City Limits spoke with Legal Aid Society Attorney-in-Chief Steven Banks last week, following the settlement announcement Sept. 17. Banks has worked on this case since Yvonne McCain, a single mother and victim of domestic violence who was turned away from the city shelter system, first brought the suit in 1983. He spoke with us about what the settlement means, how the rights of homeless families will be protected, and what impact this work has had for both the Legal Aid Society and Yvonne McCain.
What does the settlement accomplish?
It wasn't until last week that any city administration had agreed to a permanent order requiring the provision of shelter to families with no place else to go.
The families originally came to seek Legal Aid Society's help 25 years ago, and through all these years of litigation no administration would agree that the city had a permanent obligation to provide shelter to children and families. So homeless families with children whose rights were being violated have gone to court asking for help, and over the years the court provided a series of preliminary orders requiring the provision of shelter, specifying the kinds of shelter that must be provided, and specifying the eligibility process. But those were all preliminary orders that were always subject to the government coming in and saying that they shouldn't be made final, that they should be wiped away.
What the city agreed to is a final, enforceable right to shelter for families and children. This means that forevermore city government – regardless of who the mayor is or what the times are like – will not have the ability to say these are only preliminary orders, that there's no need for them anymore, that they can be wiped away.
The key point, the thing to emphasize, is that those rights are now final, permanent and enforceable. And that is a rather significant breakthrough.
What does the settlement look like?
The settlement essentially creates the legal framework that we'd been seeking all along: that there would be final orders in place requiring the provision of shelter, that there would be basic standards, and a compliance plan in order to make the right to habitable shelter real for flesh-and-blood children and families in need of assistance.
There are four main components to the settlement: 1) the right to shelter for homeless families with children; 2) the right to adequate shelter; 3) an implementation plan with a number of provisions (for example, one provision relates to specified steps the city must take to make sure eligible families get shelter and another specifies due process rights for families if they're denied shelter, or if the shelter rights are terminated); and 4) an agreement at the state level to provide priority and expedited hearings for families who are denied shelter and to apply the same rules in those hearings that the city has agreed to apply.
