Gimme a shelter!
Mayor plans facility to house arrivals
The surge is real — and it is here.
The Big Apple is quietly and quickly planning to open a sprawling facility in Midtown to process and provide housing for the wave of arriving migrants, some of whom are being sent here by Texas and others by the Biden administration, The Post has learned.
Mayor Adams’ Department of Homeless Services requested late last week that the city’s nonprofit shelter operators prepare and submit plans to operate the facility, which must have sufficient space to hold up to 600 households.
The charities must submit their plans to DHS by Wednesday and, if selected, they must be ready to have the facility up and operating by next Monday, Aug. 15, according to a copy of the six-page request for proposals that DHS officials transmitted last week.
“The population served by the selected vendor will be families with children, adult couples and individual adults,” officials wrote, outlining City Hall’s needs.
It adds that any selected contractor must be able to provide around-the-clock support services and Spanish-speaking bilingual staffers to aid the immigrants, who are predominantly coming from Central and South America via the border with Mexico.
The document adds that the agency has identified an unspecified building for the facility but adds that the nonprofits can pitch their own location, provided it remains in the neighborhood.
Messing with Texas
Providers must include proposed budgets as part of their bid and there is no suggested price tag included in the document.
The new facility would allow officials to centralize their efforts to provide services and housing to the recent arrivals, who currently are being processed and placed in shelters through the city’s current intake system for homeless New Yorkers. Representatives for City Hall and DHS did not immediately return requests for comment.
But the call to action comes as Adams and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott traded barbs — and blame — Monday following the latest arrival of asylum-seeking Mexicanborder migrants relocated from the Lone Star State.
Adams accused Abbott of being “anti-American” for “shipping” busloads of migrants to New York City in response to what the Republican governor calls President Biden’s “open-border policies.”
“Be a true American,” Adams told reporters at an unrelated news conference in Queens. “I don’t think anything is more antiAmerican than shipping people on a bus, 45-hour trip, without any of the basic needs that they have, or direction, or coordination.”
An Abbott spokesperson replied Adams was “hypocritically upset about welcoming a few dozen into his sanctuary city.”