Mayor Eric Adams has tried hotels, shelters and a cruise terminal to house an influx of more than 50,000 migrants, an effort that’s stretched the budget to the breaking point and strained services.
(Bloomberg) — Mayor Eric Adams has tried hotels, shelters and a cruise terminal to house an influx of more than 50,000 migrants, an effort that’s stretched the budget to the breaking point and strained services.
The crisis got so bad that in January Adams asked New York Governor Kathy Hochul if the state could convert the Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side into emergency housing, according to a letter obtained by Bloomberg under a public records request. The request went nowhere, and Hochul’s office said the state and city are in regular communication. But on Tuesday, city budget officials said they were forced to order 4% cuts to help cope with the costs of caring for migrants.
“New York City has been shouldering the costs of this crisis largely on our own since it began last year,” Kate Smart, a spokesperson for the Adams administration, said in a statement Wednesday. “As we’ve said for months, we are in need of additional financial support as well as assistance” from the state and federal government.
The idea that the city was even considering repurposing the Javits Center — which is currently hosting the New York International Auto Show — is a sign of the extraordinary logistical and financial predicament Adams faces as he and city officials struggle to manage the flood of asylum seekers in the past year.
Citing the financial pressure from the migrant crisis, city Budget Director Jacques Jiha on Tuesday ordered all agencies to make the cuts by April 14, the third agency-wide series of cuts Adams has implemented since taking office in January 2022.
In an interview last week with Bloomberg News, Adams said the costs of the migrant crisis would hurt the city’s ability to pay for public services.
“We were dropped in our laps a crisis of epic proportion,” Adams said. “And we got no help. I don’t think people realize 54,000 people showed up in our city in 15 months,” he said.
“When we look at these challenges, every agency and service in the city is going to be impacted because of what we are experiencing right now,” Adams said. “So I’ve got to go back to my agencies and tell them,‘You’ve got to find more efficiencies.’”
‘Open Arms’
It’s a challenge that’s been building for more than a year, as thousands of asylum seekers enter the country through the US’s southern border and are being bussed to New York from states like Texas and Arizona.
In the January letter, Adams wrote that while the city is “doing its best to meet the challenge and working around the clock to welcome asylum seekers with open arms, there remains an enormous need to provide adequate support and services to this population.”
Read more: Adams please for emergency aid as migrant influx strains NYC
Hochul proposed $1.1 billion in the next budget to help New York City defray costs associated with the migrant crisis, but Adams’s administration maintains that’s not enough. The cost to the city of sheltering and aiding the migrants is projected to reach $4.3 billion by July 2024, a $100 million increase from the city’s own $4.2 billion cost estimate from just two months ago.
“Governor Hochul has committed significant resources to support the City’s efforts to aid asylum seekers, including an unprecedented $1 billion budget investment and forceful advocacy with the federal government for financial resources and policy solutions,” Hochul’s spokesperson Hazel Crampton-Hays said in a statement Wednesday.
“Governor Hochul will continue working collaboratively with Mayor Adams to address the situation.”
A spokesperson for Hochul’s office said the governor and mayor have been in constant communication with the city on all requests and that and the city hasn’t raised the idea of repurposing the Javits Center in several months.
Cost Pressures
The crisis is just one of multiple cost pressures Adams is facing as he prepares the city budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. The looming possibility of a recession, a significant drop in Wall Street bonuses that help prop up the city’s personal income tax receipts, and the cost of settling the city’s outstanding labor contracts with its workforce are exacerbating what could become multibillion dollar deficits in future years.
Read more: Adams begs state to help pay NYC’s $4.2 billion in migrant costs
The city’s most recent homeless shelter census, from April 2, counted 73,091 homeless people in the city, including 23,651 children, a significant increase from even three months ago, when the city counted 68,500 people in shelters, and a drastic increase from when Adams took office, when the city counted roughly 45,000 people in the system.
New York has a unique “right to shelter” mandate that requires the city provide housing for homeless individuals. That mandate, difficult to fulfill under normal circumstances, has become nearly impossible in the past year, the Adams administration has said.
The city has opened 100 hotels and other emergency shelters to house migrants who’ve arrived in the city since last year, including eight emergency relief centers. Staff at those shelters “are strained and need relief and reinforcement immediately,” Adams wrote in the letter to Hochul’s office.
The scope of the crisis, combined with New York’s already acute lack of affordable housing, has forced the city to find unorthodox housing solutions. Adams was criticized earlier this year by some local officials and advocacy organizations for housing migrants in an encampment of tents set up on Randall’s Island in the East River, and in barracks-style cots at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.
In recent weeks, the city moved hundreds of migrants into the now-vacant Candler Office Tower in midtown Manhattan.
(Updates with census on homeless population in second paragraph under ‘Cost Pressures’ subhead)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.