With the pro bono help of New York and Philadelphia lawyers, a homeless advocacy group has reached a settlement in a lawsuit against New York City over allowing people to secure birth certificates after their identification has been lost or stolen.
“This should never have gone to litigation,” Marsha Cohen, executive director of the Homeless Advocacy Project, a nonprofit legal services organization based in Philadelphia, said Friday. Instead, she said, New York City officials should have changed their policy when she first contacted them in the summer of 2015 to tell them they had a different standard from every other major city and even New York state.
