1,000 migrants to get another shelter — in vacant office building in Long Island City, Queens
A slide presentation during a news conference Wednesday at City Hall, showing a new shelter for single migrant men being set up in a vacant office building in Long Island City, Queens. Credit: Newsday/Matthew Chayes
A 16th barracks-style shelter is opening to house foreign migrants arriving in New York City — this one in Long Island City, Queens — officials announced Wednesday.
The shelter — a renovated vacant office building at 47-11 Austell Place, with room for almost 1,000 men to eat, sleep and bathe — is expected to reach capacity by next week, said the city's housing commissioner, Adolfo Carrión Jr.
Since April 2022, more than 112,300 migrants have arrived in the city, about half of whom are living in city-provided housing such as shelters and hotel rooms. Most are from Latin America, according to Mayor Eric Adams' office. About 2,700 migrants arrived last week.
The city has been struggling to handle the surge, opening more than 200 sites to house the migrants to comply with a decades-old and unique-in-the-nation mandate to provide a bed for anyone who's homeless.
Adams has sought mostly unsuccessfully to move migrants to places outside of the city, including to Nassau and Suffolk counties. Dozens of municipalities, including some on Long Island, have passed emergency orders barring the city from relocating migrants into those jurisdictions.
Among the city locations housing migrants are the 16 barracks-style sites, including in the parking lot of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center near the Queens-Nassau border and Randall's Island in the East River.
But for the right to shelter, Anne Willams-Isom, the Adams deputy overseeing the crisis response said of the influx, "I think it would be a little less."
Adams' lawyers are in court trying to lessen the mandate.
In July, Willams-Isom said of migrants: "they’re hearing about New York City and what they get when they come to New York City.”
“Before, it was kind of, the right to shelter, and what’s going on in New York City, was, like, our little secret. Now the whole globe knows that if you go to New York City, we’re gonna do what we always do, right? We have a big heart," she said Wednesday. "We have compassion. We’re gonna take care of people. You’re gonna get a hotel room. You’re gonna get school, open arms, and while we love that and we are so proud of that, I think in a way it’s being used against us. And I am frustrated by that. And I would like some help about that. And I would like to kind of slow down what’s happening at the front door a little bit."
“The front door” is how the administration has sometimes referred to the flow of migrants from the U.S. border to the city.
New York City is also a self-described sanctuary city that makes it illegal, except under limited circumstances, for the city to cooperate with federal immigration enforcers.
Newsday reported in June that very few of the migrants are likely to be granted asylum — the bar is high under U.S. law — but an unknown number will stay in the country anyway.
Without much success, Adams has sought reimbursement from the state and federal government for what is projected to be a $12 billion cost by the next fiscal year for the crisis.
Asked why others should pick up the tab for the city's decision to be generous, Williams-Isom said that immigration is a national issue, and "we shouldn't be penalized for who we are."
Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.
