The new hurdle to migrant shelter: waiting for the city to call 14,861
Moises Chacon is number 14,861. Jon Cordero's number is in the 15,000s. Oumar Camara's wristband states that he is number 16,700.
The men are all immigrants who have run afoul of New York City's 30-day limit on single adults staying in a homeless shelter. After 30 days, anyone who wants to remain in the shelter system must reapply. But there aren't enough beds these days, so everyone has to take a number at a city office in Manhattan's East Village and wait.
Several migrants said the city had reached numbers in the 14,000s as of Tuesday. For those with higher numbers, the city only offered a spot on the floor or a chair in one of the few waiting centers spread across the five boroughs.
New York City has a unique “right to shelter” that requires that a bed be provided to any homeless person who requests it. In recent weeks, however, the guarantee for more and more migrants has become something that only exists on paper.
The Legal Aid Society, which monitors the city's compliance with the right to shelter mandate, said Monday that the city had told it that on any given night there are 800 to 1,000 migrants on the waiting list, and that the de average waiting time for a bed is more than eight days. City officials declined to confirm or contradict the figures cited by Legal Aid.
As the number of migrants waiting for a bed grows, so does the city's broader homeless population, several measurements show. Within the city's main reception system, the number of non-migrants has increased by 16 percent in the past year.
Even before the migrant waiting list went into effect, more people appeared to be sleeping on the streets and in the subway: The number of people on the city's homeless list was up 30 percent last September, compared to September 2022.
From Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning, the city conducted its annual federally mandated count of people sleeping on streets and subways, known as the Homeless population estimate or HOPE. Last January's estimate was just over 4,000 people – the highest number in almost two decades. This year's count seemed likely to include some migrants waiting for the city to offer them beds.
“We usually collect bottles around the stations from about 5 to 11 o'clock at night and then usually just sleep on the trains – it's somewhere warm,” said Kevin Benitez Caicedo, 28, who arrived in New York from Ecuador in December and is lost a place to sleep. last week.
As winter digs in its heels — last week was the city's coldest in nearly five years, with wind chills dipping into the single digits — life has become increasingly bleak for many of the city's nearly 70,000 homeless migrants .
They spend their days figuring out where to spend their nights. They ride the train to pass the time and stay warm while they wait for the waiting centers to open. They carry their belongings everywhere. Many have gone days without showers.
Mayor Eric Adams has said for months that the city cannot afford to house and feed increasing numbers of migrants indefinitely. Since last year, the city has been trying to weaken the shelter guarantee. It is now in mediation with the Legal Aid Association, which has put pressure on the city to offer beds to every migrant. So far, the judge in the right-to-shelter case has not ordered the city to provide beds to those waiting.
“Right now, someone can come from anywhere in the world, come to New York, and stay on taxpayer dollars for free for as long as he or she wants. That doesn't make sense,” Mr. Adams said Monday evening at a town hall meeting in the Bronx.
The 30-day limit is one of several tactics the city is using to push migrants to leave the shelter system.
The time limits have been effective, with more than 80 percent of migrants being deported leaving the shelter system, and over the past six weeks the number of migrants in shelters has fallen slightly. But thousands with nowhere else to go are trying to stay.
“There is little doubt that the city's efforts to make the shelter system more difficult and less friendly for newcomers are preventing more people from entering that system,” said Dave Giffen, executive director of the Coalition for Refugees. Homeless, said Tuesday.
While he said some people may be staying on friends' couches or in churches, he added: “Without a doubt, more and more people are ending up on the streets unprotected.”
In line outside the registration center, at a former Catholic school, St. Brigid, on East Seventh Street, Mr. Caicedo said he would rather work. “But everywhere we go, they say we can't work because we don't have papers yet. How can we rent an apartment if we don't have a job?”
His friend Mr. Chacon, 37, from Venezuela, answered him: “You have to go to another state. We've talked about it, everyone's talking about it; I estimate that about 90 percent of the people want to leave here.”
Mario Nardini, 60, of Peru, who has been without a bed for six days, said Tuesday that the city had assigned him to a different waiting center each night. “One day they sent me to Brooklyn, the next day to the Bronx, the next day to Queens,” he said. At a center in Brooklyn on Sunday evening, he said: “The floor was hard – they don't give a blanket or anything.”
The city is legally obliged to do this providing homeless people with meals that are 'sufficient in quantity and content to meet their nutritional needs', but many migrants say they are only offered a meal in the morning, outside the East Village office, and then a snack of a banana, an apple and water (and sometimes a cookie) at night in the waiting centers.
Mr. Nardini said he saves half of his breakfast for the rest of the day.
On Tuesday, Manuel Rodriguez, 26, a hairdresser from Colombia, wristband number 16,363, waited for a bed for a second day.
But he had a head start on something good.
“They said at the church there they were going to shower and give new coats to the first 20 people,” he said, referring to the nearby Bowery Mission. 'I have to be there very early tomorrow morning. Very, very early.”