Persevering with to accommodate tens of hundreds of migrants in metropolis shelters — with no sign of ending — is “not sustainable,” an official in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration stated Tuesday.
“The 64,000 can’t be our baseline,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom informed a reporter throughout a Metropolis Corridor briefing. “That’s not the place we wish to be.”
The admission got here after The Put up on Monday reported that the variety of migrants in city-funded shelters has remained stagnant at roughly 65,000 for the previous couple of months.
As of final Tuesday, there have been about 65,300 migrants housed within the shelters, a quantity that plateaued in March, in keeping with figures from Metropolis Corridor.
It adopted two months of regular declines within the shelter inhabitants that coincided with a significant dip within the variety of migrants arriving within the Massive Apple every week.
The migrant shelter inhabitants hit a excessive of about 69,500 in January, when about 4,000 migrants had been coming to the town every week. Round 1,100 have been arriving weekly extra just lately.
Simply final week, some 900 migrants received to the town — the primary time that determine was beneath 1,000 since October 2022, the administration stated.
The Adams administration has held up its controversial deadlines on shelter stays as a principal driver in decreasing the burden on the town’s overwhelmed shelter system
Williams-Isom — in the course of the mayor’s weekly off-topic press convention — conceded that the 60-day limits haven’t confirmed to be as efficient for households, who make up the vast majority of migrants being housed in metropolis shelters.
“There’s no magic bullet right here, however in lots of locations the place individuals have a big majority of households with kids, the way in which that they had been in a position to get them out of shelter wasn’t essentially by deadlines, nevertheless it was by resettling individuals and dealing with different jurisdictions to ensure that individuals get settled,” she stated, citing findings from a world convention on the difficulty she attended in Paris just lately.
“That’s what we’re going to need to concentrate on,” Williams-Isom continued, “64,000 can’t be our baseline. That’s not sustainable. We now have to determine what instruments and proceed to be progressive with a view to transfer individuals out of shelter.”
Adams’ Chief of Employees Camille Joseph Varlack added: “I might add to that the place we have now seen resettlement in fact be extraordinarily profitable is the place of us have the work authorization so we’ll proceed to advocate for that as properly.”
Administration officers stated final month that solely about 2,000 migrants have been linked with a job as a part of an ongoing push to assist discover work for asylum seekers.
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