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Mayor Eric Adams’ administration says the city has saved money by putting limits on how long migrant families can stay in shelters. But that 60-day cap has come at a humanitarian cost and its consequences have been poorly tracked, according to an investigation by City Comptroller Brad Lander.
The city does not formally track whether the limits help migrants find stable housing, the investigation found. And despite the mayor’s promise to offer “intensive case management” to help families plan their next steps, Lander said those services are lacking, focused mainly on driving families out of the shelter system and often away from New York City. The city does “very little” to help families find stable housing once they reach the limit, and may hurt migrants’ ability to apply for work permits by booting them to a new address without tracking their location or forwarding their mail, Lander’s report concluded.
Since January, the administration has required migrant families with children to leave city shelters after 60 days — part of an effort to cut costs by encouraging asylum seekers to find their own accommodations. But Lander, who began an investigation as soon as the policy took effect, said Thursday that the administration failed to keep its own promises as it implemented the policy “in a haphazard and arbitrary way.”
As of late April, the city had issued 60-day eviction notices to more than 10,200 families, affecting about 19,500 adults and 18,100 children. It has seemingly achieved its central goal — 51% of families have left the shelter system entirely after receiving a notice, even though they are allowed to re-apply to stay in shelter. Another 40% moved to another shelter and 9% remained in the same shelter they began in, Lander’s office found.
The Adams administration has credited the 60-day policy, along with a stricter 30-day cap for adult migrants, with helping the city cut more than $2 billion in expected spending on the migrant crisis between this year and the coming year. That “prudent approach” helped stave off the need for more painful budget cuts to services like police and early childhood programs, Adams said when announcing his latest spending plan in April.
But Lander, a progressive and frequent foil of the mayor’s, also faults the administration for admitting that it evaluates the 60-day program only in terms of whether it drives down costs — without studying whether the limits achieve another stated goal of helping migrants find permanent housing.
“The city does not track outcomes for families who are impacted by the 60-day notice unless they return and reapply for placement,” Adams wrote in a February letter to Lander in response to the comptroller’s questions.
The mayor’s office had no immediate comment. Adams and his aides have repeatedly defended the city’s response to what they call a fast-moving emergency, during which the city has gotten little help from the federal government.
The comptroller pointed to other flaws: the 60-day cap was implemented without any written policies to uphold some of the administration’s promises, like exempting pregnant women in their third trimester or transferring migrants’ belongings. And the eviction notices themselves do not inform migrants that they have a legal right to reapply for shelter or request an accommodation for a disability.
Lander’s report also found what he called specific discrimination against families with elementary school-aged children. When those families apply for re-intake after hitting the 60-day limit, the city refuses to place them in shelters run by the Department of Homeless services, where the limits do not apply, all but ensuring that children’s education will be disrupted by future moves. (The 60-day limit applies only in emergency shelters run by city agencies other than DHS, including Health + Hospitals and Housing Preservation and Development.)
“I found this really stunning,” Lander said during a press conference outside the Row Hotel in Midtown, where some of the first eviction notices were issued in January. “The administration offered no rationale whatsoever for that especially cruel and disruptive policy.”
Lander called for the 60-day limit to be scrapped and replaced with a program that “genuinely coordinates” legal help and shelter placement for migrants. He was joined Thursday by representatives from the Legal Aid Society, which recently opposed Adams’ attempts to curtail the city’s right-to-shelter mandate; and Christine Quinn, the former City Council Speaker who now leads the shelter provider Win.
“You’re uprooting children who have gone through the trauma of having to flee their country of origin,” Quinn said. “Every other time in history when we have seen an influx of immigrants to New York City, the city has done better.”
The Adams administration reached a legal settlement in March over its request to amend the decades-old right-to-shelter rule. In the accord with Legal Aid, the city won the right to deny adult migrants a new shelter placement after 30 days, while keeping the shelter guarantee in place for unhoused people generally.
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Nick Garber , 2024-05-09 19:22:13
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