Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Migrants facing eviction from NYC shelters
System overwhelmed by asylum-seekers
NEW YORK — It could be a cold, grim New Year for thousands of migrant families living in New York City’s emergency shelter system. With winter setting in, they are being told they need to clear out, with no guarantee they’ll be given a bed elsewhere.
Homeless migrants and their children were limited to 60 days in city housing under an order issued in October by Mayor Eric Adams, a move the Democrat says is necessary to relieve a shelter system overwhelmed by asylum-seekers crossing the southern U.S. border.
That clock is now ticking down for people like Karina Obando, a 38-year-old mother from Ecuador who has been given until Jan. 5 to get out of the former hotel where she has been staying with her two young children.
Where she will end up next is unclear. After that date, she can reapply for admission to the shelter system. A placement might not happen right away. Her family could wind up getting sent to one of the city’s huge tent shelters far from where her 11-year-old son goes to school.
“I told my son, ‘Take advantage. Enjoy the hotel because we have a roof right now,’” Obando said in Spanish outside Row NYC, a towering, 1,300-room hotel the city converted into a shelter for migrants in the heart of the theater district. “Because they’re going to send us away and we’re going to be sleeping on the train or on the street.”
A handful of cities across the U.S. dealing with an influx of homeless migrants have imposed their own limits on shelter stays, citing a variety of reasons, including spiraling costs, a lack of space and a desire to put pressure on people to either find housing on their own, or leave town entirely.
Chicago imposed a 60-day shelter limit last month and is poised to start evicting people in early January. In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, has capped the number of migrant families in emergency shelters at 7,500.
Denver had limited migrant families to 37 days but paused the policy this month in recognition of winter’s onset. Single adults are limited to 14 days.
In New York, the first families were expected to reach their 60-day limits just days after Christmas, but the mayor’s office said those migrants will receive extensions through early January. Roughly 3,500 families have been issued notices so far.
Unlike most other big cities, New York has a decades-old “right to shelter” obligating the city to provide emergency housing to anyone who asks.
But officials have warned migrants there is no guarantee they will get to stay in the same hotel, or the same city borough, for that matter.
Adult migrants without children are already subject to a shorter limit on shelter stays: 30 days.
Those who get kicked out and still want help are told to head for the city’s so-called “reticketing center” that opened in late October in a former Catholic school in Manhattan’s East Village.