With city shelters challenged by an influx of migrants this year, the Adams administration is now asking religious groups if they can house migrants, THE CITY has learned.
The mayor’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships sent an email to clergy members in all five boroughs Thursday making the appeal on behalf of asylum seekers from the southern border.
The list includes leaders at Christian churches, Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.
“We are looking for houses of worship to support migrants find shelter and community (sic),” wrote Pastor Gilford Monrose, the office’s executive director.
He asked for “a building you own [that has] accessible and secure space with bathrooms and a kitchen where an asylee family or individuals could sleep during the nights or live temporarily if resources [are] provided?”
The plea from on high comes after Mayor Eric Adams asked the federal government for $1 billion to help pay for the thousands of migrants who have traveled to New York City this year, according to the New York Post.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program’s National Board is reviewing the request.
City Hall originally reached out to religious leaders in October asking if some of them wanted to “adopt” migrants in need, the Post reported.
Days later that same month, Adams declared a state of emergency, citing the city’s overwhelmed homeless shelters due in part to a major spike in asylum seekers from Latin America.
That rise flattened after a shift in federal policy in mid-October made it much more difficult for Venezuelan asylum seekers to apply in the United States. But the flow could rise again when Title 42, a Trump-era measure that allows authorities to swiftly deport arrivals at the border, expires next week after a federal judge ruled it was “arbitrary and capricious.”
The plea for housing help from clergy members is the result of years of failed housing policies and interest in creating enough affordable places for low income residents, according to Joshua Goldfein, a staff lawyer for the Legal Aid Society.
“Neither of the last two administrations made enough of a commitment to providing affordable housing for the lowest income band,” he said. “And they also didn’t make a commitment to ending homelessness they just wanted to manage it.”
Flooding an Overwhelmed System
There were 64,788 people housed in the city’s main shelter system as of Thursday, far exceeding the previous high 61,415 set in 2019, according to the city’s Department of Homeless Services.
City Hall says that more than 20,000 of those people are asylum seekers who have recently arrived, many bused directly to New York by officials in states that border Mexico.
Adams predicted earlier this year that the shelter population would soar to more than 100,000.
“We need help, and we need it now,” he said in October.
A good portion of the city’s newest immigrants are job-seekers from Venezuela where the country’s economy has collapsed and there is widespread poverty.
Advocates for people without housing contend that migrants aren’t the only reason the homeless population has exploded.
They note that rising rents and the end of the pandemic’s eviction moratorium has forced families into shelters.
“We had a homeless crisis in NYC well before this recent round of asylum seekers started coming to New York,” said Legal Aid Society’s Goldfein.
He contends the city has also not done enough to provide lawyers for tenants in housing court, and people then struggle to escape shelters because landlords aren’t accepting their housing vouchers.
The Adams administration initially built a tent intake center on Randalls Island to deal with some of the migrants in need of shelter. The 84,400-square-foot facility was closed last month, having been used by only a few migrants as the rate of arrivals slowed and following harsh criticism from City Council members and immigrant rights activists.
They noted that the island was difficult to get to, and immigrants housed there had to walk outside to access bathrooms and to do their laundry. The facility also violated city rules because the beds were too close together, according to lawyers representing people at the facility.
Initially, Adams wanted to place migrants in Orchard Beach in The Bronx. But that plan was also nixed — following some construction — after local elected officials raised concerns. They noted the low lying area floods during routine rain storms.
Ariadna Phillips, of South Bronx Mutual Aid, told THE CITY on Friday that her colleagues have already been setting people up to spend nights at houses of worship.
“This is what we had to do because there was so much violence and danger and instability in the shelter system, right to shelter law was being violated left and right,” she said. “So it was out of necessity that many of us did this. It is really unfortunate when that is the approach that the city has.”
