Hughes said."

The City

"Marika Dias, managing director at the safety net project at the Urban Justice Center, says “it is absolutely possible” that tenants do not know of their right to an attorney, “and particularly right now.” Dias confirmed that outdated materials on Right to Counsel are currently posted around several city courts."

City Limits

"Craig Hughes, a social worker and organizer with the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, criticized the new facilities as something of a shadow shelter system and a 'creative and inhumane way to get around the right to shelter.'"

New York Times

Kathleen Cash, an advocate at the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, called the pictures of what the centers might look like “devastating.” “Opening short-term municipal refugee camps through a separate city bureaucracy — while the mayor has repeatedly failed to honor the right to shelter, and has announced plans to ‘reassess’ it — is the kind of approach many feared this administration would take,” she said.

City Limits

“This decision is directly in line with his belief in widely discredited broken windows theories of public safety, which have hit poor and working-class Black and Latinx New Yorkers hardest,” said Karim Walker, an organizer and outreach worker with the Safety Net Project [of the Urban Justice Center]. “These sweeps are designed to break spirits and get people out of sight.

City Limits

Given the persistent crisis, what New York City really needs is a right to housing, said Karim Walker, an organizer [with the Safety Net Project] who spent years staying in public spaces, in DHS men’s shelters and in SafeHavens—facilities with fewer restrictions than the broader shelter network—before getting an apartment through a housing lottery.