When Mercy Collides With the Law

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/homeless-winter-shelters-law.html

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A man’s home may be his castle, but even castles are governed these days by zoning codes and other local ordinances. An Illinois man named Greg Schiller had that lesson reinforced after he opened his basement to homeless people, letting them sleep there overnight during the recent deep freeze that enveloped much of the country. No way, said city officials in Elgin, the Chicago suburb where he lives. They shut down Mr. Schiller’s “slumber parties,” as he has called them, on grounds that they violated a fistful of municipal regulations, among them ventilation and fire-safety requirements.

This is a situation that has arisen in various jurisdictions from time to time, with inherent tensions between a human instinct that many people would deem admirable and government codes that many of the same people would regard as sensible. At some point, courts may have to determine which value can claim to promote the greater public good.

Mr. Schiller, 53, says that he earns his living as a mechanic, but that his real calling is “working with the homeless as much as possible.” He was a founding member of a nonprofit group called Matthew 25:40, named for the New Testament passage that says in part, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

What he did — on a half-dozen occasions, by his count — was to let homeless people sleep on cots in his basement when the windchill factor dipped below 15 degrees. Mr. Schiller provided hot drinks and simple meals like ramen. He showed movies, G-rated fare like old “Lassie” films and Christian-themed works. Typically, he said, 10 people stayed overnight. Come morning, they had to leave. There were no untoward episodes during the sleepovers, he said. “These people are my friends,” he told a Chicago radio station, insisting on his right to have friends over to spend the night.

That’s not how Elgin officials viewed it. To them, Mr. Schiller in effect had created a shelter of his own and blatantly flouted various ordinances, for instance by not having enough exits from the basement in case of a fire. “We understand where he’s coming from,” Laura Valdez, the assistant city manager, said, “but we do have shelters for the homeless.” At any given time, she said, her city of about 110,000 has about 100 men and women in need of shelter.

Not everybody in need, though, wishes to spend the night in a municipally sanctioned facility, whether out of safety fears or out of innate resistance to the rules. That is as true in Elgin as it is in a vastly larger city like New York. So a fair question would seem to be whether Mr. Schiller’s offer of a place for these people to lay their heads in severe weather outweighs city codes governing full-time shelters.

One person who thinks so is Jeff Rowes, a lawyer at the Institute for Justice, a public-interest firm in Arlington, Va., with a libertarian bent. He has been in touch with Mr. Schiller. “Fundamentally,” Mr. Rowes said, “you have a right to rescue people unless there’s evidence you’ll do more harm than good.” He called it “the right to be a good Samaritan.”

After this dispute became the focus of news articles, Mr. Schiller and Elgin officials discussed ways in which the city might work harder to shelter all the homeless on the coldest nights, perhaps even allowing them to sleep in the lobby of a police station. Satisfied for now, Mr. Schiller said he would drop his plan to sue the municipality. In a way, that’s too bad, because a court case might help clarify how far the sanctity of one’s castle extends.

“I respect the city codes,” he said. “But I do believe a little leeway, a little grace, could have been in order.”

Amen.