Fed up with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s response to the city’s growing homeless crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic, the City Council will hold an emergency vote Tuesday on a bill that would offer free hotel rooms to all indigent New Yorkers, despite Hizzoner’s opposition, The Post has learned.
“The feeling is we must act now. This is a public health emergency,” a high-placed Council source said.
The bill will provide a single room to people living in shelters, on the subways or on the streets, the source said. The program is voluntary.
The Council and the mayor’s office disagree about whether FEMA will refund the city for the cost, which the administration estimated to be $500 million.
A City Hall spokesman blasted the legislation.
“This version of the bill, which came out of nowhere overnight with no conversation, is ham-fisted and reckless, self-defeatingly unilateral and ill-informed, and legally questionable and amateurish,” said Isaac McGinn, spokesman for the city’s Department of Social Services.
McGinn said the bill uses a “one-size fits all approach for a system that is anything but, forcing the involuntary rushed transfer of another more-than 10,000 people into hotels without appropriate services to match, putting individuals with higher needs, including substance use challenges, at risk in the process.”
Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn), who sponsored the bill, countered that it’s nearly identical to the legislation he proposed at a hearing in April.
“There have been 75 homeless New Yorkers who have died from COVID over seven weeks,” he said, noting that the population is nearly two times more likely to succumb to the virus than all over causes of death combined.
Levin also dinged the mayor for undercounting the percent of homeless shelter residents testing positive for the virus and failing to create a plan to test them by mid-May.
Homeless advocate Joseph Loonam with Vocal NY applauded the vote.
“We’re really happy to see the Council step up and take leadership where the mayor has failed,” Loonam said.
The mayor’s plan to get people sleeping on trains into shelters instead has largely been a bust, with just a 3 percent success rate over the past week and horrific photos emerging of mask-less men sleeping huddled near each other in the hallway and stairway of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter.
Over 70 homeless New Yorkers have died from COVID-19. Most of the victims were living in shelters where it’s too crowded to practice social distancing.
“We made this call right at the start of the shutdown. That was at the middle of March. We’ve had weeks and weeks and weeks for this virus to spread. We’re tired of waiting for action. We’re glad the council is stepping up,” Loonam said.
“This is really the time for the council to pass this with a veto-proof majority and stand up to the mayor and his narrative that this is going well,” Loonam said.
It’s unclear if lawmakers will have enough votes to override a mayoral veto.