evidence: Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to De Blasio . [...] Wesley G. Phelps, Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to De Blasio, Journal of American History, Volume 104, Issue 2, September 2017, Page 569, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jax299 [...] Main organizes his analysis into three broad phases. During phase one, which included the first attempts to develop a specific policy for homelessness under Mayor Edward Koch, policy makers and activists pursued a philosophy of entitlement and argued that shelter was a legally protected right. Phase two, which Main describes as paternalistic and which spanned the David Dinkins, Rudolph Giuliani, and Michael Bloomberg administrations, saw the imposition of conditions placed on the homeless that required them to meet certain behavioral expectations before receiving assistance. Finally, in the postpaternalism environment of phase three, implemented in the later years of the Bloomberg administration and extending into the tenure of Bill de Blasio, recipients of housing assistance no longer had to comply with behavioral expectations. They instead had an array of optional social services offered to them. During all of these phases, according to Main, policy makers took effective steps to solve the problem of homelessness in New York City while simultaneously grappling with the severe policy limitations of their ideas and programs.