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Mayor Adams Declares State of Emergency to Respond to Migrant Crisis New York Faces Record Homelessness as Mayor Declares Migrant Emergency
(about 7 hours later)
Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency for New York City on Friday as the city struggles to respond to an influx of tens of thousands of migrants from Latin America. Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency on Friday as the number of people in New York City’s overwhelmed homeless shelters headed for a record amid the influx of thousands of migrants from Latin America.
Mr. Adams said in a speech at City Hall that the city was preparing to spend $1 billion on its response and called for federal and state funding to help pay for housing and services for the busloads of migrants who have strained the city’s homeless shelter system. He called for state and federal funding to help pay for housing and services, and urged the federal government to allow newly arrived asylum seekers to work legally and to slow the northward flow of migrants from the border. He spoke as the population of the city’s main shelter system, which stood at 61,379 on Thursday, was set to break the record of 61,415 set in 2019. At least nine more migrant buses arrived on Friday.
“We need help, and we need it now,” Mr. Adams said. Mr. Adams said that the migrants were on pace to send the shelter population soaring above 100,000 and that the influx could cost the city $1 billion in the current fiscal year alone.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat who took office in January, said the city was moving forward with plans to build a tent intake center on Randalls Island, in the East River just off Manhattan. City officials are also negotiating with cruise ship companies to house migrants on board a ship. “We need help, and we need it now,” Mr. Adams said in a speech.
Mr. Adams said that the city has been overwhelmed by the roughly 17,000 migrants who have arrived since April and that he expected as many as 100,000 to arrive eventually. At least nine more buses arrived on Thursday. The mayor’s declaration allows the city to open emergency relief centers more quickly by exempting them from the normal land-use and community-review process that often slows the opening of shelters.
The city had set up 42 emergency shelters and enrolled 5,000 children in schools, the mayor said. But he said the city urgently needed more help to provide services to migrants. “New York City is doing our part, and now others must step up and join us,” Mr. Adams said. New York mayors have declared states of emergency in the past to free up resources and suspend local laws, including, during the monkeypox and Covid-19 outbreaks. But Mr. Adams’s announcement on Friday was one of the few occasions he has given a major speech at City Hall.
Declaring a state of emergency would allow city officials to move more quickly to provide services, Mr. Adams said. He said the city was also looking for ways to send some migrants to other cities. Roughly 17,000 migrants, many of them fleeing Venezuela’s economic collapse, have arrived in the city since April. Thousands were sent on buses from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who has been trying to pressure the White House to tighten border security. As of Sunday, the city said, 12,700 of the migrants were in shelters.
“A city recovering from an ongoing global pandemic is being overwhelmed by a humanitarian crisis,” he said, adding that New York was “on the edge of a precipice.” But the migrants are not the sole reason for the growth in the homeless population. Even setting aside the 12,700 migrants in shelters, the population of the city’s main shelter system has risen by 6 percent since mid-April — the biggest jump in that short a time since 2015.
Mr. Adams has received criticism over his response to the crisis from homeless advocates and City Council members who disagree with efforts to house migrants in tents or on ships. They have called for empty hotels to be used and for shelter residents to be moved into permanent housing as quickly as possible. The causes are numerous, but they boil down to one thing, said Joshua Goldfein, a staff lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which filed the suits that established New York’s unique right to shelter: “We haven’t addressed all the issues we knew we had before the migrants started to show up.”
City officials are examining housing up to 2,700 migrants on a cruise ship and in discussions with three cruise companies, including Carnival Cruise Line, Frank Carone, the mayor’s chief of staff, said in a brief interview at City Hall. The other two companies are Norwegian Cruise Line and Tallink, which is housing Ukrainian refugees in Estonia. Rents are increasing, and too little affordable housing is being built. Evictions resumed after a two-year pandemic moratorium. Landlords get away with illegally rejecting tenants who pay with government vouchers because of understaffing at city enforcement offices. State prisons continue to discharge inmates directly into the city’s shelter system. And families who reach the maximum time limit at domestic-violence shelters run by other city agencies are forced into the Department of Homeless Services shelters.
City officials are considering different sites to dock a cruise ship, including a pier in Staten Island called Homeport that is between St. George Ferry Terminal and the Verrazano Bridge. This year, Mr. Goldfein said, “a number of those things got worse.”
Mr. Adams has criticized Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas for failing to coordinate migrant arrivals with his administration and called on him on Friday to quit sending buses to New York and to spread the burden to other cities. People who enter shelters are remaining there longer. The average stay has more than doubled since 2011, to over 500 days.
The arrival of the migrants has made all of these problems more pressing.
Jerrica Ortiz, 33, a native of the Bronx, was placed in a tiny room with her two sons in a shelter on the Upper West Side over three years ago.
Since then, she said, her attempts to find permanent housing have resulted in dead ends. She said she was told nearly a year ago that she qualified for a public housing apartment on the Lower East Side, but her move-in has been delayed because lead was found in her apartment.
While she waits, she has asked to move to larger shelter quarters — her older son, who sleeps in the bunk above her, is about to turn 12 — but she said she has been told that the new arrivals are taking up all the available space.
“I said ‘Listen, I’m a New York City resident, I’m homeless, and you can’t transfer me and my children from living in this box? That’s ridiculous.’”
Plenty of people are entering the shelter system from places other than Latin America, too. On Wednesday, Leida Rivera, who had been flooded out of her apartment in Tampa, Fla., by Hurricane Ian, checked into the women’s intake shelter in the Bronx. She was assigned a bed in a 15-person room.
“I woke up this morning not believing I’m here,” Ms. Rivera, 45, said on Thursday.
At the intake shelter for families two miles away, Tara McEachin, 35, said she had moved to New York from Woodbridge, Va., in search of “better opportunities.” Ms. McEachin, a home health aide, said that she and a friend who also moved north “just haven’t gotten our foot in the door yet.”
In the 40 years since courts began requiring the city to offer a bed to every person who seeks one — guaranteeing the so-called right to shelter — the shelter population has fluctuated, but the overall trend has been upward.
(In addition to the Department of Homeless Services shelters, there are another 10,000 or so people in shelters run by other city agencies.)
Mr. Adams said on Friday that the city was looking for ways to send some of the border-crossing migrants to other American cities. New York has been racing for months to keep up with the surge, opening emergency shelters in about 40 hotels and enrolling more than 5,000 children in public schools.
Mr. Adams said the city was moving ahead with plans to build a tent intake center on Randalls Island, just off Manhattan, where new arrivals could stay for a few days. City officials are also negotiating with cruise line companies to house up to 2,700 migrants on a ship.
Frank Carone, the mayor’s chief of staff, said in a brief interview at City Hall that the companies were Carnival Cruise Line, Norwegian Cruise Line and Tallink, which is housing Ukrainian refugees in Estonia, though Mr. Carone said Norwegian’s cost estimate was too high.
The tent and cruise ship proposals have drawn criticism from homeless advocates, City Council members and state legislators who have called for empty hotels to be used and for shelter residents to be moved into permanent housing.
Mr. Adams has criticized Mr. Abbott for failing to coordinate migrant arrivals with his administration and called on him and other leaders to stop sending buses to New York and to spread the burden to other cities. He also asked the city of El Paso, led by a Democratic mayor, not to send migrants, following reports that the city had sent thousands of people to New York since August.
“New Yorkers are angry,” Mr. Adams said. “I am angry too. We have not asked for this.”“New Yorkers are angry,” Mr. Adams said. “I am angry too. We have not asked for this.”
The mayor’s repeated calls for federal and state assistance are also putting pressure on President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, just a month before the November elections.The mayor’s repeated calls for federal and state assistance are also putting pressure on President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, just a month before the November elections.
Asked if he was putting Mr. Biden and Ms. Hochul in a difficult position, Mr. Adams said “No, not at all.”Asked if he was putting Mr. Biden and Ms. Hochul in a difficult position, Mr. Adams said “No, not at all.”
Mr. Adams said he had spoken to Mr. Biden recently about the crisis and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Hochul understood the challenges that the city is facing. Mr. Adams said he had spoken to Mr. Biden recently about the crisis and that Mr. Biden and Ms. Hochul understood the challenges the city is facing.
“They understand that this is an urgent situation and New York needs help,” the mayor said.“They understand that this is an urgent situation and New York needs help,” the mayor said.
Angelo Roefaro, a spokesman for Senator Chuck Schumer, said that his office was “in close communication with the Adams team and working with the New York delegation to secure resources and to get the Biden administration to do all it can to be helpful.” A spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul said that the governor “remains concerned about the safety and well-being of asylum seekers” and that the state would “continue to coordinate closely with the city on the immediate response and support their requests for federal assistance.”
On Friday, city officials said that roughly a third of migrants arriving in the city want to go to other destinations, including many Venezuelan immigrants who have relatives or friends in Florida. Mr. Adams said the city is working to transport those migrants to other cities. For many of the people who fled the economic wreckage of Venezuela, the chance to work in New York City and send money home is paramount.
The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless released a statement saying that they agreed with the mayor that the city needs additional state and federal support, but that the city’s homelessness crisis was many years in the making. Outside a former women’s shelter in East New York, Brooklyn, that has been repurposed as an intake center for migrant men, Cesar Rodriguez, 37, a refrigeration technician from the Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, said Thursday that he and several new friends had made the rounds of possible employers within a few blocks: metalworks, an air-conditioning contractor and a construction site.
“The reason that the shelter census is at an all-time high is not solely because of an influx of asylum seekers,” the groups said. “It is the city’s historic shameful failure to adequately invest in affordable housing that has continued to fuel mass homelessness.” At every spot, he said, they were told that they needed a certificate from the federal government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The groups also called on the city to “abandon its plan to construct tent cities, and to instead focus on high-quality indoor shelter options and permanent housing.” “It costs money,” he said, “but how can we make money if we can’t work?” asked Mr. Rodriguez, who said he had left his wife and five children back home.
Karen Zraick contributed reporting. A little later, a city bus pulled up in front of the shelter and discharged about 30 men who had arrived earlier in the day at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. The men, most holding pillows and plastic bags bearing the logo of a Texas social services program, lined up on the sidewalk to be processed.
One of them, Brayan Gonzalez, 25, was asked what he thought of New York.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just arrived.”
Kaya Laterman, Sean Piccoli and Karen Zraick contributed reporting.