Someone get City Council Speaker Christine Quinn a dictionary: Yesterday, she filed suit against Mayor Bloomberg over a new homeless-housing policy she called “cruel” and “inhumane.”
More like sane — and much-needed.
The new regulation is simple: To obtain city services, single adults seeking shelter from the Department of Homeless Services will have to demonstrate that they’re actually homeless and out of options.
Sounds good to us — but not to Quinn and her colleagues on the council, who voted 47-1 to file this reckless suit against the mayor — the heroic holdout being Peter Vallone Jr. of Queens.
Better get Quinn a history book, too.
Her lawsuit isn’t just an assault on reason — it’s also a first step toward the bad old days before the ’90s-era reforms that made New York City livable once again.
Before Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki teamed up to change things, city regs practically begged housing fraudsters with other options to live rent-free off the city.
Families could claim they needed housing even if they weren’t homeless at all — and were then offered a smorgasbord of city-furnished apartments, free to refuse any they deemed unworthy.
The reforms cut that fraud to pieces from the very first — and Bloomberg is expanding on the model by applying it to single people, not just families, seeking housing.
Lawsuits like Quinn’s threaten to undo years of careful stewardship of scarce resources — and if she doesn’t understand the stakes here, one needs to wonder if she’s qualified for higher office.
There’s good reason for Bloomberg’s update. Men’s shelters have long been the province of a large population of the mentally ill, but ever since the economy tanked, a growing number of sound-minded men have looked to shelters as a first resort.
“People who have alternatives are not homeless,” says DHS Commissioner Seth Diamond. “If they have [someone] who can house them, that’s where they should go.”
Quinn’s lawsuit, and a prior legal challenge from the Legal Aid Society, have already pushed back the implementation of the new housing rule by weeks and weeks.
And perhaps far later than that. So don’t forget to thank Quinn for increasing the burden on the city’s ailing fisc.
The next mayor of New York — the job to which Quinn aspires — will face many unpopular, but necessary, decisions.
Is Chris Quinn really up to it?