Slow rollout for city houses of worship as migrant shelters
Less than a half dozen houses of worship in the city are currently operating as temporary shelters for migrants as part of a program that’s supposed to involve 50 faith institutions, the Daily News has learned.
Upon first announcing the program last June, Mayor Adams said his administration had 50 houses of worship on tap that would shortly be able to start housing 19 single adult migrants each. At the time, Adams told reporters the program would alleviate pressure on the city’s overcrowded shelter system and save his administration money as his office estimated it would be cheaper to house a migrant in a faith institution like a church than in a hotel or an emergency site.
But in a private briefing with local elected officials on Friday afternoon — nearly nine months after Adams’ announcement — Rudy Giuliani, executive director of the mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery, said just four houses of worship are currently providing shelter for migrants as part of the program.
“We’ve been struggling mightily to get these churches through the Buildings and Fire Department approval process,” Giuliani, a cousin of the former mayor with the same name, said in the virtual briefing, a recording of which was obtained by The News.
The problem lies in city rules requiring congregate housing sites to have sprinkler systems, which can be costly to install.
Giuliani, whose office oversees the program, said his team has finally found a workaround to the problem.
“We’ve lowered the bed count from 19 to 15 to get around the sprinkler requirement ... so that freed up a lot more houses of worship that can be eligible,” he told lawmakers on the call. “Since we’ve finally cleared our issues with the agencies we have a clearer path to opening these sites, so we plan on moving forward at a much quicker clip than we have.”
Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Democrat who attended the briefing, questioned why Giuliani’s team waited so long to lower the bed count if that’s all it took to circumvent the sprinkler requirement.
“Why didn’t they do that [months] ago?” she told The News after the briefing.
Brewer said that if Giuliani’s team had moved with more urgency on finding a workaround, dozens of migrants might not have ended up sleeping outside the city’s intake center in the East Village this winter.
“The 1,000 people who were waiting down outside St. Brigid’s could have been in houses of worship,” she said, referring to the shuttered Catholic school that serves as a migrant intake.
After Friday’s briefing, an Adams spokeswoman said reducing bed counts doesn’t resolve all issues with houses of worship and that some sites being considered for migrant housing have preexisting building violations that need to be resolved. Still, the spokeswoman said the administration expects several more houses of worship to open as migrant shelters in coming months.
“Safety is our top priority,” said spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak. “We are working to bring interested houses of worship into full FDNY and DOB compliance and streamline the inspection process so more faith partners can play a role responding to this crisis.”
According to the latest data from City Hall, some 65,000 migrants remain housed in city shelters.