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| Jennifer Quijano |
Legal barriers such as delays in securing housing vouchers, wrongful benefit denials, and a lack of enforcement against landlord discrimination exacerbate the challenges faced by individuals and families trying to transition from temporary shelter to stable housing.
In response to these growing needs, the New York City Bar Association's pro bono arm — called the City Bar Justice Center — recently retooled its Legal Clinic for the Homeless, transforming it into the Shelter Advocacy Project. The aim is to tackle urgent day-to-day issues creating barriers for people who are homeless, such as storage facility disputes, shelter placement challenges, and housing voucher delays.
Jennifer Quijano, an attorney with extensive experience in homelessness prevention and tenant defense, took over the program in December 2023 and has been leading it through its rebranding.
Quijano talked to Law360 about the motivations behind the Shelter Advocacy Project, how it is tackling systemic failures in housing and benefits access, and her personal connection to the work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What prompted the shift from the Legal Clinic for the Homeless to the Shelter Advocacy Project?
The program has historically focused on giving people access to public benefits so that they can stabilize, get back on their feet and move into permanent housing.
I started with the project here at the City Bar Justice Center in December 2023. Within the first month or so, I scheduled a focus group with some of our clients. I really wanted to hear from them what needs they were having. It was really helpful. We were seeing that as much as we wanted to assist in the specific lanes that we had built for ourselves, there were a lot of additional needs.
Another thing we did was to connect with our partner organizations that also serve people experiencing homelessness, to see if there were any outstanding needs in the community, to see if we could assist in those areas.
We often get emails from folks that have been contacting many different legal services providers just looking for help. One stuck out: a woman who was looking for assistance with her storage unit. The unit had gone up for auction, and all of her belongings were gone. The Human Resources Administration was supposed to make payments for her account, but didn't.
That really opened up a door for us to understand how wide the world of issues that people might be facing can be. Having people, clients really just being vulnerable enough to reach out to us and share some of the additional things that were going on, it's really helped us to be able to shape the services that we need to be offering.
The common thread was we wanted to do a lot more listening than telling. And that was a really big priority to me as I started directing the program: We wanted to hear what the needs are and then figure out how we might be able to help.
What's behind your vision for this new project?
I've always wanted to build on the legacy and the reputation that the Legal Clinic for the Homeless had built up to this point. We have a lot of client trust. We have a few different shelter partners that have a lot of trust in us.
It was really straightforward for us to be able to pivot our advocacy, and learn the substantive rules around any new topic and then be able to advocate for what our clients need, which has always been our strength.
I'm grateful here to have some really wonderful leadership that worked with me to really flesh out the plan and develop it. We had a robust rolling out and implementation of the new changes. We had input from every stakeholder that could be involved.
We have a very robust pro bono program where we work with lots of different corporate legal departments, law firms and individuals. We made sure to check in with them right away, and they were very supportive of the changes. We've had additional firms and offices that have reached out to us and are looking to get involved.
What's your personal investment in doing this work?
I have a personal background with this. My family, years ago, had been evicted from a couple of different homes. I had dealt personally with what it's like to have all of your treasured belongings in storage and to not know what might happen with those belongings, and to have belongings that are lost, that you never get to see again. I also know the stress of not having a permanent home to call your own.
New York City has seen a surge in homelessness, including an increase in newly arrived migrants. Was the program expansion driven by these trends?
I was very aware of the rise in homelessness within New York City. As a practitioner, I was working in homelessness prevention, doing tenant defense in housing court for nine years prior to coming to this role. Something that I was seeing was people not getting the attorneys that they needed, but also just the sheer volume of cases that for a lot of people were ending in potential evictions.
Pretty early on, we met with the homeless rights unit at Legal Aid Society. They pointed us to the influx of newly arrived people to the U.S. There are a lot of needs within that community.
They were able to connect us to a different community organization called Artists Athletes Activists that had set up a robust clinic that operates out of Metro Baptist Church in midtown. They had really created a one-stop shop for people to be able to come in and get any services that they might need: health insurance assistance, assistance with navigating their immigration cases, IDNYC, MetroCards, and public benefits. We were able to come in and offer assistance with those application processes.
We are there for about five or six hours every Thursday. It gives us the opportunity to serve in a very clear-cut, defined way, knowing that clients are going to find us. We're going to serve people as they come up to the clinic.
What has the outcome of that partnership been so far?
We've been able to serve over 1,200 people in the past year. We've completed over 700 applications and inquiries related to benefits issues, benefits applications, or issues related to shelter. And we have been able to serve over 450 households just in the past year. Even within the first month, it was really clear to us that there was going to be a lot that we could offer.
Part of what helped us to be able to continue to expand our capacity was growing our pro bono relationships and having more and more people come either to the clinic to work with us, or to take on some of the cases that we would normally take on with our regular caseload.
What's it like to work in synergy with other nonprofit organizations in the city?
We worked with some of our partner organizations, like Legal Aid Society and our shelter partners, to ensure that our clients understood that we're still here, still committed to serving the same people that we served before.
So we have been really mindful about developing those partnerships, not as much to avoid stepping on each other's toes, but to really make sure that we're able to work as a team. Ultimately, we're not in competition with each other. We all have the same end goal of wanting to serve as many clients as we can, especially people experiencing homelessness.
How is the project managing to maintain its partnerships with shelters while focusing on making new connections?
We have shelter partnerships that were put in place many years ago. We have historically worked with family shelters because there are a lot of needs there that we have expertise to be able to assist, and we have a great working relationship with them.
When I first started, I made sure we did lots of introductions with all the different shelter partners. Part of this has also included ongoing training and clinics that we offer to our shelter partners, so that they know that they can always come back to us with client needs.
We would go out to the shelters, do a clinic for a few hours at a time, and assist clients in that way. During the COVID-19 pandemic, that shifted to more virtual referrals. We have a referral form that shelter partners can complete and send to us, and we'll get in touch with our clients that way. That model has continued to work really well for us, so we get a pretty regular flow of client referrals from the various shelter partners. We'll conduct intake normally by phone with our clients, and then we'll advocate through email or any other means. An outcome of this is that it's helped us to cut down on client burden in terms of time that they need to spend coming into our office.
How is the Shelter Advocacy Project adapting to address the challenges faced by immigrants amid the Trump administration deportation plans?
The biggest way that we're adapting is that we want to ensure that we're as up to date as possible on incoming executive orders or changes in legislation, so that we're able to advise our clients or people that we see in the clinic.
We are continuing to serve these communities because people are in many different stages of their immigration processes. We've seen people from Central and South America. We've seen people from Africa. We've seen people from Russia and different parts of Eastern Europe. We've also seen people from the Middle East as well. We've seen a really wide range of experiences.
We are really mindful to whoever the person is and whatever their specific situation is that's coming in to see us, that we're looking at what they might be eligible for in terms of benefits and making sure that we're advising and catering our advice for each individual client to the best of our ability, even as regulations and orders continue to change.
What are some of the biggest legal and systemic challenges that your clients face when dealing with issues like housing voucher delays or storage facility disputes?
One of the biggest delays that we see our clients facing is obtaining a voucher and then finding housing where the landlord will accept it. While New York City has very clear laws that say that landlords can't discriminate based on source of income, which includes housing vouchers, the reality is that when you look on any rental search engine you're going to find places where someone says "no vouchers allowed."
At this point, we're not seeing a very strong enforcement mechanism when clients are encountering these issues. Also, having to take the time to report every single landlord that posts "no vouchers allowed" notices is extraordinarily time-consuming. It places the burden on someone that's already experiencing and navigating a lot.
Another issue that we're seeing is that, with many storage companies, after about two or three months of payments not being made by the person renting units, they get put up for auction. It's normally a very short timeline — maybe 30 days or less — and if payments aren't made in that time frame, the auction takes place very quickly.
So, if the Human Resources Administration has agreed to make payments for the unit while our client is in shelter, if any of those payments are late, or HRA decides just not to make the payment, our clients are left in the position where all of their belongings could be gone, really, overnight — even if they were doing everything right, like requesting the payments and providing all the required documentation and information. Years and decades of belongings and memories can disappear that quickly.
Is the Shelter Advocacy Project advocating for policy changes that are critical to address the issues of homelessness?
We are involved with two ongoing campaigns, one of which got its start here at the City Bar Justice Center back in 2020. It's called the #Wifi4Homeless campaign. That is to ensure that anyone within any shelter system throughout New York state has access to Wi-Fi.
As we know, Wi-Fi has become as essential to survival in any sort of residential structure as electricity or water or any other utility: that's what opens the doors for people to find employment or educational opportunities, to be able to search for permanent housing and to continue to move their lives forward.
We also are involved with what's called the End Poverty Now campaign, which relates in large part to increasing cash assistance and other benefits for folks throughout New York state. One thing that we've seen that really plays an impact here is that, for anyone who is in a shelter that serves food, cash assistance is lowered tremendously just because your shelter serves food, even though cash assistance is not a food benefit.
We're looking not just for the levels of cash assistance to be increased for people in shelters that serve food, but for everyone. That's because the amount of cash assistance that someone receives is not sustainable at this point. They have not been increased for decades.
What metrics or feedback mechanism do you have to evaluate the impact of this project's work?
I want to always know what my client would find successful with whatever the matter is that's in front of me, and sometimes what they might find successful is just not within the realm of possibility. So sometimes we have to redefine what success would look like together. But at the end of the day, I want to make sure that I'm doing right by all of my clients and doing what they know to be in their own best interest.
So it can be a little bit challenging to quantify what success can look like in a practice like this, because I will be one stop on someone's very long journey, and while within our representation, we may not solve every single thing that is happening in their lives. I want to make sure that whatever issue it is that they came to us for, we've been able to either assist or send them on the path that will help them to resolve that issue.
Of course, we want to serve the largest number of people that we can. And I think with our clinic, for example, it has been really exciting to know that we have been able to serve, the numbers of people that we have, the number of households that we have. But what's more important to me, especially in the clinic setting, is that people who are starting their journey within New York City are getting the tools to be able to navigate life here in a way that is going to be helpful and beneficial to them. The same thing goes with our clients who are residing in shelters.
What matters to me and to our project is knowing that we're able to assist in ways that may seem small at times, but that could have a huge impact on the person. We always want to make sure that our advocacy, our work, and even the way that we define success, is very person-centered.
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
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