As the ballooning population of illegal immigrants continues to overwhelm New York City’s shelter system, Mayor Eric Adams is not ruling out giving tents to the new arrivals and housing them in encampments in public parks.
While the city has already been setting up several giant tent shelters, including two in Queens and the now-dismantled ones in the Bronx and Randall’s Island, to help shelter thousands of single adults, this new plan is said to be more like campground sites in parks and other large green spaces.
Nowhere to Go
During a press briefing on Tuesday, a frustrated mayor reiterated that his city is “out of room,” and that it’s just a matter of time before the illegal immigrants find themselves having to sleep on the streets.“You’re going to start seeing the visual signs of this crisis like you’re seeing in other cities,” Mr. Adams said, days after the city’s fire department conducted a sweeping safety inspection and closed multiple shelters because of potential fire hazardous.
“The places that we are finding are really temporary locations. They’re not meant to house people in,” he continued. “This is what we are faced with, and I don’t know how to get this any clearer. When you are out of room, that means you’re out of room, you know?”
“It’s not ‘if’ people will be sleeping on the streets, it’s when,” the mayor said. “We are at full capacity.”
In the meantime, Mr. Adams said his office is working to find “large spaces” throughout the city and try to “create a controlled environment” to house the waves of new arrivals.
When pressed by a reporter on whether he was talking about establishing more giant tent shelters or he meant something different, Mr. Adams was reluctant to answer the question, but said the city is going to utilize “outdoor spaces.”
“We’re finding out what are our options,” he told the reporter. “Believe it or not, tents are costly. Everything is costly. What we are dealing with right now is a depletion of resources that is going to threaten our ability to provide the basic services to New Yorkers.”
Backlash to Plan
The proposal has already drawn fierce criticism from several activist groups.“Passing out tents as winter approaches is not only a mockery of the City’s legal and moral obligation to provide safe shelter to people without homes, but it will put lives in danger,” the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless said in a joint statement.
“People freezing to death on the streets is the exact nightmare that the Right to Shelter was designed to prevent,” the groups said, referring to a policy that requires the city to provide a bed in a homeless shelter to anyone in need of one, regardless of immigration status. Mr. Adams is stepping up his effort to do away with this policy, saying that the shelter guarantee is becoming a magnet for illegal immigrants.
The New York Immigration Coalition also voiced opposition to the potential plan.
“It’s absurd that the Adams administration would rather pursue dangerous ideas like street tent encampments, when he could be alleviating pressure on our shelter system by getting more New Yorkers into permanent housing,” Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the coalition, told The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Mr. Adams was offering to arrange a roundtable where his critics can make the case for their solutions as the shelter crisis continues to spiral out of control.
“What do we do right now with 2,500 to 4000 people coming here a week, coming faster than leaving?” he asked at Tuesday’s press briefing. “That’s the question we need to answer.”
“People may have the answers, so I want to get in the room personally and sit in a room with them around the table and say: ‘Here’s the problem that we have. Do you have something for right now that we can solve it?’”
