After months of saying New Yorkers are going to start seeing scores of migrants sleeping on Big Apple streets, Mayor Eric Adams detailed for the first time on Tuesday some of what the city is doing to prepare for that reality.
The mayor said that when, not if, the city has no more space for housing a continuous stream of newly arrived migrants, his administration will have to “manage” and “localize” newcomers sleeping outside. The move would be a way to avoid the widespread homeless encampments that are common in other major American cities, like San Fransico.
Adams, who was asked about how the city is preparing for the possibility of migrants living on the streets en masse during a Tuesday press conference, said that this is “new territory” for his administration.
“When we reach that point, we need to manage it, [so] that it is not a citywide visual state of chaos,” Adams said. “We have to sort of localize it as much as possible.”
In practice, Adams said, that means designating large outdoor spaces, equipped with some kind of bathroom and shower network, around the city where migrants who cannot get a shelter bed would live. The goal is to try and create a “controlled” environment, he added.
“Whatever space we can find, we’re going to use and we want to do it as humane as possible,” Adams said.
The mayor said he and his chief of staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, have been meeting with leaders in foreign countries who have dealt with large numbers of people sleeping outside in their cities, in order to prepare for that outcome in the five boroughs.
“We are spanning the globe, we’re not waiting until the day of, we’re spanning the globe, and we are tapping into international people, and we’re finding out what are our options?” Adams said.
With roughly 65,000 migrants in the city’s shelters and over 4,000 arriving each week, according to the latest figures from City Hall, the mayor insisted his administration will imminently start having to turn migrants away in order to safeguard services for long-time New Yorkers. Adams’ office projects the influx could cost the city up to $12 billion by summer 2025 and has floated making 15% budget cuts across city agencies over the next fiscal year in order to shoulder the expense.
“What we’re dealing with right now is a depletion of resources that is going to threaten our ability to provide basic services to New Yorkers,” he said. “And I can’t allow that to happen. I can’t allow basic services to taxpayers, New Yorkers, to be depleted at the state that I cannot provide those services … I can’t make it any clearer, this is going to hurt, and it’s not going to be pretty.”
Thus far, the administration has found placements for nearly all of the 130,000 plus migrants who have arrived here over the past 18 months. However, last summer, nearly 200 single adult migrants slept outside the Roosevelt Hotel — which serves as the city’s migrant intake center — when the facility had reached capacity.
Since then, the mayor has warned that large numbers of asylym-seekers living in the streets would become more common in the absence of substantially more aid from Washington and Albany.
