Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show is

John Ketchum. John is the director of state and local policy and a fellow at the Manhattan

Institute, and he writes regularly for City Journal on New York public policy and other matters.

His work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, New York Daily News,

and other outlets.

Today, we're going to discuss a big problem in the city, the city's migrant crisis, and the

legal basis for the city's right to shelter, which has come into question this year, as the city

has struggled to house tens of thousands of newly arriving immigrants. So, John, thank you

very much for joining us. Glad to have you on. Thank you, Brian. Great to be with you. So the city's

right to shelter mandate, as you analyze in your recent City Journal essay, How to Fix Gotham's Migrant

Mess, you know, it has for decades required New York to provide

immediate housing to anyone who requests it, regardless of whether a person has been resident in the

city or what their income status is. So to meet this obligation, New York's built what is basically

the largest, most complex shelter system on earth.

Yet the right to shelter does not appear expressly in the state constitution or in the city

charter, at least in that language. Instead, it is rooted in today's form in a consent degree,

as you described, that goes back to 1981. So I wonder if you can describe the lawsuit that

established this right to shelter in the city and how subsequent litigation has expanded that

obligation. Sure. As you say, the right to shelter is not the process of a deliberative democratic process in New York.

In the only other jurisdiction that does have a right to shelter, Massachusetts,

there is a state statute that lays out the obligations under the right to shelter.

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