A Record 100,000 People in New York Homeless Shelters
“If there was a national coordination of this,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said at her weekly press briefing on the crisis, “then the burden wouldn’t be so much on New York City.”
She said that 2,500 asylum seekers had entered shelters in the last week alone. Of the 50,000 now in shelters, more than two-thirds are families with children.
At the same time, the city’s nonmigrant homeless population may also be growing. When Mr. Adams took office, there were 45,000 people in the city’s main shelter system. Now there are over 81,000, and while the city did not give detailed breakouts, the number of nonmigrants in the system appears to be nearing 50,000. (At least 17,000 migrants are in facilities outside the main shelter system, the city says, which include large hotels and other venues set up especially to house them.)
In all, about 1 in 80 people in the nation’s largest city do not have a permanent place to live.
The migrants are now housed at over 150 sites, including hotels, regular shelters, vast “emergency relief centers” and “respite centers” that the administration revealed last week do not have showers on site.
Again and again, they have tested the city’s reputation as a place that welcomes immigrants.
Last month, after the expiration of a national immigration policy that had let the authorities expel many migrants at the border, their numbers accelerated, leading the city to seek judicial relief from its unique court-enforced mandate to offer a shelter bed to anyone who wants one.
Source: The New York Times
