NYC Confronts Homelessness Crisis as Shelters are Overwhelmed
Josh Goldfein, a staff lawyer at the Legal Aid Society, which filed the litigation that led to the right to shelter more than 40 years ago, said he believed that the people sleeping outside the Roosevelt were there in part because the mayor was trying to pressure Washington to send more aid and trying to discourage more migrants from coming.
“There are many ways the city could shelter everyone who is on that sidewalk if that is what they wanted to do,” he said.
Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the mayor, said on Tuesday that the 194 locations the city has opened to shelter asylum seekers are at capacity.
“Our teams run out of space every single day, and we do our best to offer placements where we have space available,” he said. He added that the city is adding two more big humanitarian relief centers in the coming weeks, including a mega-tent big enough for 1,000 people in the parking lot of a state psychiatric hospital in Queens. The city has estimated that the migrants will cost more than $4 billion over two years.
Source: The New York Times
