It is a remarkable fact of life in this relentless city that every person has a right to shelter here. This has been true for almost forty-five years: in 1981, in response to a class-action suit on behalf of homeless men, the state Supreme Court determined that New York City had an obligation to care for its needy. (The initial suit concerned only men; within a few years, the mandate had been extended to women and families, too.) The Callahan Consent Decree, as the settlement agreement became known, listed such required amenities as “a bed of a minimum of 30 inches in width, substantially constructed, in good repair and equipped with clean springs.”

Since 1984, one of the places providing these beds has been a looming red-brick structure on East Thirtieth Street and First Avenue. Originally opened in 1931 as Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward, the 30th Street Men’s Shelter—inevitably still referred to as Bellevue—became an anchor of New York’s shelter system. This month, Zohran Mamdani announced that Bellevue would close, citing its “severe state of disrepair.” The building had served for decades as the site of intake operations for single men and families without children, and, in addition to assigning people to shelters around the city, Bellevue itself also offered hundreds of beds. The capacity was at one time as high as eight hundred and fifty, but in recent months, as the facility’s condition deteriorated, it has dwindled to a few hundred.

Mamdani’s move suggested a new emphasis on compassionate public policy. “My administration is focused on ensuring every New Yorker experiencing homelessness not only has access to shelter, but to spaces that are safe, humane, and truly livable,” the Mayor said. The two hundred and fifty people in residence at Bellevue would be transferred to other shelters this month, and men’s intake would move to a shelter on East Third Street—the same site where it was situated decades ago, before Bellevue took over.

In January of this year, a hundred thousand four hundred and thirty-seven people were sleeping in the city’s shelters (including more than thirty thousand children); the estimated number sleeping in subways or on the street, although difficult to know precisely, tends to be about four thousand. Homelessness is a subject that cuts to the core of Mamdani’s vision of a New York where safety and inclusivity are not in conflict, where the quality of life in the city is improved and not diminished by one’s proximity to fellow New Yorkers.

Well before the Bellevue shelter reached its current state, people were trying to shut it down. “There’s been talk about restructuring, rebuilding the Thirtieth Street shelter for as long as I can remember,” Dave Giffen, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told me. Muzzy Rosenblatt, who calls it a “giant monstrosity of a building,” was one of the first to take up the cause. Rosenblatt was a part of the task force that had helped establish the Department of Homeless Services (D.H.S.) in 1993 under David Dinkins, and served there for six years, including a stint as the acting commissioner, under Rudy Giuliani. The Callahan Consent Decree “is very specific,” Rosenblatt told me. “It’s about, you know, distances between beds and make sure there’s linen.” In the years after the nineteen-seventies fiscal crisis, the city had scrambled to check these rudimentary boxes by retrofitting the decaying real estate it had on hand: old armories, shuttered schools, the Bellevue psychiatric hospital. “That’s how we got into these really crappy buildings at the beginning,” Rosenblatt said. In 1994, he put together a plan to convert the Bellevue site to supportive housing—“and then I sold Giuliani on it!”—but it fell by the wayside, as did a later agreement to close it down after the Administration for Children’s Services opened its own intake facility nearby.

Today, Rosenblatt is the president and C.E.O. of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit that runs shelters, affordable housing, and other services, and has the city contract for homelessness outreach on the subways. He said he hoped that the closure of Bellevue would be “part of a larger plan to reëvaluate the customer experience” for New Yorkers entering the shelter system. “I’m a big fan of Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, and the whole notion of hospitality has to be at the core. If we want people to come in, we have to make them feel like we want them to come in,” he went on. “That is not the experience you have when you walk into Bellevue.”

Michael Bloomberg felt that the system hardly needed a Danny Meyer approach; in 2012, in fact, he opined that “pleasurable” conditions in the shelters—as opposed to the post-recession economy—were encouraging longer stays. Yet Bloomberg, too, tried to close Bellevue. In 2004, the D.H.S. announced that it would shut down intake operations in the building within the next two years, which did not happen, and in 2008 the Economic Development Corporation proposed redeveloping the site as a luxury hotel and conference center, which did not happen, either.

Mamdani has connected homelessness policy to his broader emphasis on housing access and affordability: when he said, in December, that he was going to end Eric Adams’s sweeps of encampments, he noted that the strategy had been ineffective at moving people into permanent housing. A shelter like Bellevue might give homeless New Yorkers a place to sleep out of public view, but it offered crisis management rather than a long-term solution. Still, Giffen told me that he remained somewhat skeptical that the people his organization represents have had a real place in the new Mayor’s rhetoric. “ ‘Affordability’—that’s a tricky word,” he said. “ ‘Affordability’ means affordable to the middle class. It does not mean affordable to the people who are most in need of housing.” Giffen said that the Coalition had received word back in December from the Department of Social Services (D.S.S.), which oversees D.H.S., that Bellevue would finally have to close. The Mamdani administration’s decision, in this case, is less a matter of visionary change than of physical inevitability: long decrepit, the building is now officially approaching uninhabitability. (No definite plans for its future have been announced.)

When I visited Bellevue on a gray morning this week, it could have already passed for an abandoned building—boarded windows, an overflowing dumpster with a suitcase wedged on top. But it hadn’t shut down quite yet: although the shelter beds had cleared over the weekend, intake was still open, and a slow trickle of arrivals was visible at the entrance. Outside, underneath the sidewalk sheds surrounding the building, I spoke to a twenty-seven-year-old man who had stayed at Bellevue. (He preferred not to be identified by name.) He used the same word as the Mayor had in the announcement of the closure: “It’s not livable.” He had, nonetheless, lived there this winter starting in late December, except for a stint at his sister’s, when heat and hot water had gone out at the shelter during one of this winter’s snowstorms. He worked nights loading and unloading trucks; he said that he’d been told he was eligible for housing-voucher programs, but he didn’t know where he would live next.

Bellevue has long been the kind of place—sometimes, in fact, the specific place—that people who said that they did not want to go to a shelter did not want to go. Large, congregate shelters of its sort offer little privacy or quiet; many have reputations for violence, drug use, and theft. The twenty-seven-year-old noted that building maintenance at Bellevue was an issue, drug use was an issue, but, more than that, he felt that there was a lack of human sympathy. “Ninety per cent of the problems here happen because staff don’t know how to talk to people,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of space or love for people who need help.” Bellevue’s 11 P.M. curfew had also presented difficulties. A few weeks ago, coming home late, he was on a 7 train that got held for an hour after a track fire. He remembers returning to the shelter around midnight to find that his bed had been given away. “There was a homeless man sleeping in my bed,” he recalled. “Covered in my sheets.”

Calibrating a balance of care and freedom for all constituents has been a work in progress for the Mayor. Since taking office, he has revised two of his earlier positions on homelessness. He resumed the efforts to clear encampments that he had previously halted, and he declined to support an expansion of CityFHEPS, a housing-voucher program intended to prevent homelessness (which he’d previously criticized Adams for opposing). Giffen called these moves “very disappointing”; Christine Quinn, who served as the City Council speaker from 2006-13 and who now heads the nonprofit WIN (formerly Women in Need), said that she saw them as “curious-at-best backsliding.”

Early this month, Mamdani’s new D.S.S. commissioner, Erin Dalton, arrived in New York to start work in person. When I asked her about the encampment sweeps, she was quick to distinguish between the Mayor’s policy and what had come before. “He’s not going to do sweeps,” she said. “It’s a language issue. What we’re focussed on is actually connecting New Yorkers to housing.” She pointed out that the D.H.S. will take the lead, as opposed to the police (as was the case under Adams), and that outreach workers will visit camps daily for a week before dismantling them. “We are the people who have created connections with folks and know the resources that are available,” she said. “And will take care, for example, of their belongings.”

It’s an approach that aligns with the Mayor’s Office of Community Safety, created by executive order this week, which seeks to shift responsibility for emergency interventions away from the police. It also resembles what Dalton implemented in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, as the director of its local Department of Social Services, where she oversaw a dramatic reduction in encampments. Her work there, she told me, relied on “understanding person by person, name by name, what their housing preferences are, what their social-service preferences are—if we have time to do it, what their dreams are.”

Along the way, Dalton built a reputation for creating systems and services grounded in data. “The things she has done in Allegheny County are really best in class,” Linda Gibbs, who served as the D.H.S. commissioner under Bloomberg and who co-wrote the book “How Ten Global Cities Take on Homelessness,” told me. Gibbs called Dalton “a mature, sensible, wise, reform-minded, experienced government person at the helm.”

In the new commissioner’s first weeks in the city, she participated in the city’s annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate, a nocturnal canvass conducted by volunteers and intended to approximate the number of New Yorkers unsheltered on a given night. (Typically, it happens in midwinter, to capture the period of most serious need; this year, the survey, after being rescheduled to avoid the extreme cold, took place on a Tuesday when temperatures had topped seventy degrees.) She also visited six shelters, including a new facility in Flushing for families with children, called Magnolia Gardens, where she attended a ribbon cutting.

Magnolia Gardens would not serve the exact same population that 30th Street had, but, still, it offered a sharp contrast. The façade was as bright and clean as an architect’s rendering, rather than plausibly haunted. According to administrators, the new building was Passive House-certified and follows principles of feng shui; soon, they hoped to receive the necessary approvals to begin welcoming pets. As I accompanied city officials on a tour that highlighted fountains and tile work as well as laundry facilities, I thought of the W.P.A. murals now mouldering inside Bellevue. Shelters are physical structures, they are symbols, but they are also manifestations of ongoing relationships; care and neglect make themselves felt only over time. ♦