The Legal Aid Society announced that it is preparing an Article 78 lawsuit against the City over its plan to force homeless New Yorkers with disabilities from the Harmonia shelter in Manhattan to other facilities scattered around New York City that lack necessary services to accommodate their needs, as reported by the New York Daily News.

This crisis emerged after the City’s knee-jerk decision to uproot men living in safe refuge at the Lucerne Hotel in the Upper West Side to the Harmonia Shelter in Midtown Manhattan, a facility that serves homeless New Yorkers in adult families, 80% of whom are disabled.

Legal Aid has learned that the City has not properly assessed the needs of residents of the Harmonia Hotel to ensure that any future facility where they may be housed can accommodate their disability and medical issues, as required by law. Legal Aid has also learned that Harmonia Shelter staff who work with this particularly vulnerable population may be laid off as that shelter will be converted to a single men’s facility.

“This program is being broken up to solve the non-problem at Lucerne,” said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney with the Homeless Rights Project at The Legal Aid Society. “Why would they break up this very needed, very successful program just for this reason — just to empty this hotel because a bunch of rich white people on the Upper West Side wanted them to?”