A Staten Island judge Tuesday ordered the city to stop using the site of a former Catholic school as a 300-person migrant shelter — while blasting the Big Apple’s “Right to Shelter” law as a “relic from the past.”
Justice Wayne Ozzi issued a “preliminary injunction,” which blocks the city from filling the former St. John Villa Academy with asylum seekers, although it was not immediately clear whether the facility would close.
The Adams administration last month convinced the state’s Appellate Division to keep the Staten Island shelter open hours after the same judge ordered it shut down in an earlier order.
City Hall was expected to immediately appeal Tuesday’s decision as well.
The Staten Island jurist also had some harsh words about the city’s “Right to Shelter” mandate, which since 1981 has required the five boroughs to provide housing to anyone who applies for it.
Ozzi argued that the 1981 agreement “is intended to address a problem as different from today’s dilemma as night and day,” calling the law “an anachronistic relic from the past.
“The consent decree was entered into to address a specific problem existing at the time —
to provide housing for unfortunate New Yorkers who needed shelter,” Ozzi wrote. “No one can argue that there was at that time a situation of the magnitude existing today — a virtual flood of migrant asylum seekers whose numbers would fill two Yankee Stadiums and equal one-fifth of the population of Staten Island,” he said.
Ozzi’s ruling comes two weeks after lawyers for Staten Island local Scott Herkert, who is seeking a court order to shutter the site, argued at a hearing that the shelter creates an “unreasonable public nuisance” — including because he’s allegedly been smelling raw sewage from the site at his home next door.
A lawyer for the city argued that Herkert’s complaints do not rise to the level of what’s known as an “irreparable harm” that the judge would need to find to order the site closed and accused Herkert and other locals of “just does not wanting to live near a shelter.”
City Hall moved in May to try to address its migrant housing issues by temporarily reducing the Big Apple’s requirements for housing homeless families to help make way for asylum seekers.
But the Legal Aid Society teamed up with former city Social Services Commissioner Steve Banks – who now works at white-shoe law firm Paul Weiss – to oppose City Hall.
City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.
A hearing in the Legal Aid Society’s “Right to Shelter” case is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at Manhattan Supreme Court.