50% in shelters now migrants

Recent migrant arrivals now account for more than half of the record 100,000 people receiving care and shelter through the Big Apple’s scandal-scarred social safety net, as municipal agencies struggle to keep pace with demand, City Hall said Thursday.

The staggering new figures announced this week come as Mayor Adams and city lawmakers struck a $107 billion budget deal that was balanced — in part — by pushing ahead with controversial budget cuts at the Department of Homeless Services, which has been tasked with handling much of the response.

“With more than 50,000 migrants still currently in our care, at this point, we have reached the tipping point and we are now caring for more asylum seekers than long-time New Yorkers experiencing homelessness,” said City Hall press secretary Fabien Levy.

The statistics are staggering. More than 100,000 people are either housed in New York’s shelter system — which has dramatically expanded in size with 166 emergency facilities opened, mostly in hotels, around the city — or in the public hospital system’s 11 megasites at a cost of $8 million a day.

While much of the public attention on the homelessness crisis typically falls on roughly 3,000 New Yorkers who live on the streets, they account for just a tiny fraction of the city’s homeless population.

Families with children account for more than half of the people in the shelters, a pattern that has repeated with recent arrivals from the southern border, officials say.

City Hall estimates housing and caring for the recent arrivals will cost almost $4.4 billion when the receipts are tallied for 2023 through 2024.

Hizzoner blamed that yawning hole for consuming $1.4 billion in 2024 that City Hall would have otherwise used for social services.